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.

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.

What will "post-developmental" Japan look like? In contrast to the view that Japan's political economy will converge with the U.S. system, Schaede argues that Japan is characterized by a system of cooperative capitalism. One feature of this system is the dominant role played by industry associations, which have increasingly assumed regulatory functions in the 1980s and 1990s. With the decline in ministerial power to guide industrial development, this self-regulation by industry is becoming a critical factor in understanding the workings of Japan's political economy. Ulrike Schaede is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at the University of California, San Diego. She has a Ph.D. from Marburg University (Germany) in Japanese Studies, and has held various visiting positions and research affiliations in Japan, including at Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo), the Bank of Japan, MITI, and the Ministry of Finance. Prior to joining IR/PS, Schaede taught at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. She specializes in Japanese government-business relations and business regulation in Japan, and Japan's financial markets.

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.

This talk explores the broader puzzles of the East Asian economic crisis through a focus on the Thai textile-garment industry. Once the leading Thai export, the textile industry weakened in the 1990's in the face of wage increases, regional competition and slackening demand. The goal of this talk is to explain the industry's past success, its failure to sustain that growth through technical upgrading, and its current responses to the crisis. The emphasis is on the political and institutional factors influencing industry performance. Rick Doner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his M.A. in Chinese Studies from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Doner's general research interest is comparative political economy of Southeast Asia. This current research covers political and institutional bases of Thai economic growth, comparative analysis of business associations in developing countries, flexible production in East Asia, and political economy of the hard disk drive industry in East Asia.

The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) is Pakistan's best reputed and only private management school. Operating within the environment of a government run university system, LUMS has used innovative strategies in marketing, research and consulting to reach its globally renowned status. Wasim Azhar, Dean of LUMS, will present a case study on its strategies. Dr. Wasim Azhar has taught at Wake Forest University, Swarthmore College, Kean University and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. He has also worked as Marketing Analyst for Exxon Corporation in the USA. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), American Marketing Association, American Production Inventory Control Society (APICS), American Mathematical Association and MENSA. His research interests include issues in business policy, marketing strategy, and negotiation dynamics. Dr. Azhar received his Ph.D. and MSc from the University of Pennsylvania, MBA from Wake Forest University, and MSc from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore.

Japan represents a quintessential "network society" -- permeated by dense webs of formal and informal relationships across all areas of daily life, from the political to the economic. Yet as industrial activity continues to languish along many indicators in the 1990s, what was once considered a source of competitive strength is now viewed as an underlying weakness. Critics of "crony capitalism" in Japan (and the rest of Asia) charge that mutual backscratching has replaced the kind of hard-nosed business decisions needed to make economically efficient decisions about how to allocate capital, weed out poorly performing companies, and shift resources into more productive uses. Based on the forthcoming volume, "The Organization of Japanese Business Networks" (Cambridge University Press), this presentation evaluates these criticisms theoretically and empirically. It also considers efforts now underway in Japan in the area of keiretsu reform. Michael L. Gerlach received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale University and is currently associate professor at UC Berkeley's business school. His research is focused on cross-national studies of business organizations; entry strategies in foreign markets; strategic alliances, joint ventures, and new organizational forms; interfirm relationships and corporate strategies in Japanese business; business and public policies concerning international competitiveness; the comparative analysis of the institutions of modern market economies as they reflect social and cultural contexts.

Regulations on new drugs, drug prices, and other aspects of the Japan's pharmaceutical industry had in effect protected domestic manufacturers and kept them from inventing a truly innovative new drug. As the deregulation and the international harmonization of the drug market proceed, disintegrated Japanese drug makers will need to ally or integrate with partners in and out of the industry.

M&A will have a positive effect on the marketing, but not necessarily on the research. Possible increase of university TLO and spinouts in Japan can improve the access to the information in Japanese universities, but the access is open to both domestic and international companies. Alliances between drug makers and the local parties with an international competitive edge, such as electronics and precision mechanics, may produce a unique synthesis.

Atsuomi Obayashi is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center and associate professor at the Keio University Graduate School of Business Administration. His research topics include application of the game theory, the contract theory and economics of the R&D. He received his Ph. D. in public policy from the University of Chicago in 1996 and an LL.B. from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1983.

David W. Brady is a political scientist whose work encompasses American politics and legislative bodies, international political trends, and comparative politics. Brady holds the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy endowed chair at the Graduate School of Business and is a professor of political science in Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences. A dedicated and popular teacher, Professor Brady is a past recipient of Stanford's Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Teacher Award, presented for his work with undergraduates, and of the Robert K. Jaedicke Silver Apple Award, presented by the Stanford Business School Alumni Association for his participation in alumni activities.

Brady recently served as an associate dean for academic affairs at the Business School and continues to serve as director of the School's programs in executive education. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and senior fellow by courtesy at the Institute for International Studies, both on campus. David is also co-director of the University's Social Science History Institute and associate director of the University's Public Policy Program. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the advisory council for the Kansai Silicon Valley Venture Forum.

His publications include Change and Continuity in House Elections (eds. with J. Cogan), Stanford University Press (2000), Revolving Gridlock, Westview Press (1998); "Congress in the Era of the Permanent Campaign," Brookings Review, forthcoming 2000; "The Roots of Careerism in the U.S. House of Representatives," Legislative Studies Quarterly, (1999); "The SNTV and the Politics of Electoral Systems in Korea," in Electoral Systems in Asia (University of Michigan Press (1999); "Out of Step, Out of Office: Legislative Voting Behavior and House Election Outcomes," in Change and Continuity in House Elections, Stanford University Press (1999).