Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development joined the Faculty of Pitzer, a member of Claremont Colleges, as Freeman Fellow from June 2003 to June 2005. Before joining, he served the current administration as US Executive Director Designate of the Asian Development Bank, and as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.
As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank's Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB's Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.
As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing six books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.
Encina Basement Conference Room
The global trade in grain and meat between nations is extensive and is projected to grow considerably in the short term. The concept and quantification of "virtual water" involved in these trade exchanges has led to new insights of the larger consequences of global transfers in commodities. FSE will host a small international team of scholars, including economists, ecologists, and livestock specialists to scope out this issue and to expand this concept to include energy and nutrients. By documenting trends, developing scenarios for the future, the group is proposing ways to achieve desired outcomes in a way that is sustainable for the life systems needed to fuel industrial livestock systems.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
Encina Hall Central, 2nd Floor,
C231
William Brown (Bill) is an economist and senior research analyst with CENTRA Technology, Inc. of Northern Virginia, specializing in North Asia-area economics. He is also a member of the adjunct faculty of George Mason University's graduate school of public policy where he teaches courses on Asian economic development and international trade.
Bill has extensive experience as an economic analyst in the US government, having worked in the Chief Economist's Office of the Commerce Department, as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Economics in the National Intelligence Council, and as an eco-nomic analyst in the CIA's Office of Economic Research where he focused on his research on the North Korean and Chinese economies. He served for two years in the US Embassy in Seoul and has traveled extensively in the region, including a trip last summer across the DMZ into North Korea.
Mr. Brown writes occasionally for the Chosun Ilbo in Seoul and speaks on Korean and Chinese issues to a number of Asian and US audiences. He holds an M.A. in economics from Washington University, Missouri with most of his Ph.D. work completed, and a B.A. in International Studies from Rhodes College, Tennessee. He grew up in Kwangju, South Korea as the son and grandson of Presbyterian missionaries and speaks and reads some Korean and Chinese.
Hosted by the Walter H. Shorenstein Forum as part of its ongoing seminar series on North Korea.
Philippines Conference Room
China's rapid growth and increasingly close integration with world markets is transforming Northeast and Southeast Asian regional production and trade. Southeast Asia's relatively resource-abundant economies are expected to lose comparative advantage in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing activities while gaining comparative advantage in natural resource products. The latter shift will increase incentives to exploit and export the products of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture.
What are the implications for long-run growth and welfare, particularly in the poorest and least industrialized economies, including Indonesia and Vietnam? How will this trend interact with the other major phenomenon sweeping through Southeast Asia, i.e., decentralization? With reduced national authority and minimal local accountability, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. A race to liquidate natural resource assets, if sufficiently pronounced, could expose parts of the region to a new variant of the "natural resource curse" - the idea that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others.
Ian Coxhead is an economist and serves as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialty is the economic development of Southeast Asia. His many publications on trade, development and the environment include The Open Economy and the Environment: Development, Trade and Resources in Asia (2003, with Sisira Jayasuriya). Prof. Coxhead's current research features the impacts of globalization, regional growth, and domestic policy reforms on the structures of production and employment, issues of poverty and the environment, and the exploitation of natural resources in Vietnam and the Philippines.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Steven Miller is Director of the International Security Program, Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal International Security, and co-editor of the International Security Program's book series, BCSIA Studies in International Security (which is published by the MIT Press). Previously, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and taught Defense and Arms Control Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-author of the recent monograph, War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives (2002) and a frequent contributor to Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Miller is editor or co-editor of some two dozen books, including, most recently, Offense, Defense, and War (October 2004), The Russian Military: Power and Policy (September 2004), Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict- Revised Edition (2001), and The Rise of China (2000).
Miller is the co-chair of the U.S. Pugwash Committee and a member of the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council of International Pugwash, the Advisory Committee of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the Scientific Committee of the Landau Network Centro Volta (Italy). He is a former member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Within Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Miller serves on the steering committees of the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe and of the Harvard Ukrainian Project.
