Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party won by a landslide in the national election for the upper house of parliament on July 10. Writing for Toyo Keizai, Shorenstein APARC Associate Director for Research Daniel Sneider said American policymakers hope the Prime Minister will use the fresh mandate to kick-start stalled economic reforms and to move ahead on implementation of Japan’s new security legislation. Read the article here.

The Independent writes about REAP's early childhood education centers and efforts to provide babies in rural China with a stimulating start to life. To read the original article, click here.

Around 8 per cent of rural children in China take college entrance exams, compared with 70 per cent of urban children. Reap officials believe this is due to a woeful lack of mental stimulation for rural youngsters between birth and the age of three. They say this is the crucial period for neurons to connect in the brain and set a path for a child’s mental ability later in life. “Around 92 per cent of neurons will have completed connecting by the age of three,” says Professor Shi Yaojiang, who heads Reap at the Centre for Experimental Economics in Education at Xi'an city’s Shaanxi Normal University. “This period is critical for early development. If parents don’t nurture their child’s brains during this time, then mental ability cannot be maintained. If you miss it, it’s irreversible.”

To combat all this, Reap, which was set up in conjunction with Stanford University in California, has founded seven education centres in China’s centrally located Shaanxi province. Caregivers bring toddlers there for weekly play and learning sessions with trainers such as Mr Li, and can use the facilities all week.

The sessions are meticulously planned, offering age-appropriate toys and materials to stimulate motion, cognitive skills, language and social abilities. They are all designed to help ensure a child's crucial mental development. “We don’t have toys at home, and my granddaughter just used to rip up books,” says Chen Huafen, a grandmother who comes to the centre with her grandchild. My granddaughter’s parents work away in Xi'an, so I take care of her,” Ms Chen adds. “At first I told them I didn’t know how to nurture a child, so they said: ‘Go to the education centre.’ Everything is good here. At home my granddaughter would just play in the dirt.”

The four-room education centre is a burst of life and colour in the sparse village, the streets of which are deathly quiet due to most residents working away in fields, or as migrant workers. The centre is small and basic, filled with new toys and picture books. A ball pit and plastic slide make a colourful centrepiece, and the cartoon-adorned walls and floors are padded to help boisterous toddlers avoid accidents. The children who come to the centre are happy and calm, occupied by the wealth of playthings on offer, the tinny squawk of push-button electronic toys drowning out sporadic, short-lived tantrums. Most of the children have no such items at home.

Reap has around 90 trainers who also make home visits to around 550 families living too far from the centres to travel to them. There are fewer than 20 centres at the moment, but there are plans to increase the number to 50 and pressure on the government to roll out the project nationwide.

Every six months Reap researchers compare mental ability test scores garnered from the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development between children who take part in the education course and those who don’t, and the results show the project is working. The group’s scores are maintained over time at an average of 97, and researchers have found that if children don’t take part in the course, their score declines to an average of 81. “And with a score of 81, you are not going to have the ability to graduate from high school,” claims Professor Shi.

Professor Shi has discussed the benefits of Reap with 27 National Health and Family Planning Commission officials from provinces across China in an attempt to see it spread throughout the country. Some have started setting up their own regional education centres. He hopes that the government will be enticed to fund a nationwide rollout by offering the prospect of a better-educated workforce: one more suited to China’s ongoing shift away from agriculture to urban industries.

Caixin media cites REAP's research on middle school dropout rates in commentary on the importance of investing in China's rural human capital. To read the piece in its original Chinese, click here.

Recently, an academic consensus has emerged that China should focus its human capital development in rural areas. Rural residents receive only an average of 9.6 years of education, which leaves them ill-prepared for high-skilled work. Yet with the increased mechanization of factories, manufacturing jobs will likely move offshore, or revert back to the West. This is a great risk for an economy transitioning from low-income to high-income status, such as China.

REAP's research has shown that middle school dropout rates in rural China have reached 63%. In addition, psychological problems of rural students are on the rise due to being "left-behind" by migrating parents. China's poorly formed land, residence and education policies have lead to this predicament. It's time for China to implement better policies for rural children. Investing in rural children is investing in the future of China.

A new course jointly taught by Stanford and Peking University brought together students and scholars in China and the United States in dialogue using videoconferencing.

Each week during the past spring quarter, students at Stanford and Peking University (PKU) gathered in a classroom to learn, just as they would for any other course. The only difference was these students were neither in the same classroom nor on the same continent.

Despite being separated by nearly 6,000 miles, 18 students in Palo Alto and 28 students in Beijing held ‘face-to-face’ conversations via high definition videoconference in a course taught by American and Chinese scholars. On each side, they sat in a three-rowed amphitheater and looked directly ahead – not at a whiteboard – but at a screen that projects a video ‘wall’ of their colleagues at the other campus. The venue, known as a ‘Highly Immersive Classroom,’ enabled the distance learning experience between the two universities, using advanced software to create a cross-Pacific virtual classroom. The course titled The United States, China, & Global Security, led by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and PKU professor Fan Shiming, was organized under the auspices of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative whose research focuses on security challenges in Asia with teaching as one of its core activities.

“We set out to host a course that addressed topics critical to China and the United States in a new type of classroom format,” said Eikenberry, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and director of the Initiative. “What resulted was a truly unique academic exchange that considered topics even beyond the bilateral relationship and carried a certain ‘Silicon Valley spirit’ being divided by an ocean yet connected through technology.”

