Stanford University

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Taiwan's Future Development Strategy

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On October 11 and 12th, the Democracy in Taiwan Project at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in cooperation with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will hold its 8th annual conference, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by at least nine Pacific Rim countries that has the potential to re-shape economic relations in the region for the coming decades. This conference will bring together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. to examine the evolution, geopolitics and future of the TPP, and also to consider how Taiwan is responding to the challenge of freer trade and what its strategy for deepening its trade relations and maintaining its economic development should be.

 

Among the issues to be addressed are:

  • How the economic and trading environment of East Asia is evolving, and what Taiwan’s future place will be in that regional environment.
  • The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a potentially far-reaching new economic and strategic framework for the region, including the origins and evolution of the TPP, US participation and China’s response, and the implications for the balance of power in East Asia.
  • Taiwan’s response to the challenge of freer trade to date, including the impact on US-Taiwan relations and domestic constituencies for free trade in Taiwan.
  • The perspectives of other key countries in the region toward the TPP, including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China.

This event is co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

 

Conference Resources

 

Agenda

Speaker Bios

Presentations

Conference Papers

Conference Report (full report, abridged report)

 

 

Conferences
CDDRL Conferences

Liberation technology seminar series debuts on Sept 26

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Vivek Srinivasan
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Seminar series

The Liberation Technology Seminar Series is set to continue this fall with a remarkable set of speakers. The series debuts on Thursday, September 26, 2013 and will continue until December 5, 2013. The last season focused on domestic issues given the debates around SOPA and the use of technology in the U.S. Presidential elections. This emphasis this fall will be tilted towards international initiatives. 

The series will begin with Canada’s effort at direct diplomacy with people abroad using technology and move on to crowd-souring of a law by the Parliament of Finland. Talks will also cover the political impact of the internet in Malaysia, a review of the world’s most ambitious open government project by a state government in India, and an ambitious Stanford project to bring design thinking to accountability projects internationally. On the domestic front, we have timely presentation on mass surveillance in the United States and a discussion on Code for America’s initiatives to build civic engagement by coders. Finally, we are set to have a look at the history of information technology in social initiatives by our own Terry Winograd who retired from the Department of Computer Science last year. 

Students can take this as a one credit course by attending at least seven out of the ten seminars. The course is listed as CS 546 / POLISCI 337S.

Where: Wallenberg Auditorium [Map]

When: Every Thursday 4.30 – 6 pm from Sept 26 – Dec 5 (except Nov 28)

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The Unintended Consequences of Internet Diffusion: Evidence from Malaysia

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Abstract:
Can the introduction of the Internet undermine incumbent power in a semi-authoritarian regime? I examine this question using evidence from Malaysia, where the incumbent coalition lost its 40-year monopoly on power in 2008. I develop a novel methodology for measuring Internet penetration, matching IP addresses with physical locations, and apply it to the 2004 to 2008 period in Malaysia. Using distance to the backbone to instrument for endogenous Internet penetration, I find that areas with higher Internet penetration experience higher voter turnout and higher candidate turnover, with the Internet accounting for one-third of the 11% swing against the incumbent party in 2008. The results suggest that, in the absence of the Internet, the opposition would not have achieved its historic upset in the 2008 elections.
 

Luke Miner recently completed his PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Liberation Technology Program. He is currently working as a data scientist in the techology sector.

Miner’s research interests are political economy and development economics. In particular, he aims to quantitatively assess the effect of the Internet and new media on political accountability, development, and election outcomes. His past research finds a strong effect of Internet diffusion on results of Malaysia's 2008 elections, where it contributed to the ruling coalition's largest electoral setback in thirty years. His current research looks at the effect of the Internet on the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, in particular as a means of promoting campaign contributions.

Wallenberg Theater

Luke Miner Data Scientist Speaker
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Margaret Triyana

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall C331
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-5656 (650) 723-6530
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2013-2014 Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow
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Margaret (Maggie) Triyana’s main research interests are inequality and human capital investments in developing countries. In particular, she is interested in the effects social policy changes on children’s health outcomes. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, she will analyze the effects of rural-urban migration in Indonesia and China, as well as the impact of health insurance expansion in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Triyana received a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 2013.

 

Working Papers

“Do Health Care Providers Respond to Demand-Side Incentives? Evidence from Indonesia“

“The Effects of Community and Household Interventions on Birth Outcomes: Evidence from Indonesia”

“The Longer Term Effects of the ‘Midwife in the Village’ Program in Indonesia”

“The Sources of Wage Growth in a Developing Country” (with Ioana Marinescu)

SEAF welcomes applications for the 2014 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia.

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The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Stanford University (Stanford) are pleased to announce that applications are welcome between now and 1 November 2013 for the 2014 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Southeast Asia. Interested individuals with backgrounds or positions in the social sciences or humanities are encouraged to apply. Candidates may be of any nationality or seniority.

Please visit the link below: 

http://seaf.stanford.edu/fellowships/nus_stanford/

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View of the Inner Quad looking through the east portal toward Green Library Bing Wing, February 2012. | Stanford News Service/Linda A. Cicero
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Jason Reinhardt

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Jason C. Reinhardt is a national security systems analyst, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Risk Analysis from Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering Engineering Risk Research Group, focusing on nuclear weapons arsenal management. Specifically, he is developing quantitative risk models to examine the trade-offs faced by nuclear armed nations in the process of disarmament. He is also pursuing research aimed at modeling and quantifying the catastrophic risks posed by near earth asteroid encounters. Other research interests include game theoretic applications to risk analysis and management, as well as adversary models. While at CISAC, he hopes to engage subject matter and policy experts to strengthen his modeling and analysis of nuclear weapon arsenal risk.

