FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling.
FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world.
FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.
Reprint from The Pacific Review (Vol. 8, No. 2).
We use newly released data on Japanese hospitals to explore patients’ perceptions of hospital quality, the implications of these assessments for the structure of demand for hospital care, and the role of the availability and quality of hospital care in influencing access. We find that the primary influences on hospital choice for Japanese patients are interpersonal aspects of care, that Japanese hospital markets are not segmented, and that availability has no influence on access. These results are interpreted in light of institutional differences between the Japanese and American health care systems.
In comparison with the postwar decades from 1945 to 1990, East Asian prospects for peaceful stability and economic growth have never been better. The Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States has ended. The arms race that flooded the Pacific region with Soviet and U.S. nuclear weapons systems has been replaced by a gradual phasing out of tactical and intermediate missiles. The navies of the two superpowers are diminishing, albeit involuntary on Russia’s part. Moscow’s alliances with Pyongyang and Hanoi now exist only on paper. Washington’s bases in the Philippines were closed by mutual agreement.
In this volume of concise and informative essays, leading specialists examine the nature, impact and prospects of China's post-1978 party±market symbiosis. Criticizing the collapse thesis derived from Eastern European conditions, it argues that economic liberalization has created new forms of interdependency between the state and market in China. The corollary is that party cadres have developed a new and useful role as facilitators of market transactions.
Since China did not take the big bang route to economic liberalization, cadres retain great discretion over the fate of fledgling private enterprise. So, despite their objective economic importance, China's entrepreneurs remain politically passive (Young's chapter). Oi argues that it is naive to assume that the state merely encumbers and preys upon private enterprise. She shows how village businesses are helped by a primitive form of `administrative guidance' commonly associated with Japanese industrial policy (pp. 69±72). From the perspective of property rights and their reassignment, Walder's essay demonstrates the spatial redistribution of power favouring provincial cadres (vis-aÁ -vis Beijing) and local and enterprise level cadres. Owing to her gradual reformism, China has not suffered the scale of social dislocation witnessed in Russia's transition. Nevertheless, within the overall improvement of living standards, reform has produced social discontent from those who have lost status and income, notably public sector employees (see the essays by Ma, Unger and Kent). In playing a facilitating role for market transactions, cadres have derived considerable personal profit. This `visible hand' of the cadres has attracted much popular resentment and undermined the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now trapped between its egalitarian roots and the international democratization wave.
While overt opposition has been effectively contained since 1989, economic liberalization has nevertheless created the potential for further social protest. Much will depend on the CCP's readiness to accommodate nascent social forces (with workers, as discussed by Chan, for example) into some meaningful channels of consultation and grievance redress, which in turn raises questions about the future shape of the regime and the role of the party within it