Over eight weeks, a select group of graduate students from the two universities explored a wide array of subjects related to international security, ranging from terrorism to trade and energy and the environment. The course aimed to provide students with a forum to discuss current issues in U.S.-China relations and to analyze areas that could be applied to other case studies. 

“Because each week was a different topic, it didn’t feel like I was just thinking about the United States and China again every Wednesday night,” said Sam Ide, a Stanford graduate student who studies China’s relations with Central Asia. “Each session was very interesting to me in a different way.”

Guest-taught by prominent scholars and former senior government officials from the United States and China, the course sessions allocated thirty minutes for each lecturer to present, followed by a thirty minute question-and-answer period in which students were given the opportunity to interact with the lecturers and their peers on the other campus. Lecturers from Stanford included nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Thomas Fingar, a former deputy director at the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and from PKU, Dean of the School of International Studies Jia Qingguo, and arms control and disarmament expert Han Hua. All discussions were off-the-record to encourage candid exchange of ideas. 

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At Stanford's Highly Immersive Classroom in Palo Alto, students look ahead at their counterparts in Beijing.

One course session in particular resonated with students. The session, taught by Zha Daojiong, a professor of political economy at PKU and Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, focused on the changing nature and future of cybersecurity relations between China and the United States.

“I loved the cybersecurity class because there was a lot of candor on both sides,” PKU student Shan Jee Chua recalled.

Kimberly Chang, a second year Stanford graduate student in management science and engineering, noted that it was beneficial to hear the Chinese view on cyber “because most of the talk within the United States has been from an American perspective.”

The course revealed a broader range of perspectives and provided a chance to interact first-hand with international colleagues while remaining at their home campus. Discussion amongst peers uncovered the “behind the scenes stories” and added context to media reports found online or in print, said Seung Kim, a student in Stanford’s East Asian studies program.

Besides the technology, a unique aspect of the course was its diversity. More than half of the course participants were international, representing 15 countries beyond China and the United States. That setting encouraged debate and reinforced the notion that “neither the United States nor China is the center of the universe,” said Zhu Jun Zhao, a PKU international relations student.

When students were asked what could bring about better understanding between China and the United States, continued dialogue was a common answer. The future of U.S.-China relations rests in the hands of people talking to one another: “I think we need more honest conversations,” Chang said.

And for some students, an opportunity to hold those conversations in-person may be close. Ide said he anticipates traveling to Beijing over the summer and plans to try and meet with a few of his counterparts whom he met through the course.

“Hopefully, I’ll be able to meet some of these people in real life who I’ve met on the ‘wall.’”

Related Links:

Video showcases SCPKU's Highly Immersive Classroom enabling co-teaching across the Pacific

The Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with scholars from Stanford Health Policy's Center on Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Next World Program, is soliciting papers for the third annual workshop on the economics of ageing titled Financing Longevity: The Economics of Pensions, Health Insurance, Long-term Care and Disability Insurance held at Stanford from April 24-25, 2017, and for a related special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. High-income countries offer lessons – frequently cautionary tales – for low- and middle-income countries about how to design social protection programs to be sustainable in the face of population ageing. Technological change and income inequality interact with population ageing to threaten the sustainability and perceived fairness of conventional financing for many social programs. Promoting longer working lives and savings for retirement are obvious policy priorities; but in many cases the fiscal challenges are even more acute for other social programs, such as insurance systems for medical care, long-term care, and disability. Reform of entitlement programs is also often politically difficult, further highlighting how important it is for developing countries putting in place comprehensive social security systems to take account of the macroeconomic implications of population ageing.

The objective of the workshop is to explore the economics of ageing from the perspective of sustainable financing for longer lives. The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent empirical and theoretical research on the economics of ageing with special (yet not exclusive) foci on the following topics:

• Public and private roles in savings and retirement security
• Living and working in an Age of Longevity: Lessons for Finance
• Defined benefit, defined contribution, and innovations in design of pension programs
• Intergenerational and equity implications of different financing mechanisms for pensions and social insurance
• The impact of population aging on health insurance financing
• Economic incentives of long-term care insurance and disability insurance systems
• Precautionary savings and social protection system generosity
• Elderly cognitive function and financial planning
• Evaluation of policies aimed at increasing health and productivity of older adults
• Population ageing and financing economic growth
• Tax policies’ implications for capital deepening and investment in human capital
• The relationship between population age structure and capital market returns
• Evidence on policies designed to address disparities – gender, ethnic/racial, inter-regional, urban/rural – in old-age support
• The political economy of reforming pension systems as well as health, long-term care and disability insurance programs

Submission for the workshop

Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by Sept. 30, 2016, to Karen Eggleston at karene@stanford.edu. The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by Oct. 15, 2016, and completed draft papers will be expected by April 1, 2017.

Economy-class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organizers.

Invited authors are expected to submit their paper to the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. A selection of these papers will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue.

Submission to the special issue

Authors (also those interested who are not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by Aug. 1, 2017. Submissions should be made online. Please select article type “SI Financing Longevity.”

About the Next World Program

The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Working Group on Comparative Ageing Societies. These institutions organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.

More information can be found in the PDF below.