The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.
Comparative, policy-oriented research aimed at improving health care and the overall quality of life across the Asia-Pacific region is at the heart of AHPP’s mission and activities. As a research program within a world-class university, focusing exclusively on comparative health policy in Asia, it is unique. AHPP aims to provide evidence for addressing key health policy challenges in the Asia-Pacific, from links between poverty and ill health, to improving “value for money” and defining appropriate government and market roles in health systems. The program brings researchers to Stanford for on-site collaboration, and creates opportunities for Stanford students to conduct research in and about Asia.
The study of comparative health policy at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) dates back almost a quarter century, with its roots in the Comparative Health Care Policy Research Project inaugurated in 1990. Starting with pioneering research on health economics in Japan, the program has expanded since then to encompass research on health policy and demographic change throughout the region, albeit with a continuing focus on East Asia in comparative perspective.
Collaborative initiatives and global researchers
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AHPP’s leading-edge research involves experts on both sides of the Pacific. Among its current core research initiatives, AHPP is investigating the economic and social implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic change, especially population aging and gender imbalance in China, as well as examining the determinants of health and health disparities among Asian populations.
AHPP is also analyzing evidence on health service delivery and financing in the Asia-Pacific region, such as the impact of expanding insurance coverage, reforming provider payment incentives, and contracting with the private sector. In addition, the program is conducting a comparative analysis of the historical development of health care institutions — like physician drug dispensing and recent reforms to separate prescribing from dispensing. AHPP also sponsors collaborative initiatives to address critical global health issues, including tobacco control, promotion of child health, and control of infectious diseases.
Preparing future health care policy experts
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The program is dedicated to training the next generation of health policy experts: undergraduate and graduate students gain crucial research experience by their involvement in AHPP’s research initiatives, as well as invaluable mentoring for their own projects. A postdoctoral fellowship was initiated in 2008, followed three years later by a fellowship for young health policy experts from low-income countries of Asia.
In addition to numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, recent AHPP publications include Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea and Prescribing Cultures and Pharmaceutical Policy in the Asia-Pacific. AHPP also runs its own working paper series that is open to scholars and health policy experts around the world.
Annual workshops and engaging seminars
Each year, AHPP assembles some of the world’s greatest health policy minds at Stanford to examine focused topics at conferences and workshops, resulting in special issues of journals, edited volumes, and ongoing collaborative research. In this thirtieth anniversary year of Shorenstein APARC, director Karen Eggleston organized a conference on “Economic Aspects of Population Aging in China and India,” co-sponsored by several related research programs at Harvard University.
In addition, AHPP organizes numerous public seminars throughout the academic year. Recent topics have included the battle against HIV/AIDS in Cambodia; immunizations and child health in Bangladesh; population aging in Japan; Vietnam’s health policy challenges; tobacco control in China; air pollution in South Asia; private health insurance in South Korea; and many other important health policy-related issues.
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AHPP director Karen Eggleston with physicians and nurses of Shandong
Provincial Hospital's Endocrinology department.
This multiyear project, coordinated by Thomas Fingar, Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, looks sequentially and systematically at China’s interactions with countries in all regions and across many issue areas. The project seeks to clarify China’s objectives and policies to achieve them, but it also seeks to identify and explain the goals and policy calculations of other countries that see opportunities and perils associated with China’s greater activism on the world stage.
Phase one of the project examined China’s engagement with Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Scholars and foreign policy practitioners from China, Japan, the ROK, Russia, and the United Stated discussed these questions at a two-day workshop in Beijing in March 2012. Participants from several Southeast Asian countries also attended the workshop to ensure that questions explored were broad enough to facilitate comparisons and the search for patterns and learning across issues and areas at the follow-on regional workshop held in Singapore in November 2012.
The Singapore workshop, phase 2, discussed China's objectives and policies with respect to Southeast Asia, but focused primarily on the ways in which China's approach and actions are perceived by individual countries in the region and what regional countries seek to achieve with respect to China. Implicit in some of the presentations was the notion that China was trying to restore its traditional primacy in the region and to prevent any country inside or outside of Southeast Asia from exercising greater regional influence. Other participants emphasized material goals, including access to resources, markets for Chinese goods, and fostering economic dependence on China. Participants agreed that China's influence and impact are large and growing, and that states in the region are pursuing different strategies to advance their own interests and maximize their own freedom of action.
