FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue 2012 final report available
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Education, fundamental to economic growth and development, has become an arena for global competition in the digital information age. As in the United States, many Asian policymakers are now pushing for higher education reform in the belief that strong, innovative higher education systems will pave the way for their countries’ future economic and political strength.
Looking comparatively at situations across Asia and in the United States, the fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue considered possible solutions to the challenges of reforming higher education today.
Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012. In the discussion sessions following the presentations, participants raised a number of key, policy-relevant points, which are highlighted in the Dialogue’s final report. These include:
All countries face the challenge of preparing students to find meaningful employment, yet there is a lack of clarity in educational goals. Several participants felt the political expediency of government funding aiming for world university rankings must be balanced with the less politically attractive but potentially more critical vocational needs of economic development.
University administrators and government policymakers need to define their goals for “globalization” or “internationalization” as they launch new initiatives and policies. Participants noted that, while few are opposed to the principle of internationalization, without a sense of concrete and realistic goals, the cost-benefit of various measures may not make sense.
Online education promises great potential innovation in education, but it is still at a very early stage. While potentially valuable in enhancing traditional learning and research, serious challenges remain. There was a sense that far more needs to be done than simply taking existing forms of education and putting them online in order to truly harness the potential offered by online education.
The Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue series is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko. The final report from the 2012 Dialogue, and previous years, is available for download from the Shorenstein APARC website.
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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).
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Jing Zhang
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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).
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Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall, Room C332
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dfu@stanford.edu
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow
Diana Fu is currently working on a book manuscript on state control and civil society contention in contemporary China. She completed her doctorate in politics with distinction from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar (2006–2012). Her dissertation, "Flexible Repression: Engineering Control and Contention in Authoritarian China" explores how the state and civil society experiment with new modes of control and contention inside the world's largest authoritarian regime. The research draws on empirical data from 18 months of close fieldwork inside unofficial labor organizations across China, including underground groups. It identifies variations in patterns of state-civil society interactions and compares the above-ground sector with the underground sector of civil society. Overall, the dissertation contributes to an understanding of the nature of state repression and civil society contention in an adaptive authoritarian regime.
Prior to Stanford, Fu was a pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was also awarded an MPhil with distinction in international development from Oxford University, as well as a BA (summa cum laude) in political science and global studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her public engagement includes contributions to Nick Kristof's On the Ground Blog (The New York Times), PostGlobal, and Global Brief.