Providing people with safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world. The first part of our research investigates the effect of a major water quality improvement program in rural China on the health of adults and children. Using panel data covering about 4500 households from 1989 to 2006, we estimate the impact of introducing village-level access to water from water plants on various measures of health. The regression results imply that the illness incidence of adults decreased by 11 percent and their weight-for-height increased by 0.835 kg/m, and that children's weight-for-height and height itself both rose by 0.446 kg/m and 0.962 cm respectively, as a result of the program. And these estimates are quite stable across different robustness checks.

While the previous research has shown health benefit of safe drinking water program, we know little about the longer-term benefits such as education. The second part of our research examines the youth education benefits of this major drinking water infrastructure program. By employing a longitudinal dataset with around 12,000 individual observations aged between 16 and 25, we find that this health program has benefited their education substantially: increasing the grades of education completed by 0.9 years and their probabilities of graduating from a lower and upper middle schools by around 18 and 89 percent, respectively. These estimation results are robust to a host of robustness checks, such as controlling for educational policy and local resources (by including county-year fixed effects), village distance to schools, local labor market conditions, educational demand, instrumenting the water treatment dummy with topographic variables, among others. Our estimates suggest that this program is highly cost-effective.

Jing Zhang, an assistant professor, received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2011, and joined Renmin University of China in the same year. Prior to that, she worked at the World Bank from 2010 to 2011. The focus of her research lies in health economics and public finance. Her publications include: “The Impact of Water Quality on Health: Evidence from the Drinking Water Infrastructure Program in Rural China,” Journal of Health Economics (2012) and “Soft Budget Constraints in China: Evidence from the Guangdong Hospital Industry,” International Journal of Healthcare Finance and Economics (2009).

Professor Hidehiko Ichimura of the University of Tokyo will share recent results from his research on the health of older adults and the retirement process in Japan. His research draws upon a unique data source, the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). This rich dataset provides information on how middle-aged and elderly Japanese live in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes, and how these interact with their family status. The JSTAR project aims to provide longitudinal data enabling detailed policy-relevant comparisons to other industrialized countries (e.g. the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, and similar surveys now launched in Korea, China, and India).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his PhD in economics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

Professor Hidehiko Ichimura of the University of Tokyo will share recent results from his research on the health of older adults and the retirement process in Japan. His research draws upon a unique data source, the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). This rich dataset provides information on how middle-aged and elderly Japanese live in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes, and how these interact with their family status. The JSTAR project aims to provide longitudinal data enabling detailed policy-relevant comparisons to other industrialized countries (e.g. the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, the US Health and Retirement Study, the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, and similar surveys now launched in Korea, China, and India).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is now Professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

Asian universities are rising in world university rankings, with schools in emerging Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea recently making strong gains. Six universities in South Korea alone placed among the top 400 in the world in the 2012 Times Higher Education rankings. Competition within Asia is also intensifying. 

The shift of relative economic power from the West to the East suggests that Asian universities will continue their ascendancy, but progress brings with it growing pains. In his talk, Dr. Jeong, president of one of Korea’s premier universities, will discuss the pressures that Korean universities face and their efforts to reform and adjust to new times and new challenges.

Dr. Jeong Kap-Young is president and a professor of economics at Yonsei University. He holds a B.A. from Yonsei University, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in economics. His research interests are in industrial organization and public policy, applied microeconomic theory, and East Asian economies. He has authored numerous works, and served as adviser to the Korean government.

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

Much has been made of the Asian success story. The region is a key driver of the global economy, and the lives of millions of its people have been transformed in ways unimaginable decades ago.

It is ironic, however, that the factors that have driven Asia's rapid growth—technology, globalization, and market-oriented reforms—are the same factors driving inequality. Asia remains home to the world's largest concentration of poor. Millions of people do not have access even to basic services, and weak governance is a serious concern. 

Rising inequality is not the only challenge facing Asian countries. There is also the looming threat of environmental degradation. For decades the region has taken the approach of “grow now, clean up later,” wreaking havoc on the environment and putting lives and livelihoods at serious risk.

If Asia is to achieve sustainable growth, it must pursue both inclusive growth and green growth. These should not be separate processes, but rather simultaneous processes that focus on the quality of growth rather than quantity of growth.

Rajat M. Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, will speak on why and how Asia should boldly confront the twin challenges of inclusive and green growth so that its people, and the rest of the world, will continue to benefit from its successful growth story.  

About the Speaker

Rajat M. Nag is the managing director general of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). With broad experience across Asia, Mr. Nag plays a critical role in providing strategic and operational direction to ADB. He also oversees the risk management operations of ADB.

Mr. Nag’s work has given him wide-ranging insight into several issues and challenges relevant to Asia, including infrastructure financing, public-private partnerships, and regional economic integration. His particular interest is in working to enhance regional cooperation and integration in Asia, and to bridge the gap between the region’s thriving economies and the millions of poverty-stricken people being left behind. Read more.