In the space of ten short years, Germany and Japan have gone from paragons of economic success to models of political paralysis. In both countries, reformers call for a decisive move toward the liberal market model, yet find themselves frustrated with their governments' inability to act. This deadlock reflects the normal operation of German and Japanese democracy, and not its failure, for Germany and Japan are fundamentally divided over the merits of the proposed liberal reforms. As a result, Germany and Japan proceed with reforms slowly and cautiously, they package delicate compromises, and they design reforms to preserve the core institutions of their respective economic models as much as possible. Steven K. Vogel is Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of the advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan. His book, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Cornell University Press, 1996), won the 1998 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. He has written extensively on Japanese politics, industrial policy, trade and defense policy. He has taught previously at the University of California, Irvine and Harvard University. He has a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley.

Before becoming the Governor of the Bank of Korea in 1995, Mr. Lee was Advisor for the Korea-Foreign Trade Association (1994) and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economic Planning Board (1993). He was also President of the Korea Gas Corporation (1991) and of Daewoo Motors Co. Ltd. (1988). In 1981, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota after having been the President of the Small and Medium Industry Promotion Corporation.

Qian investigates decentralization and fiscal incentives in the central-provincial relationship during China's reform. He finds a strong correlation between local government revenue collection and local government expenditure and shows that the fiscal contracting system provides local governments with strong fiscal incentives. He also finds that stronger fiscal incentives in terms of higher marginal revenue retention rate implies faster development of non-state enterprises and more reform in state-owned enterprises. Federalism, Chinese style, is compared to federalism, Russian style. Born in Beijing, Yingyi Qian received his B.S. in applied mathematics from Tsinghua University, Beijing; his M.A. in statistics from Columbia University; his M.Phil. in management science from Yale University; and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Professor Qian's fields of research include the theory of organizations, comparative institutional analysis, economics of transition, and reform and development in China. He is the author and co-author of many papers, including "Federalism and the Soft Budget Constraints," "Understanding China's Township-Village Enterprises," "Financial System Reform in China: Lessons from Japan's Main-Bank System," and "Enterprise Reform in China: Agency Problems and Political Control."

Southeast Asia has been buffeted by several shocks and momentous events over the last two years, in particular the economic recession which started in July 1997; the return of Hong Kong to China; and political instability, particularly in Indonesia.

Increasingly, large, extended urban regions compete with each other in the Region and in the global economy. Furthermore, as a result of strong driving forces, including free trade, convergence in tax structures, and the "death of distance", Southeast Asian urban regions are less protected and influenced by nation states, and are thus highly vulnerable to unpredictable consequences of strong forces associated with globalization and co-evolving domestic change.

Dr. Webster will assess events of the last few years in terms of the dramatic re-positioning that has occurred among major urban regions in Southeast Asia - identifying winners and losers. His assessment will be based on consideration of both competitiveness and resilience - the two primary objectives, perhaps non-reconcilable, of most Southeast Asian urban regions.

Dr. Webster is currently a visiting scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center. He has been Senior Urban Advisor to the National Planning Board, Prime Minister's Office, Thailand for the last five years. He is involved in formulation of strategies and policies related to urbanization in the context of rapid socio-economic change in Thailand. He is also full time advisor to the World Bank's Asia and Pacific Urban Unit. At the global level, he is involved in formulation of the World Bank's Global Urban Strategy, and the World Development Report 2000 which will focus on urbanization and decentralization.

Dr. Webster was formerly Director of the Urban Planning Program at the University of Calgary and Professor of Planning at the Asian Institute of Technology. He has advised a wide variety of governments, cities, corporations, and development agencies on urban policies and programming, particularly in Southeast Asia, over the last 25 years. He is the author of many academic and professional publications on urbanization and urban issues in Southeast Asia.

Entrepreneurs and self-employed people have much higher incomes than other rural Thai residents. This raises the question: why don't more people become entrepreneurs? One possibility is that people are prevented from changing their occupations because they lack wealth or access to credit. This talk provides a preliminary exploration of this issue using new survey data from rural Thailand. Anna Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She is currently a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and taught at Princeton before going to Kellogg. Her research is concerned with how people cope with risk, particularly in cases where formal financial and insurance markets are not available.

