In this talk, Nirupama Rao, the former Indian Foreign Secretary, will address the current relationship between India and China in the light of her three-and-a-half decades of experience dealing with this crucial bilateral relationship. The politics of a fractious history still complicates this relationship: a history tied to the brief but intense border conflict of 1962, the presence of the exiled Dalai Lama and the Tibetan refugee community in India, and Sino-Pakistani friendship. These issues have proved they have an extended shelf life and they are coupled with 21st century strategic competition in maritime Asia between the two nations, the ascent of China as well as India’s rapid economic growth, and China’s growing assertiveness and presence in India’s neighborhood. Besides Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka are two examples of countries where the Chinese profile has grown dramatically in recent years. On issues like multilateral trade negotiations and climate change issues, China and India have much in common despite their bilateral rivalries in other areas. But where, essentially, is this crucially important relationship headed? How are the deepening friendship and strategic partnership between India and the United States, and trilateral India-US-Japan cooperation, affecting China and its relationship with India? Ambassador Rao will address these issues in her talk through the prism of her unique experience as a former Ambassador to China, and her long years in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. 

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Nirupama Rao was Foreign Secretary of India from 2009 to 2011. Prior to that she served as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and Ambassador to China (2006-2009). On the completion of her tenure as Foreign Secretary she was appointed India’s Ambassador to the United States where she served from 2011 to 2013.

Ambassador Rao joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1973, having placed first in the list of men and women candidates who had taken a nation-wide examination to enter the civil service. She grew up in various parts of India as the daughter of an Army officer. During her diplomatic career she served also in Vienna, Lima and Moscow. She was and remains the only woman in the Indian Foreign Service to have served as spokesperson of the Foreign Office (and also the only Indian woman to have served as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and as Ambassador to China).

Mrs. Rao was a member of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission from 2009 to 2011. 

In retirement, Ambassador Rao has taught a course on Indian foreign policy at Brown University. She has been a Fellow of the India-China Institute at the New School in New York and a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington DC (where she is also a Global Fellow). She is on the Advisory Council of the Women in Public Service Project at the Wilson Center. She is a Member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and serves on the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Advance Study, Bangalore. She is a frequent contributor on Indian foreign policy issues to Indian newspapers and is currently working on a book called “The Politics of History: India and China, 1949 to 1962” to be published by Penguin, India.

This colloquia is co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for South Asia

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Using previously unexamined nationally representative data from the Philippines, this study employs detailed measures of children’s welfare and addresses biases related to endogeneity of parental migration to examine the wellbeing of left-behind children. The results are robust across several econometric methods (treatment effects, biprobit, PSM, PSM-IV). They suggest that migrants’ children have better educational outcomes and are less likely to work, but are more likely to be physically sick, which cognitive stress theory would attribute to parental migration as a stressor. Still, the positive impacts of parental migration, attributable to income effect, outweigh the negative effects attributable to parental absence. The results also show heterogeneity in the impacts of parental migration conditional on children’s gender.

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After the Cold War, Thailand became a poster child of democratizing processes in Southeast Asia. Student protests, farmers’ activism, a thriving civil society, and an expanding middle class suggested a model of successful democratic transition. In the last decades, however, many of the forces that supported that process turned sour on electoral politics. Dr. Sopranzetti’s book will explore how that happened—new class alliances, discourses of corruption and morality, questions of law.  In this context, he will portray Thailand as an experimental space for a new model of authoritarianism, inspired by Beijing and now spreading throughout the region.  The book, Owners of the Maps: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok, will be available for sale at the talk.

Claudio Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Owners of the Maps: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok and he is currently working on Awakened,  an anthropological graphic novel on Thai politics.

Stanford Conference on "The Political Economy of Japan under the Abe Government"

February 8 - February 9, 2018

Philippines Conference Room

Sponsored by: Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Stanford University), and Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (Stanford University)

Organizers: Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy

Program

2/8/2018

8:30am     Breakfast
 

9:15am     Welcome remarks
                 Gi-Wook Shin (Stanford University)
                Toru Tamiya (Japan Society for Promotion of Science)
 

9:30am  "Transformation of the Japanese Political System: Expansion of the Power of the Japanese Prime Minister", Harukata Takenaka (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

Discussant:
Saori Katada (University of Southern California)
 

10:30am  Break
 

10:50am  "Constitutional Revision Under the Abe Administration", Kenneth McElwain (University of Tokyo)

Discussant:
Yu Jin Woo (Stanford University)