The third workshop, to be held at Stanford University on June 20-21, 2013, will examine China’s relationship with South and Central Asia. While there is a focus on the bilateral relationship between China and India, the largest and most powerful regional actor, the conference will also look at other key bilateral relationships, such as with Pakistan, and at interactions on a regional level, including in the economic sphere. The workshop will explore the management of cross border issues such as migration flows, water, and energy resource development. The sessions on Central Asia will offer broader understanding of China’s intersection with other powers such as Russia and India in that region.
A small group of Asia specialists at Stanford met for a retreat in the Wilbur Hall dorm complex in 1978, at the dawn of what later proved to be an era of transformative regional change, marked by the rise of Japan as an economic superpower and the early moments of China’s opening to the world.
By the end of the day, the seven scholars had set the groundwork for one of the university’s earliest interdisciplinary research organizations. Those early discussions led to the creation of the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford–now the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC)–an institution dedicated to exploring the dramatic changes in the world’s most dynamic region. This month the center, part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), celebrated 30 years of connecting Asia and Stanford and helping to guide American policy towards the region.
The Center’s founders were among those gathered to reflect on this history of interdisciplinary cooperation among the university’s scholars. “We respected one another’s areas of expertise—we wanted to learn from one another,” recalled co-founder Daniel I. Okimoto, former Shorenstein APARC director and a professor of political science emeritus. “There was a kind of dynamic learning curve that we all moved along.” Okimoto, a Japan specialist, co-founded the center with John W. Lewis, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics Emeritus and a FSI senior fellow.
Shorenstein APARC has evolved into a flourishing research center with five active research programs focusing on China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and comparative health policy in the Asia-Pacific. It also boasts a South Asia Initiative and a vibrant Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program, which has grown alongside the center.
Shorenstein APARC has brought hundreds of visitors to Stanford from Asia over the years for academic exchange and policy dialogue, and it sponsors an increasing number of activities in Asia, such as conferences at the Stanford Center at Peking University, the Kyoto International Community House, and the National University of Singapore.
“If Shorenstein APARC did not now exist, Stanford would need to create it to keep abreast of today’s critical international issues,” said Walter Falcon, a former FSI director and a senior fellow at the institute.
The center kicked off its celebrations with a Jan. 17 talk by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and commemorated its anniversary with a May 2 symposium about the historic changes in the Asia-Pacific region over the past three decades.
"Shorenstein APARC's History," Directors' Panel, May 2
Originally established as the Northeast Asia-United States Forum on International Policy, Shorenstein APARC counts its “official” beginning as 1983, the year it came under the administration of Stanford’s International Strategic Institute, which is now FSI. The Center for International Security and Arms Control, its sister organization and today the Center for International Security and Cooperation, joined the institute at the same time.
In 1992, the Forum became the Asia/Pacific Research Center in recognition of the growing scope of U.S. interests in Asia. The center was renamed in September 2005 after Walter H. Shorenstein, a prominent San Francisco-area businessman and philanthropist, who helped insure the center’s long-term success by establishing a permanent endowment.
Speaking during the May 2 symposium, Okimoto said the founding group realized the benefits of looking at issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, and understood the need for their own views to remain flexible.
In the twilight of the Cold War, Shorenstein APARC’s earliest research focused on Northeast Asia, then one of the most strategically and economically important regions for the United States. The center initially explored such issues as high-tech competition and security collaboration with Japan and the emergence of China’s budding economic reforms.
Center research has responded to the impact of developments in the region on U.S. foreign policy, ranging from the growth of regional integration and a counter rise of nationalism, to the spread of democracy, the torrid pace of economic growth and the explosion of cross border movement of people, culture and ideas in Asia. Current initiatives are dedicated to understanding the implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic change, reconciling the unresolved legacy of World War II memories in Northeast Asia, and finding solutions to the challenges posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Shorenstein APARC maintains its own active publishing program, with books distributed through Brookings Institution Press, and a contemporary Asia series published in collaboration with Stanford University Press. Some of its most recent leading-edge publications have dealt with political and economic reform in China, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the issue of aging in Northeast Asia.
Center research initiatives come to life through talks and conferences, offering members of the Stanford community and public the opportunity to hear from prominent government figures, scholars, authors, journalists, business people and non-governmental workers. Its popular, long-running annual event series include in the Oksenberg lecture on U.S.-Asia relations, the Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum on critical regional issues and the Shorenstein Journalism Award, granted to journalists on both sides of the Pacific who are at the forefront of promoting mutual understanding.
In the past decade, Shorenstein APARC has hosted engaging talks by speakers ranging from top politicians such as President Jimmy Carter and South Korea’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, to key cultural figures including Clint Eastwood and Chinese independent media pioneer Hu Shuli.
Since its earliest days, the center has also regularly convened important policy-focused dialogues on a wide range of issues, bringing together scholars and government officials. Such closed-session dialogues include the early U.S.-Japan Congressional Seminars, which brought together members of the U.S. Senate and Japanese Diet, the current series of Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogues, convened each year to address key issues in the Asia-Pacific region with global implications, and a long-running policy dialogue with South Korean scholars and policy makers.
Shorenstein APARC remains deeply committed to teaching and outreach. In collaboration with the School of Humanities and Science’s Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies, it supports a summer East Asia internship program for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students. It also regularly partners with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education on innovative Asia curriculum units for K-14 classrooms.
“The key to Shorenstein APARC’s success is its well-focused mission and ability to look to the future, enabled by the extraordinary people who take part in its research, publishing, and outreach activities,” said Gi-Wook Shin, the center’s current director and a senior fellow at FSI. “As we celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, we honor a vision turned into successful reality, and head toward a bright future of possibilities for continuing our work to foster lasting, cooperative relations with the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.”
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Shorenstein APARC directors past and present during the May 2 "Asia’s Rise" symposium (from l.): John W. Lewis, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics Emeritus; Daniel I. Okimoto, professor of political science emeritus; Henry S. Rowen, co-director, Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Andrew G. Walder, Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor; and Gi-Wook Shin, current Shorenstein APARC director.
For more than thirty years, Shorenstein APARC’s Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program has offered a unique opportunity for affiliate organizations to nominate personnel to spend an academic year at the Center. Since 1982 — one year before the Center even existed — visiting fellows in the program have been sharing ideas, forming connections, and broadening perspectives, from the early years when a handful of visiting fellows were hosted at Galvez House to recent groups of close to twenty visitors each year meeting in Encina Hall’s Okimoto conference room. As a recent visiting fellow observed, “Academically, professionally, and personally, the different perceptions I have now will change the way I approach and understand my future work.”
The present cohort of visiting fellows represents organizations in China, India, Japan, and Korea, and each fellow brings years of practical experience and an international perspective that informs and enriches the intellectual exchange at the Center and at Stanford University. A majority of the current affiliate organizations have participated continuously in the program for the past five years, or even longer.
The program — ideal for mid-career managers who wish to deepen their knowledge on topics relevant to their work — has fellows participating in a structured program, which includes creating an individual research project; auditing classes; attending exclusive seminars; and visiting local companies and institutions. In addition to broadening their views through interaction with world-class scholars, visiting fellows can network with managers from different countries and corporations.
With such an array of activities, every day in the life of a visiting fellow is different, and every year differs as well. The core research goal remains constant, but the changing composition of each group — more female fellows, varied professional backgrounds, and new countries joining the mix — keeps the program exciting and unique. One of the earliest visiting fellows from one of the longest-standing affiliate organizations put it best: “Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University and, more broadly, the Silicon Valley are culturally unique, and this program offers a great opportunity to understand some of the ins and outs and different mindsets that make the region so successful.”
The wide variety of participants has possessed an equally broad range of interests. Over the past three decades, visiting fellows have pursued research on topics ranging from “The Deregulation of Telecommunications Industries in Japan and the United States” to “Northeast Asian Interdependence;” from “Corporate Governance & Energy Management” to “Advanced Tools for Complete Characterization of Biopharmaceutical Products” to “Risk Management in Large Commercial Banks in China.”
Once visiting fellows return to their home institutions, the Corporate Affiliates Program stays connected with alumni, allowing it to maintain close partnerships with not only its affiliate organizations, but also with all of the people who have passed through the program. The alumni network has grown to more than 350, with many individuals holding prominent positions in both the corporate and governmental sectors, working in countries around the world including Russia, France, Indonesia, and Australia. Recent alumni events held in locations like Seoul and Tokyo have kept the program in close contact even with those visiting fellows who came through the Center during the early years.
The Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program thrives by bringing together a diverse international group, and through the shared experiences of research and study at Stanford University. It creates long-lasting bonds and a new community — one that enriches the university and finds within itself new, constructive perspectives. Ultimately, the hope is that these experiences will over time contribute to stronger U.S.-Asia relations.
Over the course of a year, Corporate Affiliates visiting fellows learn about the United States, but also learn a lot from each other. Fellows from the 2011-12 academic year show their Stanford pride. Corporate Affiliates is Shorenstein APARC's longest-running program.