Suggested readings for the seminar:
(1) Teresa Johnson, "Writing for International Security: A Contributor's Guide." International Security, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 1991), pp. 171-180.
(2) For a critical view of the journal: Hugh Gusterson, "Missing the End of the Cold War in International Security," in Jutta Weldes, et al., Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 319-345.
(3) For a survey of the evolution of the journal: Steven Miller, "International Security at 25: From One World to Another," International Security, Vol 26, No. 1 (Summer 2001), pp. 5-39.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Encina Basement Conference Room
Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, Center for Economic Performance, and Center for Economic Policy Research.
His work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal Economics and Review of Economic Studies to name a few. Daron Acemoglu's research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, technical change, and search theory. Acemoglu is also the editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.
Abstract of paper presented in this research seminar
This paper develops a model where there is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An "oligarchic" society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers, violating the property rights of future producers. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on the producers, but tends to avoid entry barriers. When taxes in democracy are high and the distortions caused by entry barriers are low, an oligarchic society achieves greater efficiency. Nevertheless, because comparative advantage in entrepreneurship shifts away from the incumbents, the inefficiency created by entry barriers in oligarchy deteriorates over time. The typical pattern is therefore one of the rise and decline of oligarchic societies: of two otherwise identical societies, the one with an oligarchic organization will first become richer, but later fall behind the democratic society. I also discuss how democratic societies may be better able to take advantage of new technologies, how an oligarchic society might transition to democracy because of within-elite conflict, and how the unequal distribution of income in oligarchy supports the oligarchic institutions and may keep them in place even when they become significantly costly to society.
Encina Basement Conference Room
President Bush's 2002 nuclear posture differs sharply from its predecessors and is relevant to the President's recently repeated assertion that he will strike first against any country that might pose a threat of using weapons of mass destruction.
The main new trend in the posture is that the US will be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a much wider range of circumstances than before. Such an emphasis has not been seen since the days of "flexible response" forty or so years ago, when tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in Europe and elsewhere.
Yet, nuclear weapons don't help much with the kinds of missions the US prepares for, including the ones noted in the posture, such as digging out deep underground facilities that might contain bio-warfare agents. Deep underground facilities are difficult or impossible to destroy without large nuclear explosions that create large amounts of fallout. Nuclear weapons are more suited for use against shallow-buried facilities (of the order of ten meters deep) but even in those cases, Hiroshima-type yields are needed, and complete destruction of the bio-agents cannot be guaranteed. Other uses mentioned to justify the posture are even more marginal in their feasibility.
Given the overwhelming US conventional advantage and the relative invulnerability of the US to all but nuclear weapons, the US nuclear posture should aim at minimizing the chances of nuclear weapons spread rather than seeking marginal gains with tactical nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are equalizers. Why bring them back into the forefront of regional problems, whether in the Middle East or anywhere else?
Increasing the US nuclear threat will increase the motivation of adversaries, big or small, to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they don't already have one. The US cannot subsequently be confident that it will be the only power to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. There are now several demonstrations of the relative ease with which states can acquire nuclear weapons. North Korea, a poor nation of 17 million people, made and separated with little help enough plutonium for perhaps one or more weapons. South Africa made at least six weapons with essentially no help. Other cases tell the same tale.
The nuclear genie is long out of the bottle and the relative stability that characterized the Cold War is also gone. Instead, the US has been pursuing an aggressive strategy of military expansion around the world and ever closer to other states' vital interests. Quite apart from the wisdom of that strategy, is it wise to couple it with an increased nuclear threat to possible adversaries, as the posture does?
In the past, the existence of a real or putative nuclear threat has been a serious motivation for states to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they didn't already have it. That was true of the US, USSR, China, and others. The US, as the world's strongest and least vulnerable major power, should pursue a strategy that minimizes the most serious risk rather than increase it for marginal, and questionable, benefits. The posture implies a strategy that does the opposite.
A nuclear posture better suited to our times would recognize these changes. It would lay the policy basis for the following difficult, long-term, but necessary steps:
1. Minimizing the demand for nuclear weapons, focusing on Asia. Asia contains most of the world's population and might, in a few decades, have most of its wealth. Three states there (four if Israel is included) have nuclear weapons; several more could readily have them. The US nuclear posture should provide US initiatives toward a more stable security order there, one in which peaceful states will not be threatened by nuclear or potentially nuclear rivals. The Non-Proliferation Treaty provides a basis -the only existing basis- for such an order, but it needs to be updated with more inducements in the way of technical cooperation and reassurance, and more clearly defined internationally agreed sanctions if the treaty is disregarded. The US nuclear posture in essence forswears the lead in this endeavor.
2. A pattern for nuclear arms reductions that would include eventually limitations on all arsenals. Openness here is as important as numbers. The US and Russia have most of the weapons but, after the first hundred or so survivable weapons, it matters less and less how many a state has. An internationally recognized framework is needed that can be applied to the regions of the world where nuclear rivalries threaten. Instead, the US has gone the other way, with a sketchy US-Russia agreement that delays the time scale for reductions and does not provide any precedent for international agreements on inspections.
3. A strategy for addressing the problem of nuclear terrorism. The most serious dimension of that problem--the possibility of a terrorist nuclear weapon --is closely related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and capabilities. Any strategy to avoid that has an important international dimension. Hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, most of it surplus in the US and former Soviet Union from the Cold War, need to be better secured and accounted for. A solution to the problem of keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of the tens of millions of shipping containers that crisscross the world requires international cooperation on standards, procedures, cost sharing, and inspections. A good start has been made toward these goals, mainly through the Nunn-Lugar programs, but more money and agreements are needed. A modern nuclear posture should establish the policy basis for securing those resources and agreements. There is at present no comprehensive global strategy for securing such vital agreements and establishing the institutions to enforce them. Consistent, high-priority US participation is vital to secure other countries' participation.
4. A strategy for reducing the risks of accidental nuclear launch while at the same time maintaining invulnerability of the reduced deployments. The nuclear posture briefly mentions the "rigorous safeguards" on US weapons systems and proposes to deal with the problem of accidental or unauthorized launch of "certain foreign forces" via nuclear missile defense. That is at best a partial and certainly a distant remedy. Maintaining the human and financial infrastructure for nuclear weapons system will become more difficult in the US as well as elsewhere. Given the relationship among nuclear deterrent forces, the problem cannot be solved unilaterally. A program that would use US technical leadership to improve warning and control for all states threatened by nuclear weapons is also needed. It is needed now in South Asia. Later, it could help limit crises with or among Russia and China, and help prevent proliferation in the Middle East. President Reagan, with a portion of Star Wars, and, before him, President Eisenhower, with Open Skies, had something of the kind in mind. It is time to begin thinking about how this would look in modern form.
In summary, a nuclear posture for a world with more dispersed power centers and more widely available nuclear technology should have more, not less, emphasis on international agreements. President Eisenhower stated fifty years ago that "Only chaos will result from our abandonment of collective international security." That is even truer in today's world than it was then. The present administration seems to have a bias against such agreements, which are slow to bear fruit and do not win votes. That is shown in the posture itself, which states that arms control measures will not stand in the way of nuclear weapons development.
Yet these and other agreements are essential to deal with the dangers of proliferation to unstable states, with the possible use of international trade for terrorism, and with the risk of accidents and unauthorized launch. Nuclear deterrence continues to be needed, but the last thing a modern posture should do is to bring nuclear weapons back into the forefront of regional deterrence.
Ironically, when it has committed itself to the task, the US has used international agreements more effectively than any other nation. The Cold War-- better called a Cold Peace perhaps, since the military lines of demarcation never changed while the safeguarding of Western values and collapse of the Soviet Union were brought about mainly by economic and political instruments-- saw a rise in US power and influence in good part through the use of US-led international agreements in the areas of trade and security, areas that are necessarily related. Now is not the time to give up that approach, especially not in matters relating to nuclear weapons.