Masahiko Aoki has been engaged with Stanford University for over four decades. He has witnessed the roots of Silicon Valley grow and seen the many successes of students who formerly passed through his classroom. Selected academic papers written over his 40-year academic career have recently been published.

Aoki is the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi professor emeritus of Japanese Studies in the department of economics and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), in residence at Shorenstein APARC.

You have been at Stanford since 1967 in different capacities – what has changed since then? Can you share some memories with us? 

I first came to Stanford as an assistant professor in 1967. Campus and the surrounding environment were different then – there were series of apricot orchards along El Camino to the south and my office was located in a wooden building – the old president’s house where the engineering buildings stand today. Changes at the university and in Silicon Valley have been fascinating to witness. I was away from Stanford in the 1970s, but when I came back in the 1980s, I had over 200 students at a time in my classes. This was because of widespread interest in Japan’s economic performance, which was then challenging American industries. Now students are inclined to be more interested in the rise of China. I share the same interest.

What has been most interesting for me is collaboration with graduate students and faculty to develop institutional studies. In the 1990s, I worked with Paul Milgrom, Avner Greif and Marcel Fafchamps among others, to initiate the field of comparative institutional analysis in the economics department. Greif and Fafchamps now have appointments in FSI like myself. Our research worked to understand why and how institutions matter to economic performance. However, my interests have expanded since then. I aim to understand relations between economic and demographic variables as well as institutional complementarities between economic institutions, social norms and political governance. As for my former students, many of them can now be found in important academic, government and private sector roles across the world.

What particular “lens” do you use to conduct your research?

Some influential economists understand that the nature of polity determines economic performance. They say this correlation is obvious if we compare the exploitative political regime like North Korea with that of a democratic political regime like South Korea. But this “lens” is a bit too simplistic for me. Why do ‘bad’ political regimes persist in some countries?  The relationship between political governance and economic performance is more complex than “the former simply causes the latter.”

To understand the relationship between political governance and the economy, I use game-theoretic concepts. While I am not a game theorist, I still believe that human interaction – whether economic, political or social – is a kind of game. People form beliefs based on how others play societal games. One of the important insights derived from these ideas is that political governance and economic institutions actually co-evolve. Furthermore, we need to look at the historical context to understand the present.

How have you applied these theories to the cases of Japan and the United States?

One of my major research interests has been the comparison of corporate governance across countries. Financial economists view the corporation as the property of stockholders. But we can also view the corporation as a system of distributed cognition. That is, the corporation is a group of people who have different cognitive roles and capabilities. Individuals can be organized to achieve economic value using physical assets as tools for respective cognitions.

By looking at corporations in this reversed way, we can identify different types of organizational architecture and their comparative advantages. In short, my research has found that managers’ cognitive assets are prioritized in U.S. corporate model, while workers’ entrepreneurial cognitive assets are prioritized in Silicon Valley’s model. In contrast, Japan favors a model where manager and workers’ cognitive assets are more interdependent.

You emphasize the connection between economics and demographics. What can be done about Japan and greater Asia’s rising demography problems?

Human capital is very valuable, but cultivating human capital is quite costly. Due to this constraint, the total fertility rate of women has declined as the economy develops. Scholars call this phenomenon the demographic transition. In addition, as economies further develop, people live longer and the working age population in the total population declines. Japan, Singapore and Taiwan are experiencing this phenomenon. Korea will follow this trend soon and at an even faster rate than Japan. Even if China modifies the one-child policy, the demographic dilemma cannot be escaped. And even for California, which is typically considered to be the youngest state in the U.S., a study predicts it will become the oldest state around year 2030.

So, what can be done to cope with this phenomenon? One option to raise the retirement age. Over two decades ago, Japan started this policy and has seen noted, positive effects. Another option is to increase and secure participation of women in the workforce. Across Asia, total populations are still rising due to immigration. Japan should consider liberalizing immigration. It is interesting to note that in the past 1,500 years Japan’s cultural development benefitted greatly from migration and assimilation of people, such as monks, political refugees and artists from Korea and China. 

With the recent execution of Abenomics, what performance can we expect to see from Japan’s economy in year 2014?

Abenomics has only been assessed in terms of short-term effects on the economy. Instead, my view is that Japan is now in the process of longer-term institutional change. Lifetime employment was the core of Japan’s overall institutional arrangement until some twenty years ago. The main banking system and government-industry relationship complemented and mutually reinforced lifetime employment. Though, with the demographic transition, the Japanese government has found it increasingly difficult to sustain. However, Japan’s institutional arrangements are normally very resilient. I think institutional transformation fitting this new demographic phenomena will require the duration of one generation. Institutions cannot be changed overnight by a revolution or government decree.

Of course, Abe could accelerate institutional adaptation by expanding the roles and opportunities for women and young people and creating more open foreign policy. This policy agenda may be related to the so-called “third arrow” of Abenomics, a period of structural reform following monetary easing and fiscal stimulus. But what Abe can do and has the willingness to do has yet to be fully seen. Thus, if we believe that Japan started the process of institutional change in the early 1990s and requires one generation to attain visible outcomes, the next several years are crucial. Tokyo has been chosen as the host city for the 2020 summer Olympics. I hope this event will act as Japan’s opportunity to display its changes to the international audience. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

Here is Gerhard Casper, standing before 7,000 people gathered in Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater to hear him deliver his first speech as the university’s president.

It’s 1992, the second day of October. Stanford is embroiled in a federal lawsuit over indirect research costs. It is struggling with campus-wide budget cuts and saddled with $160 million in damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. University officials are wrestling with controversies over affirmative action, sex discrimination, free speech and diversity.

“What was I to say at my inauguration,” Casper asks in “The Winds of Freedom: Challenges to the University,” a newly published book of selected speeches and extended commentary about those addresses.

“What was I not to say? What were my tasks?”

Casper spent months wrestling with those questions, writing and rewriting his inaugural address. Rather than focus on the university’s troubles with a promise to make them disappear, he instead emphasized Stanford’s role as an institution devoted to teaching, learning and research. He grounded his remarks in Stanford’s motto – translated from his native German as “the wind of freedom blows” – and charted the freedoms most important to a university.

There are eight, he tells his audience.

Among them: an unrestrained pursuit of knowledge, an ability to challenge long-held beliefs and new ideas, and the “freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point.”

“The research enterprise can easily be smothered by internal and external politics, pressures, and red tape,” he tells the crowd. “The wind of freedom has been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making our great universities the envy of the world. Without that freedom, that greatness is imperiled.”

Humor and heft

Academic freedom was a recurring theme during his eight years at the helm of Stanford. It was a time in which he navigated the university through turmoil and debates not only faced by Stanford and other American universities, but by the entire country.

With “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper presents seven speeches from his presidency, along with a commencement address he delivered at Yale in 2003. They delve into free expression, campus diversity and affirmative action. They cover the university’s role as a place of research and its relationship to the politics of the day.

A book launch celebration and discussion will be held Feb. 25 at Encina Hall.

The big, weighty ideas often come wrapped in a sense of humor – sometimes self-deprecating – that was the hallmark of a popular and seemingly very accessible president who surely never spoke to the same audience twice.

Casper has done more than merely dust off and repackage his favorite or most important speeches into a book. These are addresses tied together by those notions of academic freedom. And in detailed commentary following the text of each speech, Casper explains what was on his mind when he was writing them.

“I put a lot of effort into my speeches,” Casper says during a conversation in his office at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is a senior fellow and served as director from 2012 to 2013. “But if you take the speeches in isolation, you often end up with an abstract notion of what was happening at time. I wanted to use these speeches as an example of the complexity of issues and questions that I had to deal with as president.”

Diversity, identity and valid arguments

So here is Casper welcoming an incoming class in 1993, one year after delivering his inaugural address. It includes white and black and American Indian students. Some are the American children and grandchildren of Mexican and Asian immigrants. Only 5 percent are foreign students, but they hail from 37 countries.

The president is talking about diversity. He shares his own story about coming to America, telling the students about growing up in Germany in the wake of the Nazi regime and moving to California as a 26-year-old in 1964. He pokes fun at the accent he never lost, but reminds the students that “I have acquired an American `cultural identity.’”

He tells them they will all develop their own sense of cultural identity, adding that diversity makes the university a richer place.

“If we at the university were not committed to interactive pluralism, education would become impossible,” he tells the newcomers.

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“No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes,” he says.

Read out of context today, passages of the speech tuck into the timeless tropes of America as both a mosaic  and a melting pot. It’s OK to assimilate, he tells us. We can still maintain our own identities.

But In Casper’s rearview mirror, the speech becomes a history lesson, a reminder of the American landscape 20 years ago.

“The early 1990s was probably the decade during which multiculturalism and identity politics were most prominent in the United States in general and on American campuses in particular,” he writes in his new book. “When I came to Stanford in 1992, I was ill equipped to deal with some of these issues.”

He goes on to trace the steps Stanford took to address diversity and he shares his thoughts – some scholarly, some personal – on the issues of social and cultural identity. He parses the differences between multiculturalism and diversity.

He discusses the adoption of a new policy on sexual harassment, moves made to increase the number of women on the faculty, and the tensions arising from the university’s struggle to support on-campus ethnic community centers. He revisits the political and ethnically charged student protests that unfolded in the early 1990s.

While he was dealing with the daily fallout of those matters in the president’s office, he was also searching for opportunities to convey his positions and address the issues in his public speeches.

Welcoming the Class of 1997 gave him one of those chances.

“In a university nobody has the right to deny another person’s right to speak his or her mind, to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point,” he tells the incoming students.  “In a university discussion your first question in response to an argument must never be `Does she belong to the right group?’ Instead, the only criterion is `Does she have a valid argument?’”

The lines echo those he used in his inaugural address, and they do so intentionally.

“If you have something you believe in strongly, you must repeat it and repeat it and repeat it,” he says now. “I do that. I plagiarize myself – not because I ran out of things to say, but because it was important to re-emphasize points over and over again.”

Defining academic freedom

So here is Casper in 1998, speaking at Peking University during the school’s centennial celebration. The Chinese government used the occasion to bolster PKU’s standing as a key institution that would lead the country into the 21^st Century, and Casper focused his remarks on the role of research-intensive universities and the integrity they must maintain.

“Academic freedom is the sine qua non of the university,” he tells the audience. “Academic freedom means, above all, freedom from politics.” It also means “freedom from pressures to conform within the university,” he says.

Reflecting on that speech in “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper shares an unsettling irony: as he delivered his remarks, he was unaware that a Stanford research associate from China was being held in a Beijing prison under dubious charges of betraying state secrets.

He learned about the matter several months after the event, and writes now about the university’s unsuccessful appeals for the researcher’s release to then-President Jiang Zemin and his subsequent decision not to pursue a plan for Stanford to open a program at PKU at that time.

“I did not think that it was appropriate for me to enter into an agreement with one of China’s most prominent institutions – continue, as it were, as if nothing had happened – while a Stanford researcher was being held in prison without any explanation,” he writes. “I certainly did not take the step to suspend our discussions lightly, since throughout my life, throughout the many years of the Cold War, I had always favored engagement rather than iron curtains.”

“Germans don’t give funny speeches”

Casper gave his first public address at Stanford when he was 53. But he had already spent a lifetime as a speechmaker.

“I had been viewed in high school to have the ability to talk well and address a large audience,” he says. “And clearly, I liked to do it.”

He was elected president of the student council. His principal and history teacher, Erna Stahl, would call him the school’s festredner, or keynote speaker. He was tapped as valedictorian of the Class of 1957.