Prior to beginning his current studies, Jason managed a group of experts at Sandia National Laboratories that focused on technical studies to guide policy and decision makers across government. He joined Sandia National Laboratories in August of 2002, and has worked on a diverse set of projects both as an engineer and as an analyst, including the development of instrumentation for in-situ atmospheric measurement, embedded systems design, borders security analyses, and nuclear counter-terrorism strategy development.

He has worked extensively with the Department of Homeland Security on nuclear matters, and has also worked with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and within the national laboratory enterprise on a diverse array of national security projects. He has participated in the planning and hosting of international conferences and engagements, briefed congressional representatives, and served as a subject-matter expert on the topics of border security and nuclear and radiological defense.

Jason holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Purdue School of Electrical Engineering at Indianapolis, and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Integrating technology and context into bioethics training for health delivery system researchers in Southeast Asia

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Stanford pediatrician Jason Wang and researcher Mildred Cho have received $1,087,920 to launch a center in Taiwan and Stanford dedicated to training medical professionals about ethics. Wang -- an associate professor of pediatrics and a CHP/PCOR affiliate, and Cho -- a professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine’s Center for Biomedical Ethics -- received one of five of this year’s bioethics grants from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health. 

The Fogarty grant will help support the launch of the Centers of Excellence in Research Ethics Training in the Asia Collaborative for Medical Education (ACME), a consortium of leading medical schools and healthcare institutions, with the Steering Committee chaired by Dr. Harvey Fineberg, President of the U.S. Institute of Medicine. Wang and his colleagues have proposed innovative ways to train practitioners in Southeast Asia, where ethical behavior in healthcare-related research is a pressing concern but training is scarce. 

In addition to the Taiwan facility, which will be based jointly at the Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center and the National Yang Ming University, the web-based curricular development center will be based at the Stanford’s Center for Health Policy at the Freeman SpogIi Institute for International Studies, and the School of Medicine. The centers will be hubs for training, research, and innovation for Asia health and research professionals.

The training curriculum will incorporate the use of the IDEO design method, a human-centered, design-based approach that uncovers "latent needs, behaviors and desires,” to help scholars develop culturally appropriate lessons. Partnership models include pairing trainees with core faculty members from Stanford, Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center, and National Yang Ming University for mentorship on research ethics, which will then be developed into a training curriculum appropriate for their home institutions.  

Scholars from different countries will also be invited to participate in a Research Ethics Improvement Network. The model includes face-to-face learning sessions (story boards, role plays, simulations, didactics), a web-based support component (didactics materials, cases discussions, video/audio teleconferences for problem solving,) and the application of traditional quality improvement to curricular improvement. 

The collaborative and ongoing improvement training model, inspired by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Quality Collaboratives, also has a dissemination component where scholars will be encouraged to build networks and to engage policy makers and community leaders to publicize the importance of research ethics in their academic and local communities.

Wang says that “testing and dissemination of the project’s innovative training mechanisms is paramount because of the relevance to other parts of the world facing similar demands.”

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Jason Wang
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Jeremy Menchik Wins Award for Dissertation

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Jeremy Menchik
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Annually since 1995, the American Political Science Association has given an Aaron Wildavsky award to the "best" recent PhD dissertation on the subject of religion and politics.  Normally a single dissertation is selected.  In 2013, for the first time, a second dissertation was recognized with an Honorable Mention.  Its author is Jeremy Menchik, an assistant professor in international relations at Boston University.  Its title is "Tolerance Without Liberalism: Islamic Institutions and Political Violence in Twentieth Century Indonesia." 

In 2011 Prof. Menchik was chosen to be a Shorenstein post-doctoral fellow at APARC.  During his stay at Stanford in 2011-12 he revised his thesis for publication, worked on a new project on religio-political identity in Indonesia as revealed by election campaign symbols, and presented findings from his research and writing at a seminar hosted by SEAF.  In 2012-13 he was a research associate at the American University of Beirut.  In 2013 he began his tenure-track position at Boston University.  His advanced degrees in political science are from the University of Wisconsin- (PhD, MA) and the University of Michigan.

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New Book on "Uncivil Society in Thailand" by Former Shorenstein / Asia Foundation Fellow and SEAF Speaker Pof. Pawakapan

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The Southeast Asia Forum congratulates Puangthong Pawakapan, a professor of international relations and Southeast Asian studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and an "alumni" of SEAF.  In 2010-11, as a Shorenstein / Asia Foundation research fellow at APARC, she worked on a book manuscript on the Preah Vihear Temple controversy involving Thailand and Cambodia.  Her SEAF lecture on the subject was well received.  The manuscript has been published as State and Uncivil Society in Thailand at the Temple of Preah Vihear (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013).  For more on Prof. Pawakapan, see <http://aparc.stanford.edu/people/Puangthong_Pawakapan>.

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Visiting Scholar's Forthcoming Book on Malaysia

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Dominik Müller
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Dr. Dominik Mueller, hosted by SEAF in 2013, is back in the Department of Anthropology at Goethe University in Frankurt.  His revised dissertation will be published in January 2014 as Islam, Politics and Youth in Malaysia: The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS.  A recent article by him on this topic is linked on this site under "Publications."

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