11:50am  Lunch
 

1:00pm    "Do election results reflect voters' policy preferences? Evidence from the 2017 Japanese general election", Yusaku Horiuchi (Dartmouth College), Shiro Kuriwaki (Ph.D, Harvard University), Daniel Smith (Harvard University)

Discussant:
Rob Weiner (Naval Postgraduate School)

2:00pm   "Japan's Security Policy in 'the Abe Era': Radical Transformation or Evolutionary Shift?", Adam Liff (Indiana University)

Discussant:
Ashten Seung Cho (Stanford University)

3:00pm  Break
 

3:20pm   "Abenergynomics: The Politics of Energy and Climate Change under Abe", Trevor Incerti (Yale University) and Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)

Discussant:
Kent Calder (Johns Hopkins SAIS)

4:20pm   "Innovation Policy", Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)

Discussant:
John Zysman (University of California, Berkeley)
 

5:20pm     Adjourn
 

6:30pm     Group Dinner

2/9/2018

9:00am   Breakfast
 

9:30am   "Abenomics, Monetary Policy, and Consumption", Joshua Hausman (University of Michigan), Takashi Unayama (Hitotsubashi University), and Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)

Discussant:
Huiyu Li (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)
 

10:30am  Break

10:50am "The Great Disconnect: The Decoupling of Wage and Price Inflation in Japan", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Anil Kashyap (University of Chicago)

Discussants:
Joshua Hausman (University of Michigan)
Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)
 

11:50pm  Lunch
 

1:00pm  "Corporate Governance Reform", Hideaki Miyajima (Waseda University)

Discussant:
Curtis Milhaupt (Stanford University)
 

2:00pm   "Womenomics", Nobuko Nagase (Ochanomizu University)

Discussant:
Steve Vogel (University of California, Berkeley)
 

3:00pm  Break
 

3:20pm  "Japanese Agricultural Reform Under Abe Shinzo: Two Steps Forward, A Half-Step Back?", Patricia Maclachlan (University of Texas at Austin) and Kay Shimizu (University of Pittsburgh)

Discussant:
Takatoshi Ito (Columbia University and National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)
 

4:20pm   "Yen Depreciation and Competitiveness of Japanese Firms", Kyoji Fukao (Hitotsubashi University) and Shuichiro Nishioka (West Virginia University)

Discussant:
Katheryn Russ (University of California, Davis)
 

5:20pm  "Next Step", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)
 

5:50pm  Adjourn

Confronting a declining population and increased aging, the government of Japan currently implements measures for Regional Revitalization (chiho sosei), a policy to vitalize local economies by shaping “a social framework more amenable to bearing and raising children.” One of the most important policy issues to shape such a framework is to secure employment opportunities in regional economies, and establishment of new firms, or startups, plays a significant role in providing new employment opportunities.

For the success of startups, money (fund raising) is the chief obstacle because startups are rarely creditworthy and have significant asymmetry of information on its repayment ability with lenders. Such firms have difficulty in raising funds, or financial constraint, and cannot help but depend on internal funds from their CEOs or families. Whether and to what extent do startups confront with financial constraint? How does finance matter for the performance of startups? And first of all, how do various types of startups raise funds?

To answer these questions, Uchida currently leads a research project on startup finance in Japan with support from a large-scale research grant in Japan (JSPS Kakenhi). In this seminar, he reports findings from this ongoing project. He presents an overview of, and some empirical results on, the current statu of startups firms and startup finance in Japan using publicly available data and data from original surveys that his research team has conducted. He also provides some findings from international comparisons with findings from the U.S., which he currently undertakes as a visiting scholar at APARC (with support from Abe Fellowship).

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Hirofumi Uchida joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2017-2018 academic year from the Kobe University’s Graduate School of Business Administration where he serves as a professor of Banking and Finance.

Uchida’s research interests focus on banking, financial institutions, and financial system architecture. During his stay at Shorenstein APARC, Uchida will conduct research on startup finance in the U.S. from the perspective of an international comparison with Japan. For this research, he receives Abe Fellowship (Social Science Research Council).

Uchida's research has been published in International Economic Review, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Economica, and Journal of Banking and Finance, among others. He is also an associate editor of Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and a member of the Study Group for Earthquake and Enterprise Dynamics (SEEDs) and the Money & Finance Research Group (MoFiR). 

Uchida received his M.A. in Economics in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Economics in 1999, both from Osaka University. Prior to joining Kobe University in 2009, Uchida was with the Kyoto Institute for Economic Research at Kyoto University, and the Faculty of Economics at Wakayama University. He was also a visiting scholar at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University as a 2003 Fulbright Scholar.