Richard Steinberg is Professor of Law at UCLA and the Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project. In addition to his UCLA appointment, Professor Steinberg is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Department of Political Science.

Professor Steinberg has written over forty articles on international law. His most recent books are Assessing the Legacy of the ICTY (forthcoming 2010, Martinus Nijhoff), International Institutions (co-edited, 2009, SAGE), International Law and International Relations (co-edited, 2007, Cambridge University Press), and The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Economics, Law, and Politics of the GATT/WTO (co-authored, 2006, Princeton University Press).

Helen Stacy is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Director of the Program on Human Rights at CDDRL

As a scholar of international and comparative law, legal philosophy, and human rights, Helen Stacy has produced works analyzing the efficacy of regional courts in promoting human rights, differences in the legal systems of neighboring countries, and the impact of postmodernism on legal thinking. Her recent scholarship has focused on how international and regional human rights courts can improve human rights standards while also honoring social, cultural, and religious values.

Abstract:

The World Bank and IFC's Doing Business project has used indicators capturing important dimensions of the business environment to catalyze reforms in a large number of countries. In its tenth year of operation, this talk will focus on the methodological underpinnings of the project, the results obtained on the ground, the challenges ahead and why this matters for the goal of poverty reduction and economic convergence. For more information, please visit: www.doingbusiness.org

Speaker Bio:

Augusto Lopez-Claros became the director of global indicators and analysis in the World Bank–IFC Financial and Private Sector Development Vice Presidency in March 2011. Previously he was chief economist and director of the Global Competitiveness Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, where he was the editor of the Global Competitiveness Report, the Forum’s flagship publication, as well as a number of regional economic reports.

Before joining the Forum he was an executive director with Lehman Brothers (London) and a senior international economist. He was the International Monetary Fund’s resident representative in the Russian Federation during 1992–95. Before joining the IMF, Lopez-Claros was a professor of economics at the University of Chile in Santiago. He was educated in England and the United States, receiving a diploma in mathematical statistics from Cambridge University and a PhD in economics from Duke University. He is a much-sought-after international speaker, having lectured in the last several years at some of the world’s leading universities and think tanks. In 2007 he was a coeditor of The International Monetary System, the IMF, and the G-20: A Great Transformation in the Making? and The Humanitarian Response Index: Measuring Commitment to Best Practice, both published by Palgrave. He was the editor of The Innovation for Development Report 2009–2010: Strengthening Innovation for the Prosperity of Nations, published by Palgrave in November 2009.

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).

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).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his PhD in economics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

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 US Health and Retirement Study, the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, and similar surveys now launched in Korea, China, and India).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is now Professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

Asian universities are rising in world university rankings, with schools in emerging Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea recently making strong gains. Six universities in South Korea alone placed among the top 400 in the world in the 2012 Times Higher Education rankings. Competition within Asia is also intensifying. 

The shift of relative economic power from the West to the East suggests that Asian universities will continue their ascendancy, but progress brings with it growing pains. In his talk, Dr. Jeong, president of one of Korea’s premier universities, will discuss the pressures that Korean universities face and their efforts to reform and adjust to new times and new challenges.

Dr. Jeong Kap-Young is president and a professor of economics at Yonsei University. He holds a B.A. from Yonsei University, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in economics. His research interests are in industrial organization and public policy, applied microeconomic theory, and East Asian economies. He has authored numerous works, and served as adviser to the Korean government.