Do Different Health Insurance Plans in China Create Disparities in Health Care Utilization and Expenditures?
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Venue Changed to the Philippines Conference Room
China has recently reformed its health care system with the intent of providing universal coverage for basic health care to every Chinese citizen. Three separate health insurance plans have recently been launched to achieve this objective: the rural newly cooperative medical scheme, urban resident health insurance, and urban employee-based health insurance. Each plan differs substantially in terms of insurers, insured population, premiums, and benefits packages. Using data from the 2009 China Health and Nutrition Survey, Hai Fang will discuss a study that investigates whether and to what extend different health insurance plans have created disparities in health care utilization and expenditure.
Hai Fang is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy at the University of Colorado Denver, and a research associate in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He earned his doctorate in economics and master of public health from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2006. Before joining the University of Colorado Denver, he taught at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Miami. His research interests include health economics, labor economics, and public health.
Philippines Conference Room
Hai Fang
Associate Professor, Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy
Speaker
University of Colorado Denver
Seminars
Divorce, Abortion and Sex Ratio at Birth: The Effect of the Amended Divorce Law in China
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This seminar explores whether and to what extent the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex selection behavior within marriages. China's new divorce law, which was enacted in 2001, reduced divorce costs, especially for women, by granting the right to divorce and claim damages in the case of domestic violence and extra-marital relationships and by securing women's property rights upon divorce. Ang Sun has modeled the legal change as a decrease in women's divorce costs in a household in which all the marital surplus accrues to the husband. Sun shows: (1) that the new divorce law predicts an increase in divorce rates after the birth of a daughter; (2) that the new law results in fewer sex-selective abortions for the second birth if the first birth produced a daughter; and (3) that the effect of the new law on the sex ratio should have diminishing returns to divorce cost reduction for women. All the predictions are supported by the empirical evidence. Most importantly, she finds that most of the decline occurred in historically high divorce-cost regions, which is consistent with the predictions of the model and helps rule out concomitant changes in household income and relative returns to male and female children.
Ang Sun received her PhD from Brown University’s Department of Economics. Sun’s research interests encompass development economics, labor and demographic economics, and health economics. She focuses on intra-household allocations, gender differences, and household formation. In particular, she studies how a combination of different forces in China—including traditional values, rapid growth, and the population structure—is affecting Chinese families.
Philippines Conference Room
Ang Sun
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St C335
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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asun1@stanford.edu
2011-12 Asia Health Policy Fellow
Ang Sun joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) from Brown University’s department of economics where she recently received her PhD.
Sun’s research interests encompass development economics, labor and demographic economics, and health economics. She focuses on intra-household allocations, gender differences, and household formation. In particular, she studies how a combination of different forces in China—including traditional values, rapid growth, and the population structure—is affecting Chinese families. During her time at Shorenstein APARC, Sun will participate in an interdisciplinary study of the impact of the aging process in Asia on economic growth.
Sun holds a PhD and an MA in economics from Brown University, and an MA from the China Center of Economic Research. She also received a BA in economics and a BS in information and computer science from Beijing University.
Seminars
Fighting hunger in Africa with new methods of irrigation
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Rural farmers in sub-Saharan Africa live under risky conditions. Many grow low-value cereal crops that depend on a short rainy season, a practice that traps them in poverty and hunger.
But reliable access to water could change the farmers' perilous situation. Stanford scientists are calling for investments in small-scale irrigation projects and hydrologic mapping to help buffer the growers from the erratic weather and poor crop yields that are expected to worsen with climate change in the region.
The potential for increased irrigation is there, said Jennifer Burney, a fellow at Stanford's Center on Food Security and Environment at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Burney's team partnered with the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) to measure economic and nutritional impacts of solar-powered drip-irrigated gardens on villages in West Africa's Sudano-Sahel region. Burney will present the group's work on small-scale irrigation Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
"Irrigation is really appealing in that it lets you do a lot of things to break this cycle of low productivity that leads to low income and malnutrition," said Burney.
