Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.
The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.
Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:
Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?
How are higher education systems globalizing?
What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?
How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?
What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.
Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.
The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.
Kyoto International Community House Event Hall
2-1 Torii-cho, Awataguchi,
Sakyo-ku Kyoto, 606-8536
JAPAN
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.
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
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:
To learn about successes with respect to using international human rights mechanisms to mobilize domestic law reform
To evaluate the extent to which international human rights mechanisms have had an impact on justice on the ground
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
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.
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 :
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?
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?
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?
What are the lessons learned from the global gender equality movement for other human rights struggles?
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.
Indonesia’s rainforests are among the world’s most extensive and biologically diverse environments. They are also among the most threatened. An increasing population and growing economy have led to rapid development. Logging, mining, colonization, and subsistence activities have all contributed to deforestation.
But the recent and booming expansion of palm oil plantations could cause the most harm to the rainforests, and is generating considerable concern and debate among industry leaders, environmental campaigners and scholars.
Joanne Gaskell in Sumatra, Indonesia.
Joanne Gaskell has dedicated her graduate studies to better understanding the tradeoffs and demand side of this dilemma. The doctoral candidate and researcher for the Center on Food Security and the Environment recently defended her thesis before an audience of advisers, friends, and fellow students from Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER).
“You need to understand the economics and politics of palm oil demand if you want to understand the regional dynamics of oil production and associated environmental impacts,” Gaskell said. “From a conservation perspective, this is as important as understanding supply since demand patterns affect the incentives facing producers.”
In the past 25 years, palm oil has become the world’s leading source of vegetable oil. Indonesia is currently the world’s top palm oil producer. Since the 1980s total land area planted to palm oil has increased by over 2,100 percent growing to 4.6 million hectares – the equivalent of six Yosemite National Parks. Plantation growth has predominately occurred on deforested native rainforest with major implications for global carbon emissions and biodiversity.
And Gaskell projects the demand for palm oil for food will double by 2035, requiring more than 8 million new hectares for production. Plantation expansion has already begun in Kalimantan and Papua, and Indonesian companies are now looking beyond Indonesia for new investment opportunities. Just as palm oil production spread from Malaysia to Indonesia to escape rising land and labor costs, palm oil production is now spreading to parts of Africa, where the crop is native, and Latin America.
Demand for palm oil is quickly rising in Asian markets – notably India and China – where it is used for cooking and industrial processes. Indonesia has the highest level of per capita palm oil consumption, resulting not just from population and income growth, but also from government policies that promoted the use of palm oil instead of coconut cooking oil.
“Taste preferences and investment more than international prices have driven palm oil demand in Indonesia,” Gaskell said.
Biodiesel production and speculation have also contributed to the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations, but to a lesser extent. Gaskell said the success of palm-based biodiesel hinges on remaining cheaper than petroleum diesel and whether governments subsidize the industry, as the United States has done with corn and soybean farmers.
Interest in palm oil as a cleaner burning fuel is already waning in Europe and the United States. The short-term carbon costs of deforesting and preparing land, fertilizing and managing the crops, then processing and transporting them outweigh the benefits. This is particularly true when palm oil plantations are grown on peat soils that release potent methane gas when drained for growing palm oil.
Palm oil seedlings ready for planting. Photo credit: Wakx/flikr
Growing plantations on ‘degraded land’, land that had been previously converted for other purposes, such as logging, is a much more favorable option over forest expansion. In theory, there is an abundance of degraded areas that can be profitably converted into palm oil plantations. But there are hurdles: The areas are not necessarily contiguous, making it difficult to organize a plantation, and ownership rights in these areas are often contested.
Palm oil’s considerable productivity and profitability offers wealth and development where help is most needed. Half of Indonesia’s population lives on less than $2 a day. But along with the negative ecological impacts, palm oil production increases competition for land and could exacerbate inequalities between the rich and the poor.
Gaskell believes sustainable expansion strategies are possible, and says smaller mills and different processing technologies are needed so production is affordable in scaled-down, more distributed systems.
Palm oil plantation in Cigudeg, Indonesia. Photo credit: Achmad Rabin Taim/flickr
Her work is feeding an international conversation about palm oil production. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an international organization of producers, distributors, conservationists and other stakeholders, has promoted better ways of managing palm oil production and encouraging transparency and dialogue among corporate players, governments, and NGOs.
“We need to protect the most ecologically valuable landscapes from agricultural production and we need to make sure that, in areas where palm oil agriculture occurs, there are ecological management strategies in place such as riparian buffers, wildlife corridors, and treatment systems for mill effluent,” she said. “From a food security perspective, small palm oil producers, who might be giving up rice production or the production of other food staples, need strategies to minimize the economic risk associated with fluctuating global palm oil prices.”
Scarborough Shoal, a small lagoon in the South China Sea, remains the center of a months-long standoff between China and the Philippines. Donald K. Emmerson discusses Indonesia's role in leading ASEAN, after a week of silence, to announce a consensus that avoids the issue.
Hero Image
A tranquil view of the South China Sea. | Flickr / U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eric Crosby; http://bit.ly/SF7hAP
In 2008, the world passed an invisible but momentous milestone: for the first time, more than half of the human population lived in cities, with urbanization projected to intensify to more than 5 billion people by 2030. During the past handful of years, billions of dollars have been invested by governments and the private sector, from building whole new smart green cities of Songdo and Masdar to creating new services on mobile devices in New York City and Barcelona. What have we learned to date? What is on the horizon?
On June 26-27, the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) hosted a circle of experts from six countries to examine “Innovations for Smart Green City: What’s Working, What’s Not and What’s Next”. Professor William J. Perry - Chair, US Secretary of Energy Advisory Board and former US Secretary of Defense delivered the opening keynote on potential game changers on the energy landscape. Subsequent speakers from leading universities, research institutes and firms shared insights gleaned from their direct involvement in smart city projects in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Busan, Chengdu, Chicago, Chongqing, Dalian, Guangzhou, Masdar, New York City, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and more.
Leaders from university research labs shared pioneering deployment and analysis of information technologies in sensors, from autonomous car research at Stanford to the work at MIT’s Senseable City Lab on whole city intelligent traffic monitoring in Singapore. The Roundtable closed with a look at emerging technologies, new research partnerships, and the pipeline for relevant clean-tech startups. The 1 1/2 day event ended with a keynote by Rex Northen, executive director of CleanTech Open which has been involved with finding, fostering and funding around 600 start-ups with $660 million in funds over the past six years.
Next steps include concrete actions to support the call for presenters and discussants, representing experience from architecture to IT, to better integrate research and action across disciplines, organizational boundaries and national borders. With generous support from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and others, SPRIE will continue to collaborate and work in this area.
Roundtable Videos
William J. Perry, Chairman, US Secretary of Energy Advisory Board; Former US Secretary of Defense; Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus), and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University "Energy...The Good News"
Jung-Hoon Lee, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Information, Yonsei University; SPRIE Visiting Scholar, Stanford Graduate School of Business "Toward a Framework for Smart Cities: A Comparison of Seoul, San Francisco and Amsterdam"
Ko-Yang Wang, Chief Technology Officer, Institute for Information Industry (III) "Smart System Services in Smart Green Cities"
James Sweeney, Director, Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, Stanford University "Green" Cities and Energy Efficiency"
Sven Beiker, Executive Director, Center for Automotive Research (CARS), Stanford University "New Research on Autonomous Driving"
Kung Wang, Professor, China University of Technology "Cross-strait Partnering on Smart Energy Management and Innovation in the Post-Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement Era"
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is pleased to announce the 2013 class of undergraduate senior honors students.
Honors students will spend four quarters participating in research seminars to refine their proposed thesis topic, while working in consultation with a CDDRL faculty advisor to supervise their project. In September, the group will travel to Washington, D.C. for honors college where they will visit leading government and development organizations to witness policymaking in practice and consult with key decision-makers.
Please join CDDRL in congratulating the 2013 Senior Honors students and welcoming them to the Center.
Below are profiles of the nine honors students highlighting their academic interests, why they applied to CDDRL, and some fun facts.
Keith Calix
Keith Calix
Major: International Relations
Hometown: Astoria, NY
Thesis topic: What is the relationship between the coloured experience and youth involvement in gangsterism in Cape Town, South Africa?
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Schools are one of the principal generators, justifiers and vehicles of radicalized thoughts, actions and identities. The challenge in a post-apartheid South Africa continues to be whether and how the roles, rules, social character and functioning of schools can reform to challenge the retrograde aspects of such formation and stimulate new forms of acknowledgement, social practice and acceptance. Ultimately, I hope my research will provide insight about how education reform can be used as a tool to promote democracy and improve human rights conditions.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? In many ways my personal and academic experiences have led me from a more general interest in education development to a more specific interest in post-apartheid education reform as a form of retrospective justice, the institutional, social and economic barriers to education reform, and understanding education reform as a means of promoting democracy and respect for human rights. Pursuing this in the work in the CDDRL community alongside talented and experienced faculty and students from a wide array of disciplines, interests, and experiences will ultimately enhance my understanding of development and one day, I can hopefully use these insights and experiences as a practitioner.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Human rights lawyer/fieldwork in education development.
What are your summer research plans: During the summer I will be working on my thesis in Cape Town, South Africa.
Fun fact about yourself: I’ve recently appeared on Italian television for an interview, bungee jumped from the world’s highest commercial bridge, and rode an ostrich.
Vincent Chen
Vincent Chen
Major: Earth Systems & Economics
Hometown: Taipei, Taiwan
Thesis topic: How democratic and autocratic systems affect the formation and efficacy of their environmental policies.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? As the importance of climate and energy issues continue to rise in the global political agenda, both developed and developing nations are in dire need to identify individually tailored policy routes for sustainable development. With a wide array of political systems across countries, my research aims to shed light on the difference of environmental policy creation between democratic and autocratic governments and hopefully provide real world applications for policy makers in charting the most appropriate development route. In particular, I hope to provide insights for developing democracies to leapfrog the environmental impacts associated with democratization and avoid mistakes mature democracies have committed in the past.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? My studies in environmental science ultimately manifested the important role social sciences play in solving our environmental challenges. In the center of this challenge lies the tricky balance between development and environmental stewardship. The CDDRL program serves as a great opportunity for me to explore the complex relationship between these concepts.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Although I am interested in opportunities that span public, private and social sectors, I will definitely be working on issues pertaining to our environment.
What are your summer research plans: I will be spending my summer in Washington, DC with the climate and energy team of the United Nations Foundation, as well as conducting interviews for my research back home in Taiwan.
Fun fact about yourself: Spent five weeks on a uninhabited island the size of four square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during my sophomore summer.
Holly Fetter
Holly Fetter
Major: Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (B.A.), Sociology (M.A.)
Hometown: Dallas, TX
Thesis topic: The influence of U.S. funding on the development of China's civil society
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Organizations and individuals from the U.S. are eager to support democracy, development, and the rule of law in foreign countries. Through my research on the U.S. presence in China, I hope to understand how we can do this work more ethically and effectively. How can we avoid imposing our values and priorities onto a nation's bourgeoning civil society? How can we promote indigenous modes of fundraising and management training, thus avoiding any potential expressions of neo-imperialism?
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I wanted a challenge, and I knew that writing an honors thesis in a foreign discipline would be a rewarding intellectual experience. The apparent support from faculty as well as the connections to experts on my topic were also enticing. And I'm looking forward to the big D.C. trip.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to practice community lawyering in the U.S.
What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Beijing, China, interviewing folks at NGOs and grant-giving organizations, reading lots of books and articles, and eating good food.
Fun fact about yourself: I like to write and cause a ruckus, so I started a blog for Stanford activists called STATIC. You should check it out!
Imani Franklin
Imani Franklin
Major: International Relations
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
Thesis topic: How Western beauty standards impact the preference for lighter skin in the developing world, with case-studies of India, Nigeria, and Thailand
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? This question matters for global development, in part, because it is an issue of public health. Researchers have long associated high rates of eating disorders and other mental health issues among American women with their continuous exposure to Western media’s narrow image of beauty. Given the unprecedented globalization of this image of beauty throughout much of the developing world, are non-Western women experiencing similar psychological health problems? From findings on skin bleaching cream in Tanzania to the rise of bulimia in Fiji in the late 1990s, a growing body of research attributes harmful body-altering practices to increased exposure to American consumerist media. I want to assess whether this causal link stands under empirical scrutiny, and whether this relationship shifts in different regional contexts of the world.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I am drawn to CDDRL’s honors program because of the intimate scholarly community of peers and mentors it provides. I believe this program will empower me to think more critically and scientifically about how one social issue impacts another.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: In the future, I hope to work with international policy to improve human rights protections in the Middle East and North Africa.
What are your summer research plans: I am currently studying Arabic in Jordan and will conduct primary research for my honors thesis in Amman.
Fun fact about yourself: In my free time, I enjoy learning the dance moves from High School Musical movies and attempting to make peach cobbler from scratch.
Mariah Halperin
Mariah Halperin
Major: History
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Thesis topic: The development of democracy in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP)
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Turkey has taken a unique path to democracy, beginning with Ataturk, yet many scholars worldwide have presented Turkey as a model for the rest of the Islamic world. The AKP, the party in power for the last decade, has in many ways changed the path Turkey had been on previously. With these changes and the recent uprisings in the Middle East, my thesis will hopefully speak to the viability of other countries following Turkey's example.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? The CDDRL undergraduate honors program is an amazing opportunity to deepen my studies of a topic that interests me so much. Working with a small group of dedicated, like-minded students will be a great way get feedback to develop and strengthen my thesis. Additionally, the outstanding faculty (and staff!) of the CDDRL are so supportive and eager to help students pursue their interests in any way they can.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Either diplomacy or journalism in Turkey and the Middle East.
What are your summer research plans: I will be in Turkey for over two months this summer, conducting interviews with a wide range of people who can lend their perspective on my topic.
Fun fact about yourself: I am an extreme San Francisco Giants baseball fan.
Thomas Alan Hendee
Thomas Alan Hendee
Major: Human Biology
Hometown: Sao Paulo, Brazil / Grand Rapids, Michigan
Thesis topic: I will be looking at the social determinants of health in Brazilian informal settlements and how they affect child health.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? By 2050, seventy-percent of the world will be living in cities, and the World Bank estimates that 32.7% of urban dwellers in developing regions will be living in slums. These informal urban settlements pose a significant problem for economic development, governance, and public health.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? This program will allow me to spend my last year engrossed in a topic of interest, and put my Brazilian heritage and Portuguese language skills to academic use by adding to the dialogue of a field that I hope to enter. I look forward to being surrounded by a group of peers from whom I can learn, and at the same time have the chance to be mentored by some of Stanford’s most renowned faculty.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I am still debating if medical school is a part of my future; however, I am confident that I will be involved with some kind of internationally focused health work.
What are your summer research plans: I will be doing a tremendous amount of reading in order to get a better understanding of what has already been said; furthermore, I plan to perform as many Skype interviews as possible with involved individuals in Brazil.
Fun fact about yourself: In the summer of 2011, I spent one-week on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) participating in an ecotourism consulting job.
Lina Hidalgo
Lina Hidalgo
Major: Political Science
Hometown: Bogotá, Colombia
Thesis topic: What allowed citizen resistance to turn against the state in Egypt in 2011, but not in China.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? I hope that my project will offer some hints as to why citizens faced with economic and social grievances fail to challenge - through their protests - the state structure that perpetrates those grievances. This can provide a lens through which to study other developing societies that fail to rise against oppression.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I have been able to see development challenges firsthand growing up and am honored to have the opportunity to learn from experts in the Center about the ideas and approaches taken to tackle these issues.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I hope to learn more about development challenges globally by working in the Middle East or Asia, and eventually help implement better development policy worldwide through an international organizations, government work, or activism.
What are your summer research plans: I will be in China interviewing factory workers about their perceptions of inequality and speak with scholars about the broader issues I plan to address in my thesis. I will then travel to Egypt to interview political party leaders about how they saw long-standing grievances translated into the political sphere.
Fun fact about yourself: I've broken my two front teeth.
Kabir Sawhney
Kabir Sawhney
Major: Management Science and Engineering
Hometown: Morristown, NJ
Thesis topic: The effect of regime type on a country’s propensity to default on its sovereign debt obligations.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? The link between a country’s regime type and its sovereign debt is crucial to further understanding the differences in the choices democracies and autocracies make in regards to their sovereign debt. Debt itself is important, because sovereign debt crises can have many negative consequences, including setting economic development back many years in some countries.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I took Professor Diamond and Professor Stoner-Weiss’ class in my sophomore year, and I really loved the course content and wanted to engage more with these topics. For my honors thesis, I really wanted to have an interdisciplinary experience, combining my interests in democracy and development with my academic focus in finance and financial markets, and the CDDRL program was a great place to do that.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I’d like to work in financial markets; my long-term career goal is to one day run my own hedge fund with a mix of investment strategies.
What are your summer research plans: Since my thesis doesn’t require any field work, I’ll be working on refining my quantitative analysis and gathering relevant data from databases and other sources, to be able to carry out my analysis in earnest starting in fall quarter.
Fun fact about yourself: Cooking is one of my favorite hobbies! I like making all sorts of different kinds of foods, but my favorites have to be Thai, Indian and Chinese.
Anna Schickele
Anna Schickele
Major: Public Policy and Economics
Hometown: Davis, CA
Thesis topic: Determinants of farmer participation in agricultural development projects in rural Peru.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? If non-governmental organizations are to implement successful development projects, they must figure out how to effectively engage would-be participants.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I'm attracted to the academic community. Though writing a thesis is a solitary activity, I hope the other students and I will support each other and form friendships as we go through the process together.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to find a way to perfect my Spanish, improve my French, and maybe learn Arabic.
What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Peru at the end of August. If all goes well, I plan to make a second trip in December.
Fun fact about yourself: I've eaten alpaca, camel, guinea pig, and snails.
Population aging in Asian societies is accompanied by changes in intergenerational living arrangements, which can have substantial health and economic implications for the elderly parents and their adult children. Dr. Young Kyung Do will present some of his recent works related to elderly living arrangements in South Korea. These works include the effect of coresidence with an adult child on depressive symptoms among older widowed women; the relationship between adult children's coresidence with parents and their labor force participation; and interrelations between expectations about bequests and informal care with special emphasis on the role of intergenerational coresidence. In these studies, Dr. Do attempted to account for a common methodological issue: living arrangements are not always randomly assigned but may be jointly decided with the outcome of interest taken into account by either the elderly parents or their adult children. While this seminar will focus on the South Korean context, the significance and implications apply to many other Asian societies undergoing population aging and marked transitions in elderly living arrangements.
Dr. Young Kyung Do is an assistant professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), Program in Health Services and Systems Research. His research interests include the economic and health system impact of population aging and noncommunicable disease; interactions between self-care, informal care, and formal care interfaces; and health, education, and labor market outcomes over the life course. He received his MD (1997) and master of public health (2003) degrees from Seoul National University, subsequently completing his PhD in Health Policy and Management (2008) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the inaugural Asia Health Policy postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center,(2008−9).
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Young Kyung Do
Assistant Professor
Speaker
the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School Singapore (Duke-NUS)
Eleven talented Stanford seniors have completed the Undergraduate Senior Honors Program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) to graduate with honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law. Completing their theses on issues of global importance ranging from the impact of technology on government openness to the effectiveness of democratic governance projects, CDDRL honors students have contributed original research and analysis to policy-relevant topics. They will graduate from Stanford University on June 17.
