Barak Hoffman recently defended his doctoral dissertation at UCLA. His dissertation focused on identifying the determinants of political accountability at the local level in sub-Saharan Africa, using Tanzania and Zambia as cases, where he did extensive fieldwork as a Fulbright Scholar. At CDDRL, he intends to expand the focus to include Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to also take into account cases where ethnic tensions are potential sources of instability. Barak Hoffman completed his BA at Brandeis, majoring in Economics, and has an MA in Economics from the Broad School of Management at Michigan State.

The speaker, Macartan Humphreys, is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

The respondent, David Patel, is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

When Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao assumed power in 2002, they immediately put a new populist and egalitarian spin on Chinese policy pronouncements. To the surprise of many, they then followed through with a systematic reorientation of economic policy in a "left" direction. Policy has shifted away from growth at all costs, and toward policies that favor regional redistribution, reduce urban bias and support rural development. Budget allocations for health and education have increased, and the commitment to the environment has been stepped up.

So far, these policies can be characterized as moderate and overdue efforts to address problems that emerged in the course of rapid economic growth. But there is implicit tension with pro-growth policies. Politically, Hu and Wen's policies balanced those of Jiang Zemin's coalition of "winners." At the 17th Party Congress in 2007, Hu will attempt to consolidate his power and redefine the policy direction.

Barry Naughton teaches at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His new book The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. was published by MIT Press this year. He received his Ph.D. in economics and M.A. in international relations from Yale University and holds a B.A. in Chinese language and literature from University of Washington.

This talk is part of the "China's Year of Decision" colloquium series sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Poverty Action Lab, and past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD).

Banerjee received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1988, and has taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining the MIT faculty in 1996. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Malcolm Adeshesiah Award, and was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2000. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is coeditor with Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee of Understanding Poverty and, with Philippe Aghion, coauthor of Volatility and Growth. His areas of research are development economics, the economics of financial markets, and the macroeconomics of developing countries.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.