Modern irrigation often means multi-billion-dollar projects like damming rivers and building canals. But Burney says that these projects have not reached sub-Saharan Africa because countries lack the capital and ability to carry out big infrastructure projects.
A different approach, gaining popularity in sub-Saharan Africa, involves cooperation. Individuals or groups, called smallholders, organize to farm small plots and ensure their access to irrigation. These projects allow farmers to grow during the dry season and produce profitable, high-nutrition crops like fruits and vegetables in addition to the cereal crops they already grow.
Still, only 4 percent of cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated.
Smallholder irrigation
Burney and her colleagues' work in two northern Benin villages is an example of successful investment in smallholder irrigation. They worked with women's cooperative agricultural groups to install three solar-powered drip irrigation systems. Drip irrigation conserves water by delivering it directly to the base of plants. The technique also reduces fertilizer runoff.
The team surveyed 30 households in each village and found that solar drip irrigation increased standards of living and increased vegetable consumption to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's recommended daily allowance. By selling the vegetables, households were able to purchase staples and meat during the dry season.
Successful smallholder irrigation projects have high investment returns, said Burney. Her team has seen real success from irrigation projects – like those in Benin – that provide enough returns for women to send kids to school or buy small business equipment like a sewing machine or market stall.
"That's when I think it really becomes a ladder out of poverty," Burney said.
Lessons for success
For solar technology projects to be successful, Burney said, just dropping in and giving people irrigation kits doesn't work. Communities need access to a water source and need to see the benefits of a project.
"You need the technology and management and the water access, all together," said Burney. "Our solar project incorporates all of that."
According to Burney, smallholders need not limit themselves to solar irrigation systems. "Solar is great if you have an unreliable fuel," she said. "But if you're someplace that's connected to the grid, an electrical pump would more economical."
"There are a lot of different solutions that involve many different kinds of water harvesting," Burney said. "Groundwater, rainwater, surface water, and there are a lot of places in the Sahel, like Niger, for example, where there are artesian wells." The Sahel is a transition zone between the Sahara Desert and the savannas further south.
Given the diversity of water resources in West Africa, Burney suggests that nongovernmental organizations and governments prioritize detailed hydrologic mapping in the region. Otherwise, the cost of geophysical surveys and finding water sources, especially unseen groundwater, could become an insurmountable barrier for farm communities.
"It needs to be really detailed, comprehensive, usable information that's out there for everybody to be able to take advantage of," she said.
Burney says that both of the benefits that farmers get from irrigation systems –growing outside of the rainy season and producing more diverse, profitable crops – are important for adapting to climate change.
"You can produce more value on less land in most cases and not be as beholden to the whims of the rainy season," she said. Having more disposable income also will reduce vulnerability to hunger and malnutrition. "Economic development can be a form of adaptation," she said.
Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Project were collaborators on the project.
Sarah Jane Keller is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
Jennifer Burney is scheduled to speak at the fall meeting of the AGU in San Francisco on Dec. 7 in Room 2008 (Moscone West), in Session B32B, Feeding the World While Sustaining the Planet: Building Sustainable Agriculture Within the Earth System II, which runs from 10:20 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. Her talk, "Smallholder Irrigation and Crop Diversification Under Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence and Potential for Simultaneous Food Security, Adaptation and Mitigation," is scheduled from 12:04 to 12:17 p.m.
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India's Multiple Revolutions
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Abstract:
India has been in the throes of four major transformations since the 1980s. They are in the arenas of foreign policy, economic development strategies, the process of social mobilization and the growing challenges to Indian secularism. Exogenous shocks, in considerable measure, explain the dramatic and closely linked changes in the realms of foreign and security policies. The spurt in social mobilization, however, stemmed from mostly domestic sources and specifically the deepening of adult franchise. It represents one important facet of the maturation of India’s democracy. Finally, the very success of social mobilization, in part, accounts for the assault on Indian secularism. The first two, of course represent conscious policy choices. The second two, however, can be traced to a complex interplay of various social forces. The evolution of these four features of India’s democracy will, in large measure, shape the future of the country in this new century.