Over the course of the year-long program, students worked in consultation with CDDRL affiliated faculty members and attended honors research workshops to develop their thesis project. Many traveled abroad to collect data, conduct interviews, and to spend time in the country they were researching. Collectively, their topics documented some of the most pressing issues impacting democracy today in China, Sudan, Greece, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Latin America, and beyond.
Image
In recognition of their exemplary and original senior theses, Mitul Bhat and John Ryan Mosbacher received the CDDRL Department Best Thesis Award for their research exploring welfare programs in Latin America and the developing oil industry in Uganda, respectively. Otis Reid received the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize and the Firestone Medal for Excellence, the top prizes for undergraduate social science research, for his thesis on the impact of concentrated ownership on the value of publically traded firms on the Ghana Stock Exchange.
After graduation, several honors students will leave Stanford to pursue careers at McKinsey & Company consulting group, serve as war crime monitors in Cambodia, work at a brand and marketing consultancy in San Francisco, conduct data analysis at a Palo Alto-based technology firm, work at a Boston-based international development finance startup using targeted investment for poverty alleviation, and conduct research in the political science field. The rest will be pursuing advanced and co-terminal degrees at Columbia Journalism School, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University.
A list of the 2012 graduating class of CDDRL Undergraduate Honors students, their theses advisors, and a link to their theses can be found here:
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law congratulates Otis Reid on being awarded the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize for his original and rigorous research on the impact of concentrated ownership on the value of publically traded firms on the Ghana Stock Exchange. Reid is a member of the 2012 CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program and wrote his thesis entitled, “Monitoring, Expropriating, and Interfering: Concentrated Ownership, Government Holdings, and Firm Value on the Ghana Stock Exchange,” under the consultation of Professor Avner Greif.
Four undergraduate Stanford students are awarded the Kennedy Prize each year for their outstanding honors theses in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and the applied sciences. Reid was also recognized with the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research awarded to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering. Reid will receive these awards in a medals ceremony on Saturday, June 16.
Reid's thesis combined field research and advanced econometric analysis to conclude that concentrated ownership by the government and private parties on the Ghana stock exchange has a negative impact on the value of firms in Ghana. These findings have important consequences for the regulation of newly established stock exchanges, and ultimately for Africa's economic development. Very little research has been conducted on this topic, and Reid's thesis makes a valuable contribution to this field of study with practical policy implications for developing economies.
"Otis Reid has produced a highly original work of scholarship—worthy of publication in an academic journal—that has exhibited astute knowledge of the literature and the challenges of firm development on the ground, shrewd formulation of a research design, impressive technical ability, and yet wise and important policy conclusions as well," said CDDRL Director Larry Diamond. "It is very rare to find an undergraduate honors thesis that is able to combine all four of these things."
Reid, a public policy and economics major, held prominent leadership roles in student organizations on campus, namely Stanford in Government and the Stanford Association for International Development, as well as serving as a resident assistant at Crothers dormitory. In recognition of his commitment to public service and enriching student life through these leadership positions, he was honored with the The Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education.
After graduation, Reid will travel through Southeast Asia for five weeks before starting a position at McKinsey & Company consulting group in Chicago where he will be working on a combination of business and social sector problems.
The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend honors college in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law.
Leaders from university research labs shared pioneering deployment and analysis of information technologies in sensors, from autonomous car research at Stanford to the work at MIT’s Senseable City Lab on whole city intelligent traffic monitoring in Singapore. The Roundtable closed with a look at emerging technologies, new research partnerships, and the pipeline for relevant clean-tech startups. The 1 1/2 day event ended with a keynote by Rex Northen, executive director of CleanTech Open which has been involved with finding, fostering and funding around 600 start-ups with $660 million in funds over the past six years.
Keith Calix
Vincent Chen
Holly Fetter
Imani Franklin
Mariah Halperin
Thomas Alan Hendee
Lina Hidalgo
Kabir Sawhney
Anna Schickele
