Stanford University

Ryo Masuda

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Ryo Masuda is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  Masuda has more than six years of experience in media markets working for Sumitomo Corporation, one of Japan's major trading and investment conglomerates.  Most recently, Masuda worked for Japan's largest CATV operator, one of Sumitomo Corporation's affiliated companies, where he was responsible for business development.  Masuda graduated from Hitotsubashi University with a bachelor's degree in commercial science.

Chengbao He

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Chengbao He is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  Since 2005, He has been the vice deputy director of the Science and Technology Management Department of PetroChina.  He is responsible for the R&D management of the refining and chemical businesses of PetroChina and for the intellectual property management.  He graduated from Tianjin University with a master's degree in chemical engineering in 1990.  After graduating, he worked at the Dalian Petrochemical Company (DPC) for 16 years, serving as the vice president in 2002.  DPC became the largest refinery in China which had a crude oil capacity of 400kBPSD.  During the period from 2002 to 2005, He was responsible for the technology of DPC's capacity expansion project.  In 2012, He graduated from the University of Houston with an Executive MBA degree.

Yasuaki Hanai

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Yasuaki Hanai is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  Hanai has more than eight years of experience in energy markets working for NEC Corporation.  Most recently, Hanai was responsible for business development in the areas of environmental protection and energy management systems.  Hanai graduated from Meiji University with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering informatics.

Mitsunori Fukuda

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Mitsunori Fukuda is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  He has held positions at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan (METI) for about 10 years, where he has been in charge of policy making.  His latest position at METI was as deputy director for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.  He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Kyoto University.

Long-Term Outcomes and Heterogeneity of Effects of Health Interventions in Matlab, Bangladesh

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This research aims to better understand the impact of the Matlab health interventions by using panel data to control for unobservables and understand the dynamics and long-term effects of these programs. Heterogeneity in the fertility response to the family planning program is analyzed, using sequential fertility to isolate the family planning program from other interventions and examine heterogeneity based on time-varying characteristics. The link between childhood measles vaccination and school enrollment is examined using instrumental variables, and is motivated by the hypothesis that by avoiding the long-term health effects of a disease, vaccinated children are higher-achieving. Both analyses generate interesting findings that are not captured using the traditional methodologies and outcomes of program evaluation.

Julia Driessen, PhD, is an assistant professor of health policy and management in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics. In 2011 Dr. Driessen received her PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include program evaluation and the links between health interventions and socioeconomic status, with an emphasis on heterogeneity of program effects as well as long-term outcomes. Recent research has analyzed the schooling effects of childhood measles vaccination and variation in the fertility response to a family planning program in Bangladesh. Her primary new interest since arriving at Pitt is the clinical and financial effects of electronic medical records in developing countries.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Julia R. Driessen Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Graduate School of Public Health Speaker the University of Pittsburgh
Seminars

One Decade of the International Criminal Court: challenges and possibilities

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During the academic year of 2012-2013, the Program on Human Rights’ Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Series will examine the International Criminal Court (ICC) featuring debates with local, national and international experts, academics and activists. The focus will be on current challenges and possibilities for the ICC, such as how to determine reparations for victims, US and ICC relations, nation state cooperation and the still-to-be included crime of aggression.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague opened its doors 10 years ago amid buoyant optimism and sharp criticism. Supporters of the ICC hope that a permanent criminal court ensures the worst human rights offenders -- those who have committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- are brought to justice, and that nation states will progressively structure their own criminal systems so that genocidaires will face a fair trial before their own people and their own courts. Some critics of the ICC argue that the Court is biased against countries like the U.S., and that it jeopardizes national sovereignty through falsely claiming to be apolitical.  Other critics say that the ICC is biased against the entire region of Africa, noting that so far the ICC has indicted only Africans. Still others say that the ICC process is slow and expensive, noting that after ten years the Court has only completed one prosecution.

One decade later, how should the international community assess the ICC?  How fair are allegations against the ICC of bias and politicization? Have nation states really given over their national sovereignty to the ICC?  Have the ICC, the ad hoc tribunals (the ICTY and the ICTY) and hybrid tribunals (those in Sierre Leone, Cambodia and East Timor) had a deterrent effect on would-be genocidaires? More broadly, what are the pros and the cons of the international criminal justice system, and its less formal cousins such as truth and reconciliation commissions and gacacca?  Does the ICC present a fairer and cheaper alternative to war?

The International Speakers Series will be part of a three quarter sequence comprising a fall workshop, a winter one-unit credit course open to all Stanford students and a spring conference. The results of these conferences will be compiled in a PHR Working Paper Series on the ICC and international criminal justice.

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Honorable Luis Moreno-Ocampo First Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Speaker
Richard Steinberg Visiting Professor of International Relations at Stanford, Professor of Law at UCLA, Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project Host
Helen Stacy Director of the Program on Human Rights Host CDDRL
Conferences

International Public Interest Initiative Symposium

This two-day symposium will bring together lawyers who are litigating human rights cases in international tribunals, lawyers who deploying international human rights frameworks to advance legal reform goals in their respective countries and public policy advocates who are pressing for legal reforms that are more protective of individual rights

This year’s symposium will focus, as a case study, on achieving gender equality through strategic use of both international and domestic strategies.

Goals:

  1. To learn about successes with respect to using international human rights mechanisms to mobilize domestic law reform
  2. To evaluate the extent to which international human rights mechanisms have had an impact on justice on the ground
  3. To strategize on how human rights litigators, domestic public interest attorneys and domestic public policy advocates can more effectively coordinate their work  in order to impact justice on the ground  through international human rights mechanisms
  4. To examine in-depth how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and monitoring mechanisms are shaped by local activists and how local activists use the international documents and mechanisms to press for change on the ground.
  5. To examine the impact of local norms and practices on whether a global consensus is reached on international human rights standards and whether the standards are adopted in a domestic context

Content:

Panels will address :

  1. What is the power of human rights ideas for transnational and local social movements and how have these ideas contributed to a rethinking of gender equality around the world?
  2. Using gender equality and CEDAW as a case study, have human rights created a political space for reform in particular countries and what have been the key challenges?
  3. What key successes have lawyers and advocates had in using international human rights mechanisms to ensure gender equality with respect to organizing, litigation and public policy? 
  4. What are the lessons learned from the global gender equality movement for other human rights struggles?
  5. Looking forward, what are the key challenges and opportunities for more strategic collaboration between the movement for gender equality and other aspects of  the human rights movement?

Keynotes will include Christopher Stone, the President of Open Society Foundation and The Honorable Judge Patricia Wald. Panelists are Executive Directors or Presidents of innovative human rights and international justice organizations and public interest attorneys from leading public interest legal organizations in Kenya, Nigeria, China,
South Africa, Malaysia, Palestinian Territories, China and Chile.

The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL is proud to co-sponsor this event
and hopes you take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

For registration details, please visit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/forms/LevinPILSymposium.fb

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Symposiums

Karl Eikenberry on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the 2012 Aspen Security Forum

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Karl Eikenberry, FSI's Payne Distinguished Lecturer and a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, participated in the 2012 Aspen Security Forum on July 27. Eikenberry joined Eklil Hakimi and Sherry Rehman, the ambassadors to the U.S. from Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively, in a discussion about those countries. The panel also included Doug Lute, a retired lieutenant general who is now President Barack Obama's special assistant on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was moderated by Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes.

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Defying Gravity: How Long Will Japanese Government Bond Prices Remain High?

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Recent academic papers have shown that the Japanese sovereign debt situation is not sustainable. The puzzle is that the bond rate has remained low and stable. Some suggest that the low yield can be explained by domestic residents’ willingness to hold Japanese government bonds (JGBs) despite its low return, and that as long as domestic residents remain home-biased, the JGBs are sustainable. About 95% of JGBs are currently owned by domestic residents. This paper argues that even with such dominance of domestic investors, if the amount of government debt breaches the ceiling imposed by the domestic private sector financial assets, the JGB rates can rapidly rise and the Japanese government can face difficulty rolling over the existing debt. A simulation is conducted on future paths of household saving and fiscal situations to show that the ceiling would be breached in the next 10 years or so without a drastic fiscal consolidation. This paper also shows that the government debt can be kept under the ceiling with sufficiently large tax increases. The JGB yields can rise even before the ceiling is hit, if the expectation of such drastic fiscal consolidation disappears. This paper points out several possible triggers for such a change in expectation. However, downgrading of JGBs by credit rating agencies is not likely to be a trigger, since past downgrades have not produced any change in the JGB yield. If and when the JGB rates rapidly rise, the Japanese financial institutions that hold a large amount of JGBs will sustain losses and the economy will suffer from fiscal austerity, financial instability, and inflation.

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The National Bureau of Economic Research
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Takeo Hoshi
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Greening Taiwan’s cities

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A key player in creating Taiwan's semiconductor industry explains the role of technology in improving energy efficiency.

Chintay Shih, chair of Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry, has been a key player in creating Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, which now boasts more than $50 billion in annual revenue. As the former president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a research organization with more than 1,100 PhDs who generate patents, startup companies, and spinoffs, he is interested in how Taiwan can use its technical expertise to improve its own and world energy efficiency.

Dr. Shih has been an active participant in a research and information-sharing program on smart green cities launched in 2008 by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He sat down for an interview in June during a break in a SPRIE conference on Innovations for Smart Green City: What’s Working, What’s Not and What’s Next. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.

What do you see as the technologies that might improve Taiwan’s energy situation in the next 10 to 20 years?

Taiwan is a very small island, and we import all the energy. We do not have resources to explore, so it's more about how to manage effectively the use of energy, and we are also putting R&D into alternative energy. We already have strong industries in photovoltaic solar cells, and energy savings from LED lighting. We also spend some effort in wind power. Most likely in the future, these few areas will be more promising for Taiwan.

At this conference on smart, green cities, some speakers said that islands with short travel distances would be good places to use electric cars and trucks whose batteries can be swapped at recharging stations. Do you think that technology will be used in Taiwan?

Even though Taiwan is a big island, there are also small islands associated, and we can do something on a pilot scale there and also a possible pilot between short-distance cities.

Are you developing smart, green cities?

Yes. For example, in Taipei City in 2004 when President Ma Ying-jeou was the mayor, he initiated a wireless city program, trying to use the internet to save people from travel and to reduce congestion in the city. That’s one sector of the smart city. It has evolved because the technology has evolved. More cities in Taiwan have tried using more mobile services to enhance the capability of government to provide better services for business people, for the school kids, and shoppers, or tourism. There are quite a few things that now are happening in a few of Taiwan’s cities.

Can you separate what is a gain for the economy versus energy efficiency improvements?

It's difficult to evaluate what is directly an impact on the economy and jobs. Taiwan has a strong information technology industry. We make a lot of smart phones, computers, and intelligent devices that we export to the U.S. and other countries. So now, the government is beginning to think we should also explore the use of those devices here. Instead of just making it, we are putting some effort into how to use the technology to associate with our economy, with our communities, with our energy management. It's changed from just purely economic growth from exports. Now people are talking about citizen benefits.

How difficult is financing for these kinds of efforts?

It's not easy. Even though you have money available, investors want the best return. If the cost is too high, then the government has to have special incentives in order to get the money invested into that area. You need to have some special incentive or technology that drives the costs down.

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