Jin Hwa Jung is a Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET) in Seoul, Korea, and currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), Stanford University. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Seoul National University, and Ph.D. degree in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jung has undertaken substantial work on the analysis of the Korean labor market. Her current research focuses on the gender differences in employment and wage structures in the industries with differing knowledge intensity. Abstract: Knowledge-based industries have taken an increasingly large role in the Korean economy since the mid-1980s in terms of value-added, employment, and productivity growth. Compared with traditional industries, knowledge-based industries are characterized by higher ratio of knowledge-intensive jobs, higher wage rates, and higher wage growth in the recent past. In particular, the gender wage gap is less noticeable in knowledge-based industries and, more importantly, less attributable to non-productivity-related discrimination against women. Policies to promote women's employment and career development in knowledge-based sectors are called for.

This seminar is part of Shorenstein APARC's Visiting Fellows Program.

For more than twenty years, labor-intensive industrialization in developing countries has generated controversy about "sweatshop" conditions in the factories of multinational companies and their regional subcontractors. In recent years, U.S. university students have vigorously opposed such factories as sites of abuse and exploitation. Others reply that such places offer their mainly young and female workers much-needed income and independence. Much of this controversy has focused on Southeast Asia as a prime location of facilities for the manufacturing of apparel, footwear, toys, and other labor-intensive exports. Why do sweatshops exist in these countries? Why are they tolerated? Why are they assailed? Are the objections justified? What should be done? University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Business School Professor Linda Lim has helped pioneer empirical research on young women factory workers in Southeast Asia. She has published extensively on this and other labor-related subjects. She has also served as a frequent consultant to the International Labor Organization, most recently on the globalization debate. She was a member of the University of Michigan's Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights in 1999-2000.

In Southeast Asia, partial recovery from financial crisis has been accompanied by signs of the start of a local version of America's internet business boom. E-businesses and dotcom start-ups have emerged. Political and business leaders have touted the virtues of the so-called "new economy" and its potential for resolving the post-crisis malaise that still affects parts of the region. But is the e-business revolution in Southeast Asia real? Are technologies and business practices being transformed? Or is the "new economy" mainly hype and wishful thinking? Does e-business spell the death of monopolies and conglomerates at the hands of agile new entrants? Or is it popular because it provides an alternative to fundamental business restructuring? And what do the answers to these questions imply for economic recovery and political reform? Linda Lim is the associate director of the International Institute and Director of the Southeast Asia Business Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has written and lectured extensively on political economy, economic development, and business practices in Southeast Asia, where she recently completed preliminary field research on the appearance and growth of electronic business.

Dennis Harter is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and a Foreign Service Officer (since 1966) specializing in Asian Affairs. From 1968-1970, he served as a district senior advisor in the Mekong Delta, then as deputy director for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia Affairs in the late 1970s. He has served as director of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam Affairs during the period of normalization of relations with Vietnam, and as deputy chief of Mission (Deputy Ambassador) from August 1997 to the present. He also served in Hong Kong twice; in Taiwan and Indonesia, and was Consul General in Guangzhou, People's Republic of China from 1989-1993.

Twenty years ago, there was little to no private wealth in China, yet today the average personal net worth of the wealthiest 50 entrepreneurs is over $200 million. The Communist Party's survival depends on China's successful economic integration into the world trading system, and it can not achieve this without entrepreneurship on a large scale. Hence the Party's pragmatic philosophy: to allow a few individuals to get rich in the belief that they will play a significant part in developing the rest of the country. Who are the 47 men and 3 women on this year's top 50 list? In what industries have their companies arisen? How has the composition of the ranking changed during the past 2 years? And what do their stories illustrate about changes in China's climate for entrepreneurship?

Rupert Hoogewerf is a freelance journalist whose research into the Top 50 wealthiest entrepreneurs of China was published for the second year running in Forbes magazine. Prior to journalism, Mr. Hoogewerf worked for 7 years with Arthur Andersen in London and Shanghai. Graduating from Durham University in Chinese and Japanese, he is based in London and Shanghai.

The complex issues arising from child labor have been addressed in several of the most significant ways--yielding the most important lessons--in the Asia Pacific region. It is in the Asia Pacific region too, that the greatest number of child laborers live. This conference will address the complexities of child labor and review the range of key "solutions" to improve the condition of children--especially impoverished, working children--in the region. Some people claim that abusive child labor is an inevitable byproduct of agrarian and developing economies. But is this accurate? What measures will alleviate abuses and hasten the elimination of exploitation? The United States is now the largest contributor to the ILO's International Programme on the Eradication of Child Labor. At the same time, the United States and US-based business have been accused of contributing to increases in child labor, through trade practices that allegedly expand inequality, or through the strong U.S. role in promoting neo-liberal economic policies through the activities of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF. What role can the United States play in alleviating the problem--and what role is it playing now? Are the critiques accurate? The term "child labor" conjures up images of poor young people, working in unsafe conditions, receiving inadequate wages, their health imperiled for life and their opportunity for education denied. What policies are appropriate to bring the worst practices to a swift though humane end? Much of the debate has been highly polemical, but more recently, the tone of the discussion has begun to change. It has begun to focus on the concrete measures that can be undertaken to improve the conditions under which children work, and to eliminate the abuses and exploitation to which millions of children are subjected. Participants in this roundtable will share the latest empirical findings on child labor in Asia and identify policies that are at the cutting edge in dealing with this issue.

Organizational discontinuity appears to be an important contributor to venture success in rapidly changing technological environments. Most Silicon Valley ventures are assemblies of human, technological, and financial resources, and supplier/client relationships with disparate organizational heritage. We analyze ways in which organizational discontinuity, under conditions of high technological uncertainty, contributes to new ventures' competitive advantage and exposes difficulties inherent to simulating venturing within an existing industrial organization. We use a comparative framework to expose the relative abundance of organizational discontinuity in the U.S. high technology sector and identify institutional barriers that stifle it in its Japanese counterpart. Professor Cole is Loraine Tyson Mitchell II Professor of Leadership and Communication at the Haas School of Business. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology. He is the co-director of the Management of Technology Program, a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering. Professor Cole is a long-term student of things Japanese, having published three books and numerous articles on Japan. Most recently, he published the book, Managing Quality Fads, in 1999 with Oxford University Press, a study of how American industry learned quality improvement practices from the Japanese. This year, he published (with Sage Publications) The Quality Movement and the Organizational Theory, a book co-edited with Richard Scott of Stanford University.