Japan Brown Bag seminar.
Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies.
Philippines Conference Room
Seth Faison spent 12 years living in and writing about China. He went to China as a 25-year-old looking for adventure. He spent two years studying Chinese in Xian, attaining fluency. He became a reporter in Hong Kong, and then a correspondent in Beijing, where he covered the events at Tiananmen in 1989. He joined the New York Times in 1991, covering New York City. He opened the newspapers bureau in Shanghai in 1995 and wrote about social and economic change, earning a reputation as a writer with a knack for capturing the moods and flavors of China.
China Brown Bag seminar
Co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies
Philippines Conference Room
C. Kenneth Quinones has been involved with Northeast Asia since 1962 as a soldier, scholar and diplomat. He has lived and worked in South and North Korea; ten years in the South and nearly one year in the North, and in Japan for three years. As a U.S. dip-lomat, he witnessed South Koreas struggle to democratize during the 1980s and then, during the 1990s, played a role in the opening of North Korea to the outside world. After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1997, he worked with U.S. humanitarian organizations to arrange educational and agricultural exchanges between the United States and North Korea.
Dr. Quinones is the director of Korean Peninsula Programs at the recently organized International Action (successor to International Center), a non-profit Washington, D.C. research institute. He recently organized a new forum on the internet, the International Forum for Innovative Northeast Strategy, to encourage international dialogue about innovative strategies to promote a durable peace in Northeast Asia.
A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP by 5:00 p.m., Monday, November 1 to Debbie Warren at dawarren@stanford.edu or at 650-723-8387.
Philippines Conference Room
Are federal fiscal deficits accelerating deindustrialisation in the United States? For four decades, employment in U.S. manufacturing as a share of the labour force has fallen further and faster than in other industrial countries. In the mid-1960s, manufacturing output was 27 per cent of gross national product and manufacturing's share of employment was 24 percent. By 2003, these numbers had fallen to about 13.8 percent and 10.5 percent respectively. Employment in manufacturing remains weak, with an absolute decline of 18,000 jobs in September shown in the Labor Department's payroll survey.
At the same time, the orgy of tax-cutting, with big revenue losses, continues unabated. On October 6, House and Senate negotiators approved an expansive tax bill that showers businesses and farmers with about $145bn in rate cuts and new loopholes -- on top of what were already unprecedented fiscal deficits. These are principally financed by foreign central banks, which hold more than half the outstanding stock of US Treasury bonds. Moreover, meagre saving by American households is forcing US companies also to borrow heavily abroad.
The upshot is a current account deficit of more than $600 billion a year. America's cumulative net foreign indebtedness is about 30 percent of gross domestic product and rising fast. How will this affect manufacturing? The transfer of foreign savings to the US is embodied more in goods than in services. Outsourcing to India aside, most services are not so easily traded internationally. Thus when U.S. spending rises above output (income), the net absorption of foreign goods -- largely raw materials and manufactures -- increases. True, in this year and last the high price of oil has also boosted the current account deficit. However, since the early 1980s, the trade deficit in manufactures alone has been about as big as the current account deficit -- that is, as big as America's saving shortfall (for more detail, see http://siepr.stanford.edu).
If U.S. households' and companies' spending on manufactures is more or less independent of whether the goods are produced at home or abroad, domestic production shrinks by the amount of the trade deficit in manufactures. The consequent job loss depends on labor productivity in manufacturing, which rises strongly through time. If the trade deficit in manufactures is added back to domestic production to get "adjusted manufactured output", and labor productivity (output per person) in manufacturing stays constant, we get projected manufacturing employment. In 2003, actual manufacturing employment was just 10.5 percent of the US labor force, but it would have been 13.9 percent without a trade deficit in manufactures: the difference is 4.7m lost jobs.
In the 1980s, employment in manufacturing began to shrink substantially because of the then large current account deficit attributed to the then large fiscal deficit: Ronald Reagan's infamous twin deficits. With fiscal consolidation under Bill Clinton, the savings gap narrowed but was not closed because personal saving weakened. Now under George W. Bush, the fiscal deficit has exploded while private saving is still weak. The result is heavy borrowing from foreigners and all-time highs in the current account deficit. The main component remains the trade deficit in manufactures, intensifying the shrinkage in manufacturing jobs.
Is there cause for concern? Note that I do not suggest that the trend in overall employment has decreased, but only that its composition has tilted away from tradable goods -- largely manufactures. In the long run, growth in service employment will largely offset the decline in manufacturing. However, the rate of technical change in manufacturing is higher than in other sectors. It is hard to imagine the US sustaining its technological leadership with no manufacturing sector at all.