He discusses his valedictory address – focused on the dearth of German role models – in the preface to “The Winds of Freedom.” He writes about his relationship with Stahl, how he was impressed by her stories of  confronting the Gestapo, and the impact that growing up in post-Nazi Germany had on him.

“We hadn’t done any intensive study of the Third Reich by eleventh grade,” Casper says. “That was due to the fact that the Erna Stahl believed very strongly that going into the politics of the moment – the aftermath of the Nazi period – would not be the best method to teach us the values she wanted us to have. It would have become too quickly biographical and personal and she was very insistent that there needed to be positive values instilled in us to balance against what the Nazis had perpetrated.”

The preface is as close as the book comes to reading like a memoir, and Casper condenses his childhood, education, academic career and personal acknowledgments into 15 pages.

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Photo Credit: L.A. Cicero

While there are only a few lines devoted to his 26 years at the University of Chicago as a law professor, dean and provost, it was in that city where Casper’s innate ability to connect with an audience meshed with his public persona.

“Germans don’t give funny speeches,” he says. “In Germany, jokes undercut your credibility. My speaking style – the self-deprecation, the humor – that was really honed in Chicago. My friends and colleagues had these characteristics, and those elements were brought into my life.”

He learned that a joke does more than solicit a laugh. It can disarm a critic, humanize a speaker and lighten up an otherwise serious speech.

“After all, you want the audience to keep paying attention if you really do have something important to tell them,” he says.

An era begins

So here again is Casper, new to Stanford on that second day of October in 1992 and about to take on the promises and problems of the university.

He opens with a light touch, addressing “fellow members of the first-year class and fellow transfer students.” He suggests with deadpan delivery that he was hired as Stanford’s president because he could properly pronounce the university’s motto as it appears in German on the president’s seal: Die Luft der Freiheit weht.

“Alas, I have bad news for the board of trustees,” he says, turning to look at the board members seated on the stage behind him. The phrase, he says, was originally written in Latin. Not German.

“If, under these circumstances, the trustees would feel it appropriate to renounce their contract with me, I would understand perfectly,” he says, cracking a wide smile for the first time.

“All I ask for is the opportunity to finish this speech.”

And with his first formal words as Stanford’s ninth president, Casper casts himself as a newcomer – an outsider here to lead, learn and speak his mind.

Scholars, policymakers and business leaders from Japan and the United States recently gathered at Stanford to analyze energy innovation and build new bilateral endeavors.

“With rapid economic growth in emerging countries, world energy consumption has been and will be increasing, everyone has been wondering if there are enough energy resources for this growth," said Hideichi Okada, a former vice minister for International Affairs at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Panelists weigh in on the changing energy picture in the U.S. and Japan.

Okada said Japan and the U.S. share concerns about world geopolitical change in energy supply and demand, and nuclear policy. Okada is at Stanford as the Sasakawa Peace Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) this year.

Okada's remarks came during the the New Channels Dialogue, a two-day conference organized by the Japan Program at Shorenstein APARC and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. It is the first of three annual conferences aimed to stimulate debate on 21st century problems faced by both nations. 

“In the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima, Japan has reinvigorated its search for cutting-edge technologies and alternative sources of energy,” said Yuji Takagi, president of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. In parallel, the U.S. has increased its production of shale gas as a viable alternative of natural gas.

Confluence of national interest and demand, and shared historical connections between the U.S. and Japan, suggest an ideal environment for further partnerships between the two countries.

“We have entered an especially important period in bilateral relations between the Asia-Pacific [and the U.S.] – it is undergoing such rapid change and technology is transforming. In this context, I believe the U.S.-Japan relationship will only become more important,” Takagi said.

Experts and Stanford scholars discuss electricity systems in California and Japan.

Okada cited the joint U.S.-Japan wind power project in Hawaii as an example of recent cooperation. Last December, Maui became the site of a multi-year renewable energy project between the American and Japanese governments.

Other panelists offered different perspectives on energy opportunities from across sectors, included among them were Julia Nesheiwat, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Energy Resources; Hirofumi Takinami, a member of the Japan’s House of Councilors and former visiting fellow at Shorenstein APARC; Thomas Starrs, SunPower vice president; Nobuo Tanaka, former IEA Executive Director; and Frank Wolak, Stanford economics professor and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.

Topics discussed included:

• Energy constraints experienced by Japan since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and challenges facing Japan’s electricity industry liberalization.
• Regional implications of China’s rise as a major energy consumer and producer.
• Geopolitical and trade balance effects on the United States and Japan resulting from the shale gas revolution transforming the U.S. into a major energy producer.
• Broad impacts to the energy industry caused by geopolitics and financial instability.
• Lessons learned from California’s experience with electricity industry liberalization.
• Multilateral partnerships for energy technology and innovation.

The second day of the conference was a closed session in which candid, in-depth discussions were held. Participants also went on a site visit to Bloom Energy led by principal cofounder and chief executive officer K.R. Sridhar.

The New Channels Dialogue highlighted energy imperatives and created a network of exchange anticipated to continue beyond the conference. A report that encompasses major points and policy recommendations will be published in the forthcoming months. 

As the debate over the role and future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) gathers steam, Andrew Ng, associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and cofounder of Coursera, shared his views on how MOOCs can optimize and personalize education experiences at a seminar co-hosted by the Stanford Chinese Faculty and Family Club and the China 2.0 initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business. (Watch the seminar video here.)

Ng offered up plenty of food for thought about the potential implications of the “massive data” collected from MOOCs. Coursera, which started by offering two Stanford courses online, is an education company partnering with 76 universities and organizations worldwide to offer 550 free online courses. It is currently the largest MOOC platform, according to Ng, with six million students and 108 partners.

Speaking to more than 120 attendees, Ng claimed that Coursera collected more educational data in 2013 than the entire academic field of education throughout the history of mankind. “The volume of data to unleash is unprecedented,” he noted. Researchers and educators seeking to innovate in education will be able to apply even the most basic data analytic techniques to produce a multitude of research papers and generate innovative ideas to advance education.

In a crowded field with other firms and organizations such as NovoEd, OpenEdX, Udacity, and Udemy offering MOOCs, Coursera’s students tend to be professionals seeking continuing education, with more than 75% of students already having earned a Bachelor’s degree at a minimum. By analyzing rich data collected from tens of thousands of MOOC students, instructors are receiving almost instantaneous feedback to help them improve their teaching methods and to communicate with students more effectively. Ng gave an example of how Coursera sends more “user-friendly” weekly emails to increase actions from students. “If you are reminded about things you have done well, and [we] ask you to engage in the next class, you are more likely to take action,” Ng said.

With auto-graded quizzes and peer-grading built into courses, students receive feedback much quicker in MOOCs than having to wait for professors or graduate students to return their graded work. And feedback is received at both ends. MOOCs have dramatically increased the pace of feedback for those doing the teaching. Stanford faculty members receive feedback from students annually. “Once a year I get the opportunity to improve my class… This is an incredibly slow rate of learning for me,” Ng commented. However, data is collected from students continuously on MOOC platforms – when a student finishes a lecture, speeds up videos, submits a survey, or engages in social media – instructors receive a wealth of informative resources to “rapidly improve their classes,” argued Ng.

Running A/B tests is another way to improve learning interfaces. Ng shared an ongoing test carried out by his company in determining the importance of featuring an instructor’s face in the lower corner during lectures versus hearing merely a voice over a teaching presentation. Although staff at Coursera was split over what they thought would help students more, it turned out that students without the video of the instructor found it much harder to concentrate.

Ng notes that production resources and the lack of a revenue stream are currently two major bottlenecks for MOOCs, but he is proud to be feeding Coursera’s test and analysis results back into its course development and design to create even more value-optimized courses. Coursera also makes the company’s raw educational data available to partners and other universities. He attributed an optimization mindset to his Google days, where he was the founder of Google’s large-scale deep learning project. “Your ability to get the data to optimize makes something much more valuable, and we hope to do that with education,” said Ng. “We are in very early stages of figuring out what technologies should look like for MOOCs. There is a serious trade-off between cost of content production and how engaging the content is. We continue to see other transformations.”

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REAP co-director Scott Rozelle builds on a ten-part series for Caixin Magazine titled, "Inequality 2030: Glimmering Hope in China in a Future Facing Extreme Despair." In his fifth column, Rozelle explains how China's "National Nutritious School Lunch Program" became a National Free But-Not-Too-Nutritious School Lunch Program.

REAP co-director Scott Rozelle builds on a ten-part series for Caixin Magazine titled, "Inequality 2030: Glimmering Hope in China in a Future Facing Extreme Despair." In his fifth column, Rozelle explains how China's "National Nutritious School Lunch Program" became a National Free But-Not-Too-Nutritious School Lunch Program.

To read the column in Chinese, click here.

> To read Column 1: Why We Need to Worry About Inequality, click here. 

> To read Column 2: China's Inequality Starts During the First 1,000 Days, click here. 

> To read Column 3: Behind Before They Start - The Preschool Years (Part 1), click here. 

> To read Column 4: Behind Before They Start - The Preschool Years (Part 2), click here.  

> To read Column 6: A Tale of Two Travesties, click here. 

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Inequality 2030:

Glimmering Hope in China in a Future Facing Extreme Despair

Caixin Column 5: How to Cure China’s Largest Epidemic

What do we know about China’s largest epidemic? 

• We know that 10 million school-aged children in rural China are suffering from iron-deficiency anemia and generally poor nutrition.
• We know that poor nutrition is undermining their education.
• We know that poor nutrition is the first barrier contributing to the performance gap between rural and urban students—one that does not disappear.
• We know how to solve poor nutrition: with one multivitamin a day, costing only 0.2 yuan. Or with an 8 yuan per day nutritious school lunch.
• We know that one vitamin per day – or a nutritious school lunch – will raise the students’ educational performance, turning a student who is failing into one who earns passing, satisfactory test scores.

We know all of this already. It is clear and proven. Our group, the Rural Education Action Project, or REAP, has run no fewer than five studies on the link between nutrition and education. These have been large, well-designed, carefully implemented studies with some of China’s best academic institutions and medical schools involved. The results have been consistent and clear.

Nutrition-related diseases are epidemic. We found nearly 40 percent of grade 4 and 5 students in Shaanxi to be suffering from anemia. Another study in Qinghai found nearly 50 percent of students to be nutritionally deprived and sick. The same is true in Gansu, Ningxia, Sichuan and Guizhou. In any random rural community in China, it is a near guarantee that you will find thousands of undernourished children. Convert these percentages into absolute numbers and the numbers are staggering.

We also know that the diets of children in China’s rural communities are the source of the malnutrition problem. Parents and grandparents (when Mom and Dad are away from home working) and boarding school managers (when kids live at school) are feeding students insufficient diets. Despite rapidly rising family incomes, the typical meal for rural students—both at home and at school—resembles meals that rural children were eating decades ago: grain, grain, more grain, and a tiny bit of pickled vegetables. There is almost no meat, there is almost no fruit, and often there are almost no fresh vegetables. 

It is a well-established fact that when children eat meals like this, they become nutritionally deprived. They are iron deficient. They do not have sufficient vitamins and other minerals. And, despite having no clear outward symptoms, they are sick. Anemia is a disease. It is a well-known and well-understood disease that leads to stunting and wasting, poor general health, and even reduces children’s cognitive abilities. It should therefore come as no surprise that in our studies, we find that children with anemia are shorter, lighter, miss more school due to illnesses, and have overall worse school performance than their non-anemic classmates. This is most likely one of the reasons that China’s tremendous investment into new rural school facilities and teachers has failed to produce any reduction in the rural-urban education gap. When children are sick, they can’t learn, no matter how good the school is. Enroll a malnourished 10-year-old in the best school in China—say Remin University’s Attached Elementary School—and despite the best teachers and best facilities, that child will not learn. That child can’t. Because that child is sick.

We know, however, that if we improve nutrition, the negative effects of poor nutrition can be reversed and children can learn and perform better at school.

In 2007, Lu Mai and his group at China Development Research Foundation, or CDRF, demonstrated the power of nutrition in a set of pilot schools in rural China. It was a simple and elegant demonstration. When children were given good nutrition, within months they were performing at a much higher level in school. This was the key breakthrough that inspired our group’s main research agenda between 2008 and 2012. 

REAP’s first school nutrition project launched in 2008, in Shaanxi Province. We gave children in 30 schools one vitamin per day for one academic year, and saw their standardized test scores rise much more than children in 30 similar schools that did not receive a daily vitamin. The impact of the vitamin intervention was even higher when children were also given a daily egg on top of the vitamin. In 2009, we showed that the test scores of children who received both a daily vitamin and a daily egg rose much higher than children who just received a daily egg. In fact, in 2010 we showed that a daily egg by itself is not enough to have any impact on children’s health or academic performance: When we gave children in 25 schools an egg a day for one academic year, there was no reduction in anemia rates and test scores did not improve.

But eggs are a nutritious food, aren’t they? Why aren’t they helping China’s school children? The answer is simple: The problem in rural China is micronutrient deficiencies, especially iron deficiency, which leads to anemia. Eggs are definitely not bad for children, but they do not have iron. Vitamins do. Our research has convinced us that vitamins are the fastest and most cost-efficient way of getting iron (and other key nutrients) to China’s rural school children.

Finally, in 2010 and 2011, we showed that when principals are incentivized and provided with the resources to give students healthy, nutritious meals (two dishes with meat and fresh vegetables per day), nutrition also improves, along with educational performance. A truly nutritious school lunch is more expensive than a vitamin (8 yuan versus 0.2 yuan per day), but nutritious lunches have been shown to be successful in improving health, nutrition and ultimately test scores.

The Good News: Policy Makers Respond

As the link between nutrition and education began to become clear, policy makers responded. Top leaders began to take notice.

REAP’s work initially generated a response from leaders in Shaanxi Province, where we had conducted many of our nutrition projects. In 2009, several counties in Southern Shaanxi joined together to pilot a regional experiment that improved nutrition in schools. The entire province followed suit the very next school year. The goal of the program was to improve the nutrition of every child in every rural school—from grade 1 to grade 9. National leaders became aware of REAP’s findings and of the positive impact of nutrition on educational performance.

The media provided the final nudge. Throughout 2011, news outlets and child-welfare groups published articles and reports about the abysmal state of nutrition in rural China’s schools. The coverage garnered the interest and attention of millions of netizens.

In October, 2011, the national government made a bold move. They announced a new annual commitment of 20 billion yuan per year to fund a new National Nutritious School Lunch Program. The new program would provide over 25 million school-aged children in 692 poor counties with a nutritious school lunch per day. The stated goal was to improve nutrition, health and ultimately increase the educational performance of rural students.

This was the ultimate victory for an effort that began with scholars, was picked up by the media, and finally acted upon by the central government. There is a problem; it is affecting progress towards China’s developmental goals. There are solutions; allocate the resources and put the programs into place.

This is exactly how academics, the media and the government are supposed to work together. Right?

The Bad News: Policy Failure and China’s Remaining Nutrition Challenge

So has the problem been solved? Unfortunately, the answer is no. According to REAP survey data from 2012 and 2013, malnutrition is still widespread and children are still not receiving healthy meals either at home or at school. 

What happened? The national government’s “National Nutritious School Lunch Program” failed because there were simply not enough resources. Not enough school kitchens. Not enough financial resources. Not enough buy in from local governments. 

The original plan was this: The national government would allocate 3 yuan per day per student to help finance a nutritious school lunch. In Beijing, nutritious school lunches provide about half of each student’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) of key vitamins and minerals, including more than half of each student’s daily iron needs. This is just about perfect: dieticians in school systems around the world agree that school lunches should provide at least 40% of a child’s RDA.

Three yuan, however, did not get the job done. Three yuan in today’s market was only enough to give children a large bowl of rice (or large bowl of noodles) and some pickled vegetables. In other words, it was just enough to replace exactly what children were bringing from home to eat—before the launching of the National Nutritious School Lunch Program. Children could now get their school lunch for free. But they were not getting anything better or more nutritious than what they would have brought from home anyway. In effect, the National Nutritious School Lunch Program became a National Free But-Not-Too-Nutritious School Lunch Program.

Indeed, our research shows that the policy has failed to provide the nutrition that children need to do well in school. REAP followed schools both before and after the launch of the national program. The nutritional content of the lunches provided by the schools was almost unchanged. It is therefore unsurprising that there was no impact on reducing anemia, improving health or improving educational performance. 

Several problems led to this policy failure. First, and foremost, even though the national government asks local governments to contribute matching funds to improve school lunches, they rarely do. Poor counties are chronically short of fiscal resources. This is a mandate that they were simply unable to achieve. Even if they did, however, six yuan is still not enough for a nutritious school lunch. It would be better—of course. However, our team’s calculations indicate that it would take eight to nine yuan per student per day to be able to offer a high quality, nutritious meal. The national government was bold to take on the challenge of providing nutrition for school children in rural China. It is clear, however, that they need to be even bolder. The program as currently designed is simply acting as an income transfer to parents; the national funding is offsetting what parents used to provide. Children, however, are getting the same food and are still malnourished. 

Second, the program, as designed, leaves the responsibility for providing lunches to the local government. Most local governments further pass this responsibility on to individual school principals. Are principals qualified to take charge of this sort of policy implementation? Rural school principals are not trained in nutrition; in fact, we find that principals understand little more about nutrition than the parents of their students. Moreover, principals face other incentives that dampen their willingness to spend time and resources on nutrition. In other countries, and in China’s urban school districts, there are nutritionists, dieticians and catering firms that take on responsibilities for serving quality, safe and nutritious meals. In such settings principals are able to focus on doing what they are trained to do: manage teaching, meet with parents, ensure a safe school environment, and take care of other general school management needs.

What’s next?

We know the problem. We know the solution. Leaders have shown that they are willing to try to solve the problem. Solutions have already been tried. They are not working. But they can form the basis of what to do next.

We need to make the National Nutritious School Lunch Program nutritious. There are three different possible ways to do so. One option is for the national government to immediately increase allocations for the National Nutritious School Lunch Program to eight yuan per student per day. This is admittedly not a small sum. But, it is needed, and needed now. Proper school infrastructure for clean kitchens and a trained staff are also needed. This will not only improve meal quality, it will reduce stress on principals and allow them to focus more on their main job of running the school.

There is a lower cost solution. It is one that is used in many countries, and has also been repeatedly proven to work in China. The solution is this: use part of the National Nutritious School Lunch Program funding to provide each student with one vitamin per day. A high quality multivitamin with iron can be purchased and distributed for 0.1 to 0.2 yuan per day. It is easily monitored. No additional facilities are needed. It is true (and we are not arguing otherwise) that children cannot survive on a daily vitamin alone. But, it is a safe and effective way to deliver iron and other minerals, a lack of which we already know leads to worse educational performance. Moreover, spending 0.2 yuan per student per day on a multivitamin still leaves 2.8 yuan of national funds leftover. China’s officials need to be convinced that vitamins are not medicine. They are safe. They are inexpensive. They are effective.

Of course, the third option is that both of these solutions be implemented, to create an ultra-nutritious national lunch program. If we choose to go this route, China’s nutrition problems would soon be a relic of the past. Then we could finally begin to take advantage of the new facilities and better teachers. And we could take the first step towards closing the rural-urban gap in education.