The Internet has penetrated China at an unprecedented rate. In 1994 2,000 Chinese computers had on-line access; by 2000 that figure had grown to 6 million, and China is now host to more than 30,000 websites. Many have lauded these developments for their potentially liberalizing effects; others have argued that the Internet merely strengthens the administrative capacity of the central government. How will the Internet transform China? Duncan Clark has been intimately involved in the Internet in China since its commercial inception in 1995. A recognized authority on the telecom sector in China, he is the founder of BDA China Limited, and serves on the Advisory Board of China's leading portal, Netease.com. He is a technology columnist for The South China Morning Post, and a frequent commentator on radio and television. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics.

This presentation will focus on the effects of the economic crisis on poverty in Southeast Asia illustrated by a case study of Indonesia. Particular attention will be paid to the government responses with social safety net programs and how these responses have been influenced by government perceptions of the role of rural-urban dynamics and the urban informal sector. This presentation is based upon research carried out over the last sixteen months in Indonesia. The final part of the talk deals with the issue of inserting social policy into development plans in the period of economic recovery in Indonesia. Terry Mc Gee has spent more than 40 years carrying out research in Southeast Asia. He has held appointments at the University of Malaysia, University of Hong Kong and the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australia National University (Canberra), as well as UBC since l978. He is the author of The Southeast Asian City (l967), Essays on Third World Urbanization ( l971) and co-editor of The Extended Metropolis in Asia (l991) and Mega-Urban Regions in Southeast Asia (l995) he has acted as a consultant for UNDP and CIDA on urban policy in Asia.

The talk deals with the affects of state-led industrialization on social formation in South Korea. Ha focuses on explaining why traditional primary ties have become dominant social units in spite of extensive and rapid economic changes. Going beyond a conventional abstract state-based explanation of Korean economic success, his talk traces historical origins of social conditions in the 1960s which interacted with state-initiated economic development to bring about neofamilial social units. By proposing a different framework to understand social consequences of Korean industrialization, theoretical and practical advantages will be presented through specific examples, such as the nature of civil society, middle class and bureaucracy. Prof. Ha received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1985. He has been teaching at the Department of International Relations of Seoul National University since 1986. He is currently on leave as visiting professor at the Department of Political Science of UC Berkeley. His recent research is on industrialization and tradition in late industrializing countries and the impacts of the role of strong state on society. He is preparing a book on social institutional dynamics of late industrializing countries. Some of his works include: Legitimacy and Stability under Brezhnev: A Case of Drifting Regime Type (1997, in Russian), Industrialization and Debureaucratization of Korean Bureaucracy (1996, in Korean), The Modern School System and the Reinforcement of School Ties: A Paradox of Colonial Control (1997).

This talk presents initial evidence from a large cross-section of household data for rural Indian households on factors which may explain the low levels of education in this economy, particularly for girls. While much of the existing literature emphasizes low returns relative to the high opportunity costs of educating girls, the data suggest that much of the variation in enrollment rates across the economy are explained by village-wide factors, factors which are not restricted to village-level differences in the quantity and quality of schools. Anjini Kochar is Assistant Professor of Economics, Stanford University, Department of Economics. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a M.A. in International Relations, also from the University of Chicago. Her research is on micro-empirical aspects of households behavior in developing economies, focusing in particular on the South Asian economies. Her most recent work has been on the effect of health on savings, and on the intra-household division of incomes.

The talk will highlight the economic and social development of India and Pakistan and how this has been affected by the high level of military expenditures. It will trace the likely consequences of the emergence of a nuclear race on the two economies arising both from the short-run impact of economic sanctions and the costs in the long-run of increased sophistication of military technology. Before becoming the managing director of the SPDC in Pakistan, Dr. Hafiz Pasha was Advisor to the Prime Minister on Finance and Economic Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, with status of federal minister. Earlier, he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Karachi, Dean and Director of the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and Professor and Director of the Applied Economics Research Centre, University of Karachi. Dr. Pasha's publications cover the fields of public finance, urban and regional economics and economics of social sectors. He has been involved with high-level policy making in Pakistan and has taken on numerous research assignments for international bilateral and multilateral agencies.