Abstract:

This talk will unveil the story of Taiwan’s economic transformation between 1949 and 1960, as Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist leaders turned away from a command economy to build a market economy more productive than any in Chinese history.

The talk gives special attention to how a small group ofpolitical and economic leaders began to formulate and later implement a bold new economic vision for Taiwan. In the process, they embraced institutional and organizational innovations that led to a dismantling of Taiwan's earlier centralized command economy and the growth of a new market system.

Much information in this research was obtained from historical papers that were recently made available at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University: the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, Kuomintang party archives, and personal papers of Kuomintang leaders. It also makes use of first-hand oral interviews with former Nationalist officials and economists.

Speaker Bio:

Tai-chun Kuo is Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She was a Visiting Lecturer at the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University (2003) and Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of American Studies, Tamkang University (Taiwan, 1997-2000). Prior to these positions, she served as Press Secretary to the President of the Republic of China (1990-1995), Deputy Director-General of the First Bureau of the Presidential Office (1989-1997), and Director of the ROC Government Information Office in Boston (1987-1988).

Outside of her own research, since 2003 she has assisted the Hoover Institution Archives in developing its Modern China Archives and Special Collections, including Kuomintang (Nationalist) party archives, diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, personal papers of T. V. Soong, H. H. K’ung, and other leading Chinese individuals.

Her major publications include Taiwan's Economic Transformation: Leadership, Property Rights, and Institutional Change; T. V. Soong in Modern Chinese History, China’s Quest for Unification, National Security, and Modernization; Breaking with the Past: China’s First Market Economy; Watching Communist China, 1949-79: A Methodological Review of China Studies in the United States of America and Taiwan; and The Power and Personality of Mao Tse-tung, among others.

Dr. Suzuki will speak about improving nuclear safety and security in Japan after the Fukushima Dai-ichi accident. Reflecting on official and independent reports, Suzuki will draw lessons for improving four key aspects of the nuclear system: emergency response, transparency, regulatory governance, and international cooperation. Suzuki’s remarks are unaffiliated with the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.

About the speaker: Dr. Tatsujiro Suzuki is currently a Vice Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. Previously, he was the Associate Vice President of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), Japan, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Energy Economics of Japan. He was a visiting professor of the Graduate School of Public Policy of the University of Tokyo. Dr. Suzuki holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Tokyo and MS in Technology and Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Suzuki is a former member of the Pugwash Council.

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

About the seminar

Does labor mobility matter for innovation more in some countries than in others? Based on theoretical considerations of the economic systems literature we argue that labor flexibility has different innovation effects depending on national-level institutions. This talk further argues that institutional constraints may be encountered by creating functional equivalents. The analysis is based on career histories in the videogames industry. The videogames industry is structured differently between the best performing countries U.S. and Japan. This raises two issues on human capital diversity: How does composition of human capital affect innovation? How do people react towards institutional constraints in the labor market? Contrasting approaches on the systematic relations between the structure of labor markets and the dynamics of innovation is first introduced, the seminar will then present an empirical case which is based on the career histories of 39.439 videogame developers between 1999 and 2009.

This talk is part of the seminar series hosted by by the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) at Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and sponsored by The Miner Foundation.

About the speaker

Cornelia Storz is Professor for the Study of Economic Institutions and East Asian Development at the University of Frankfurt, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, and affiliated to the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO). She is associate researcher of the EHESS, Paris.

Her research focuses on comparative institutional analysis, innovation and industry emergence. With scholarships of JSPS, JILPT, BMBF and others she has been invited to the University of Tokyo, the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, the RIETI at METI, the Hitotsubashi University, the Stanford Graduate Business School and others. She was granted research funds by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Wolfgang Ritter Foundation, the Japan Foundation and others.

Recent papers have been published in Research Policy, ZfB and Social Science Japan Journal. She is co-editing a special section of Research Policy on “Path Dependence and Emergence of New Industries” and a special issue of Socio Economic Review on “Asian Capitalism” (both forthcoming). She is co-author of Institutional Diversity and Innovation. Continuing and Emerging Patterns in Japan and China  (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Institutional Variety in East Asia. Formal and informal patterns of coordination (Edward Elgar, 2011). She is co-organiser of the SASE network “Asian Capitalisms” and member of executive committee of the European Research Network EJARN, based at the Stockholm Schools of Economics.

Paul Collier will talk about how to manage the difference between helpful and damaging commercialisation, and puts forth three arguments. First, we need to face the tough reality that African food production has failed to keep pace with demand over the course of several decades, suggesting that there is a deep problem with respect to innovation and investment given the way African agriculture has been organised. Second, we need to accept that climate change, population growth, and income gains from natural resources will all stress this imbalance further: the prospect is for widening food deficits with business as usual. Third, two major changes are afoot. Globally, the model of commercial tropical agriculture pioneered in Brazil has demonstrated that output can be raised very substantially by changing the mode of organisation. Africa is now starting to open land markets to large foreign management. Superficially this looks like Brazil2, but it may instead be a wave of speculative acquisitions triggered by the price peaks of 2008.

Collier is the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University. He is currently Advisor to the Strategy and Policy Department of the IMF, advisor to the Africa Region of the World Bank; and he has advised the British Government on its recent White Paper on economic development policy. He has been writing a monthly column for the Independent, and also writes for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural-resources rich societies.

Derek Byerlee's talk will lay out a number of models of inclusive agribusiness growth, grouped into three categories (i) institutional arrangements for improving productivity of smallholders operating in spot markets, (ii) various types of contract farming arrangements, and (iii) large-scale farms that generate jobs and/or include community equity shares. The institutional and policy context as well as commodity characteristics that favor these models are discussed within a simple transactions cost framework. He will also discuss cross-cutting policy priorities to enable the growth of commercial agriculture and agribusiness. These include continuing reforms to liberalize product and input markets, access to technology and skills, stimulating financial and risks markets, securing land rights, and investment in infrastructure through public-private partnerships. 

Byerlee has dedicated his career to agriculture in developing countries, as a teacher, researcher, administrator and policy advisor. He has lived and worked for a total of 20 years in the three major developing regions-Africa, Asia, and Latin America. After beginning in academia at Michigan State University, he spent the bulk of his career at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). There as a economist and research manager he made notable contributions in forging a new spirit of collaboration between scientists, economists and farmers. He also published widely on efficiency of research systems, spillovers, and sustaining productivity in post green revolution agriculture. After joining the World Bank in 1994, he has applied his experience of research systems to finding innovative approaches to funding and organizing agricultural research, including emerging challenges in biotechnology policy. Since 2003, he has provided strategic direction and led policy world for the agricultural and rural sector in the World Bank.