Professor Walter P. Falcon, Deputy Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), former director of FSI, and Helen Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Emeritus has been recognized with an honorary degree from McGill University for his research aimed at reducing world hunger and enhancing global food security.

Professor Falcon's expertise is in food policy, commodity markets, trade policies, and regional development. Professor Falcon's current research focuses on agricultural decision-making in Indonesia and Mexico, biotechnology, climate change, and biofuels.

From 1972 to 1991, Professor Falcon served as professor of economics and director of Stanford University's Food Research Institute, after which he directed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies until 1998. From 1998 to 2007 he co-directed the Center for Environmental Science and Policy. At Stanford he has also served as senior associate dean for the social sciences, a member of the academic senate, and twice a member of the University's Advisory Board.

Professor Falcon has also consulted with numerous international organizations, been a trustee of Winrock International, and was chairman of the board of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). From 1978 to 1980, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger and in 1990 was named a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association. From 1996-2001 he served as chairman of the board of the International Corn and Wheat Institute (CIMMYT), and from 2001-07 served on the board of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Falcon was cited as the outstanding 1958 graduate of Iowa State University in 1989 and in 1992 was awarded the prestigious Bintang Jasa Utama medal of merit by the government of Indonesia for twenty-five years of assistance to that country's development effort.

The Director of the Asia Health Policy Program, Karen Eggleston, served as guest editor of the International Journal of Healthcare Finance and Economics for the June 2009 issue. The eight papers of that issue evaluate different provider payment methods in comparative international perspective, with authors from Hungary, China, Thailand, the US, Switzerland, and Canada. These contributions illustrate how the array of incentives facing providers shapes their interpersonal, clinical, administrative, and investment decisions in ways that profoundly impact the performance of health care systems.

The collection leads off with a study by János Kornai, one of the most prominent scholars of socialism and post-socialist transition, and the originator of the concept of the soft budget constraint. Kornai’s paper examines the political economy of why soft budget constraints appear to be especially prevalent among health care providers, compared to other sectors of the economy.

Two other papers in the issue take up the challenge of empirically identifying the extent of soft budget constraints among hospitals and their impact on safety net services, quality of care, and efficiency, in the United States (Shen and Eggleston) and – even more preliminarily – in China (Eggleston and colleagues, AHPP working paper #8).

The impact of adopting National Health Insurance (NHI) and policies separating prescribing from dispensing are the subject of Kang-Hung Chang’s article entitled “The healer or the druggist: Effects of two health care policies in Taiwan on elderly patients’ choice between physician and pharmacist services” (AHPP working paper #5).

In “Does your health care depend on how your insurer pays providers? Variation in utilization and outcomes in Thailand” (AHPP working paper #4), Sanita Hirunrassamee of Chulalongkorn University and Sauwakon Ratanawijitrasin of Mahidol University study the impact of multiple provider payment methods in Thailand, providing striking evidence consistent with standard predictions of how payment incentives shape provider behavior. For example, patients whose insurers paid on a capitated or case basis (the 30 Baht and social security schemes) were less likely to receive new drugs than those for whom the insurer paid on a fee-for-service basis (civil servants). Patients with lung cancer were less likely to receive an MRI or a CT scan if payment involved supply-side cost sharing, compared to otherwise similar patients under fee-for-service. (This article is open access.)

The fourth paper in this special issue is entitled “Allocation of control rights and cooperation efficiency in public-private partnerships: Theory and evidence from the Chinese pharmaceutical industry” (AHPP working paper #6). Zhe Zhang and her colleagues use a survey of 140 pharmaceutical firms in China to explore the relationships between firms’ control rights within public-private partnerships and the firms’ investments.

Hai Fang, Hong Liu, and John A. Rizzo delve into another question of health service delivery design and accompanying supply-side incentives: requiring primary physician gatekeepers to monitor patient access to specialty care (AHPP working paper #2).

Direct comparisons of payment incentives in two or more countries are rare. In “An economic analysis of payment for health care services: The United States and Switzerland compared,” Peter Zweifel and Ming Tai-Seale compare the nationwide uniform fee schedule for ambulatory medical services in Switzerland with the resource-based relative value scale in the United States.

Several of the papers featured in this special issue were presented at the conference “Provider Payment Incentives in the Asia-Pacific” convened November 7-8, 2008 at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University in Beijing. That conference was sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University and CCER, with organizing team members from Stanford University, Peking University, and Seoul National University.

As Eggleston notes in the guest editorial to the special issue, AHPP and the other scholars associated with the issue “hope that these papers will contribute to more intellectual effort on how provider payment reforms, carefully designed and rigorously evaluated, can improve ‘value for money’ in health care.”

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is pleased to announce that Jim Hoesterey has been awarded the Shorenstein Fellowship for 2009-2010. This Fellowship is made possible through the generosity of Walter H. Shorenstein. The Fellowship supports a scholar to conduct research and writing on contemporary political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific region, or topics in international relations and international political economy.

Jim Hoesterey is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores the burgeoning industry of Islamic self-help in contemporary Indonesia. He is completing a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he also received a M.A. in Anthropology. Jim also holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina and a B.A. in Psychology from Marquette University.

During two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2005-07) at the Islamic school and “Heart Management” training complex of television preacher Abdullah Gymnastiar, Jim sought to understand how a new generation of popular preachers and Muslim “trainers” has garnered novel forms of psycho-religious authority within the market niche of Islamic self-help.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Jim will work on his book manuscript, Sufis and Self-help Gurus: Postcolonial Psychology, Religious Authority, and Muslim Subjectivity in Indonesia.

“When will he come?”  Again and again in this city I have been
asked when US President Barack Hussein will visit Indonesia.  I cannot remember a time,
since my first trip here in 1967, when Indonesians have looked forward more eagerly to
hosting an American president.