Speaker Bio:
Sumit Ganguly is a professor of political science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has previously taught at James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Ganguly has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a Guest Scholar at the Center for Cooperative Monitoring in Albuquerque and a Visiting Scholar at the German Institute for International and Area Studies in Hamburg.
He was also the holder of the Ngee Ann Chair in International Politics at the Rajaratnam School for International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the spring term of 2010. Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Democracy, International Security and Security Studies. A specialist on the contemporary politics of South Asia is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 20 books on the region.
His most recent books are India Since 1980 (with Rahul Mukherji), published by Cambridge University Press and Asian Rivalries: Conflict, Escalation and Limitations on Two-Level Games (with William Thompson) published by Stanford University Press. He is currently at work on a new book, Deadly Impasse: India-Pakistan Relations at the Dawn of a New Century for Cambridge University Press.
His article on corruption in India was just published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and he is currently writing a new book with Bill Thompson entitled The State of India (for Columbia University Press) which seeks to assess India's prospects and limitations of emerging as a great power.
CISAC Conference Room
Sumit Ganguly
Professor of Political Science
Speaker
Indiana University, Bloomington
Seminars
Lessons from Japan: Promoting entrepreneurship in Fukuoka
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Kenjiro Takenami, Director of Ruby Software Business Development Project at Fukuoka Prefectural Government, spoke to an audience at Stanford about the government’s success in promoting entrepreneurship in the Fukuoka region of Japan, at a seminar organized by the SPRIE-Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) on November 3rd, 2011.
In Takenami’s presentation, he discussed that Fukuoka now has over 800 local software and digital content companies with the number of companies increasing 20% annually. It is ranked 5th in Japan for the total number of software businesses and total software sales revenue. He described that in the past, Fukuoka had faced challenges in promoting entrepreneurship because of the lack of investment, mentors, and innovators. In an attempt to solve these challenges, the Fukuoka government created new programs that financed local start-up companies and supported venture capital funds. However, these programs failed to boost entrepreneurship and regional development.
Takenami revealed that the turning point for the Fukuoka government’s success was the decision to support research and development for Ruby, a dynamic, open source programming language developed in Japan. The government committed to build a community around the programming language and helped entrepreneurs and businesses develop new technologies that used Ruby. They launched multiple incubators for developers and held periodic conferences for the community members to inspire and learn from each other.
Fukuoka prefecture has a population of five million and a GDP of over 180 billion US dollars. The city of Fukuoka, which was selected as one of the “Hot Cities The Top 10” by Newsweek in 2006, has been attracting the attention of foreign investors. It is located on the northern tip of Kyushu and is geographically closer to China and South Korea than any other major Japanese city. Historically, it has been the hub for business and trade to continental Asia. The prefecture is ranked 2nd in Japan for the number of universities and colleges specializing in science and engineering, with approximately 7,000 graduates every year.
Takenami concluded the seminar by highlighting that eight times as many local companies in Fukuoka develop using Ruby since they began in 2008. He also shared success stories of companies which began in Fukuoka, but are now internationally known, such as Nautilus Technologies.
ABOUT THE Speaker
Kenjiro Takenami is Director of Ruby Software Business Development Project, Commercial and Industrial Policy Division of Fukuoka Prefectural Government and is responsible for the Fukuoka’s software industry development efforts. Takenami is the former Executive Director of the Fukuoka Center for Overseas Commerce in America, based in Silicon Valley.
Following the seminar, SPRIE-Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE), Stanford Graduate Business School and US-Asia Technology Management, Stanford School of Engineering co-hosted the Fukuoka Ruby Night Event, an annual Ruby developer conference, organized by the Fukuoka Center for Overseas Commerce in America (FCOCA).
The video clips for the keynote presentations of this event can be found here.
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In the Middle of the Storm: Development and Governance in the Arab World
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The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, The Safadi Foundation USA, The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE),
and the Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center
invite you to the launch of the
Safadi-Stanford Initiative for Policy Innovation
9:00-9:30 AM
Welcoming Remarks by Michael Van Dusen, Executive Vice President, Woodrow Wilson Center; and His Excellency, Mohammad Safadi, Minister of Finance, Republic of Lebanon
9:30-10:45 AM
PANEL I: Regional Arab Reform
Tamara Wittes, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs
Mara Rudman, Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Middle East, USAID
Lina Khatib, Co-Founder, Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, CDDRL, Stanford
Miriam Allam, Safadi Scholar First Runner Up and Economist, OECD
10:45-11:00 AM
Coffee Break
11:00-12:15 PM
PANEL II: Energy Reform and Economic Development in the Arab World
Robert D. Hormats, Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs
Inger Andersen, Vice-President, MENA, The World Bank
John D. Sullivan, Executive Director, Center for International Private Enterprise
Katarina Uherova Hasbani, Safadi Scholar of the Year
12:30-2:00 PM
Keynote lunch with Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund introduced by Ambassador Joseph Gildenhorn, Chairman, Woodrow Wilson Center Board of Trustees,and His Excellency Mohammad Safadi, Minister of Finance, Republic of Lebanon introduced by Lara Alameh, Executive Director, Safadi Foundation USA
To watch the live webcast of the conference, please click here.
6th Floor Flom Auditorium
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC
Conferences
Long-Term and Short Term Implications of China's Growing Impact
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This seminar is jointly hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) and Greater China Business Club (GCBC) at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
About the seminar
There is often much discussion about the current Chinese economic environment and how it impacts global economic growth. However, to gauge the true impact of China on the world economy, one should look at what will happen over the long term as the country gets closer to the United States in economic strength and maturity. This talk looked at the current trends in the Chinese political and economic arena, the long-term prospects for Chinese economic growth, and how these trends would impact the global economic order. Examples from the technology and internet industry were used to demonstrate this effect and how China would shape global industries.
About the speaker
Chris joined McKinsey & Company’s Asia leadership team in 2011 as a senior advisor in
technology. He leads engagements for clients in the technology, telecommunications and
semiconductor industries and is taking a leadership role in advanced technology areas both in Asia and globally. Previous to McKinsey, Chris was the General Manager of Intel China,
directly responsible for the overall region’s multi-billion dollar P&L. Chris managed Intel
China’s business operations, its technical and development operations, its strategic programs with enterprise, Internet & government customers, and owned the mobile, server, phone, embedded and consumer electronics product lines. Chris also managed Intel’s Olympics Program. During his 3-year tenure ending in 2010, overall revenue increased by over 80%.
Formerly, Chris was Chief of Staff to Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney, assisting
Mr. Maloney in leading Intel’s $15 billion mobile PC business as well as its $45 billion global
Sales & Marketing Group. Chris led Intel’s wireless business unit as well as various business
development, sales, marketing and product management teams at Intel. Chris was previously a private equity investor at The Blackstone Group in New York City. He served as a consultant for Bain & Company in South Africa and led the Board of Directors for Decortech, a privatelyheld technology company.
During a six months sabbatical in 2010, Chris led a major charity program in China and was a visiting professor of strategy at the MIT-Fudan University MBA program in Shanghai. Chris’s academic and policy works have been published by Stanford University; in Opportunity ’08 by the Brookings Institution; and in the Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation textbook by Clayton Christensen and Robert Burgelman. Chris has served as a senior fellow at Tsinghua University and was the author of the ‘Asia Diary’ column for Forbes Online. Chris is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and an Advisory Board Member for the Seva Foundation.
Chris received an MBA from Stanford Business School (2001), where he was an Arjay Miller
scholar; a Masters of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University (2001); and a Bachelors of Science in Economics, summa cum laude, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1996).
Chris was born in Washington, D.C., spent his entire childhood in rural Colorado, lived as an
expatriate in France and South Africa, and currently lives with his wife Xiaomin in China.
N302, Oberndorf Event Center
3rd Floor, North Building
Knight Management Center
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Christopher Thomas
Senior Advisor
Speaker
McKinsey & Company
Seminars
Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution
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Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people.
The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment.
Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.
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Island Press
Number
9781610911771