More uncomfortably, more Congressmen, pundits and voters feel justified in claiming that foreigners use unfair trade practices to steal U.S. jobs, particularly in manufacturing, and hence in urging protectionism. The irony is that, if imports were somehow greatly reduced, this would prevent the transfer of foreign saving to the United States and lead to a credit crunch, with a possibly even greater loss of US jobs.
The answer is not tariffs, exchange rate changes or subsidies to manufacturing that further increase the fiscal deficit. The proper way of reducing protectionist pressure and relieving anxiety about U.S. manufacturing is for the government to consolidate its finances and move deliberately towards running surpluses -- in short, to eliminate the U.S. economy's saving deficiency.
Born in Chennai, Aruna was an IAS officer at Delhi until 1974. She resigned from the IAS to join the Social Work and Research Center in Rajasthan, set up by her husband Sanjit Bunker Roy.
Aruna Roy is a leader in the movement for "Right to Information". Aruna showed the poor rural people of drought-ridden Rajasthan how information could give them power to stop corrupt officials from siphoning off funds allocated to dig wells and how to demand the wages that were due to them.
In 1990, Ms. Roy set up the "Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana". The MKSS built a grassroots movement that triggered a nationwide demand for the public's right to scrutinize official records. The "Right to Information Bill", was adopted by nine states including Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, and the "Freedom of Information Act 2002" was adopted by the Parliament.
In 2000 Aruna Roy was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership and International Understanding. She put the award money into a trust to support the process of democratic struggles.
Ms. Roy's talk is co-sponsored with the Association for India's Development, PrajaNet, and Sanskriti. For more information, please contact Ramani at 408-833-8494.
Building 320 (Geology Corner), Room 105. 450 Serra Mall, Stanford University Campus
Dr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa received his MD degree in 1962 from the University of Tokyo Faculty of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Kurokawa serves as president of both the Science Council of Japan and the Pacific Science Association. He is also adjunct professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo and of the Institute of Medical Sciences of Tokai University. He is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo and serves as a member of the Committee for Science and Technology Policy of the Cabinet Office and several committees for Prime Minister Koizumi's office.
Co-sponsored with the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research.
Philippines Conference Room
I am a child of the Cold War. As such, my thinking for decades was conditioned by the great issue of that era: How to maintain freedom in the face of our perceptions of Soviet ambitions for world domination?
For the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States strategy for achieving this objective was containment backed up with a powerful nuclear deterrence. But as the nuclear arms race heated up, it became increasingly clear that this strategy risked precipitating a nuclear holocaust. Thus, by the late sixties, nuclear arms control had become the overriding security issue - certainly it dominated my thinking on security during that era.
But with the ending of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust receded and arms control, as we had practiced it during that era, was no longer the dominant security issue. The most serious threat to the United States became nuclear weapons in the hands of failed states or terrorists - used not in a standard military operation, but in extortive or apocalyptic ways. Therefore, in the present era, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons replaces arms control as the organizing principle for our security. Certainly it has dominated my thinking on security for the last decade.
Oksenberg Conference Room
With our partners at the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad), PESD hosted a conference on the 23rd and 24th of Sept. in New Dehli focused on electricity market reforms in India and its effects on technologies and the environment.
Habitat Center
Lodhi Road
New Dehli, INDIA
Encina Hall E313
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Dr. Chi Zhang joined PESD in April 2002. He heads up the Program's studies of the Chinese electricity industry reforms. Dr. Zhang has been with IIS since 1998. He was a member of the China Energy and Global Environment Project under CISAC before joining PESD. Previously, he taught at Monterey Institute of International Studies, and was research associate with the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. and fellow with Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, China.
Chi Zhang received his Ph.D. in economics from the Johns Hopkins University and MA in international economics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He also attended Beijing Normal University.
School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
UC San Diego
San Diego, CA
On October 13, 2004 the Korean Studies Program at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region at the Center for International Security and Cooperation hosted a delegation from the Institute of Disarmament and Peace, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The discussion at today's workshop was wide-ranging, with participants exchanging views on the current state of relations in Northeast Asia. This gathering is part of ongoing efforts in both countries to enhance mutual understanding and to reduce tensions in the region.
The U.S. participants were, in alphabetical order, Ambassador Michael Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, APARC; Ellsworth Culver, founder and senior vice president, Mercy Corps; John W. Lewis, director, Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region; Daniel Okimoto, director emeritus, APARC; Gi-Wook Shin, director, Korean Studies Program at APARC; Susan Shirk, professor, University of California, San Diego; and Philip Yun, Pantech Fellow in Korean Studies, APARC. The guests from North Korea were Kim Myong Gil, Choe Kang Il, Jong Tong Hak, and Ri Hak Chol, all from the Institute of Disarmament and Peace.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall