Stanford University

Economic, social, and security implications of East Asia's demographic transition

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Asia’s demographic landscape is changing in a big way. Japan’s population is shrinking, as people are living longer, marrying later, and choosing to have fewer or no children. Korea is moving in the same direction, while China and the countries of South and Southeast Asia face similar issues in the coming decades. As this takes place, more people are moving to, from, and across Asia for job, education, and marriage opportunities.

These demographic changes present policymakers with new challenges and questions, including: What are the interrelationships between population aging and key macroeconomic variables such as economic growth? How will it impact security? What are the effects on employment policy and other national institutions? How have patterns of migration affected society and culture? What lessons can Asia, the United States, and Europe learn from one another to improve the policy response to population aging?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) focused its third annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue on addressing the possible economic, social, and security implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic transition. Thirty scholars, government figures, journalists, and other opinion leaders from Stanford, the United States, and countries across the Asia-Pacific region gathered September 8–9, 2011, in Kyoto, Japan, to discuss key issues related to the question of demographic change.

Comparative Demographics and Policy Responses

Japan’s shrinking workforce calls for labor policy changes, stressed presenters during the opening Dialogue session. Stanford Center for Population Research director Shripad Tuljapurkar stated that Japan’s population could decrease by as much as 25 percent and that its government has a window of approximately 40 years in which to act. In describing Japan’s demographic shift, Ogawa Naohiro, director of the Nihon University Population Research Institute, also emphasized the importance of good financial education for individuals as life expectancy increases.

Macroeconomic Implications

Economists Masahiko Aoki and Cai Fang addressed changes to East Asia’s economic landscape. Aoki, an FSI senior fellow, spoke of the transition from agriculture to industry that has occurred at different stages in Japan, Korea, and China and of the increasing cost of human capital that has followed. Cai, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences labor and population expert, stated that after several decades of industrial growth China is now at a turning point in terms of its global competitiveness.

Labor and Migration

Scott Rozelle, codirector of Stanford’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP), opened the next day with a discussion of China’s rural human capital investment. Offering Mexico’s situation after the mid-1990s peso crisis as a comparison, he emphasized the immediate need for allocating more health and education resources to China’s rural areas. Ton-Nu-Thi Ninh, president of Tri Viet University, discussed the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of labor migration—a growing trend in Asia—and advocated that governments factor it more into their foreign policy development.

Security

The security impact of Asia’s demographic transition will take several decades to understand, but it will eventually lead to the need for significant policy re-strategization, stated Yu Myung Hwan, Korea’s former minister of foreign affairs and trade, during the closing Dialogue session. He suggested focusing on impacts that could result from the major changes taking place in fertility, urbanization, and migration. Concurring with many of Yu’s views, Stanford’s Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow Michael H. Armacost also noted the current lack of literature on the link between security and demography. In addition, he emphasized the need for the United States to continue pursuing good relations with China and Russia during this time of transition.

“Low fertility rates are not because women are all out there working. In fact, a number of countries have lots of females in the labor force and have achieved a resurgence of fertility. Achieving work-life balance is important, not just for women, but for men as well, and might play a role in lessening the gap in life expectancy between men and women.”

-Karen Eggleston, Director, Asia Health Policy Program

Throughout the event, Dialogue participants unanimously acknowledged the serious challenges facing policymakers as they look for ways to meet the evolving needs of individuals, families, and organizations. The demographic outlook is not entirely gloomy, however. Numerous participants also pointed to the potential for exciting advances and innovations in technology and international cooperation.

As in previous years, the event concluded with a lively public symposium and reception attended by students from Stanford and local universities, Shorenstein APARC guests and affiliates, and members of the general public. Speaking during the reception, Kadokawa Daisaku, mayor of Kyoto, and Kim Hyong-O, member and former speaker of the Korean National Assembly, acknowledged the significance of the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue as a forum for addressing issues of mutual importance to the United States and Asia.

The Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, FSI, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko. To read the final report from this and previous Dialogues, visit the event series page below.

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A worker stands on steel rods at a superblock construction site in Jakarta in February 2010. Increasing urbanization is one of many aspects of Asia's demographic change.
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"Revisiting the Soviet Collapse After 20 Years: A Retrospective View of Causes, Courses, and Consequences"

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CREEES/FSI conference on the 20th anniversary
of the fall of the Soviet Union

WELCOME
9:30-10:00 am

Panel 1: CAUSES
10:00-11:30 am

"Post-WWII USSR: Crushed in a Daily Life Competition"
Stephen Kotkin
Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University; W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, 2010-11, the Hoover Institution

"The August Coup and the End of the Soviet Union"
John Dunlop
Senior Fellow Emeritus, the Hoover Institution

Discussant:
Amir Weiner
Associate Professor of History, Stanford University


Panel 2: COURSES
1:15-2:45pm

"The Moscow Putsch Twenty Years Later: Thoughts of a Participant Observer"
Gregory Freidin
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

"Russia's Twists and Turns in Comparative Perspective"
Timothy Colton
Morris and Anna Felding Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Harvard University

Discussant:
Fyodor Lukyanov
Editor-in-Chief, Russia in Global Affairs


Panel 3: CONSEQUENCES
3:15-4:45pm

"Strategic Stability: Then and Now"
David Holloway
Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University

"Social Consequences and Legacies of the Old System and the Transition"
Kathryn Stoner-Weiss
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Deputy Director, Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University

Discussant:
Norman Naimark
Robert & Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, Stanford University

KEYNOTE
5:00 pm
 

"The Soviet Collapse Under the Telescope or the Microscope? How to Think About Disjunctive Historical Change"
Mark Beissinger
Professor of Politics, Princeton University

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Conferences

Russia on the Verge: What After the Post-Soviet Paradigm?

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Fyodor Lukyanov is editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, published in Russian and English with the participation of Foreign Affairs magazine. He has an extensive background in different Russian and international media, in which he worked from 1990 to 2002 as a commentator on international affairs.

Lukyanov now widely contributes to various media in the US, Europe and China. His monthly "Geopolitics" column appears in the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He is a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an independent organization providing foreign policy expertise and also a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights and Civic Society Institutions.

http://creees.stanford.edu/events/DallinLectures.html

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Fyodor Lukyanov Editor-in-Chief Speaker Russia in Global Affairs
Lectures

DoD Efforts to Counter WMD

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After the Cold War, much of the U.S. countering-WMD efforts focused on dismantling the weapons and WMD production systems of the Soviet Union. While those efforts, along with passive defense and other programs, are still under way, more attention is being paid to preventing future threats from arising. Ensuring that terrorists are not able to acquire nuclear or biological materials for use in a weapon has become one of the highest U.S. national security priorities. Assistant Secretary Andrew Weber will discuss U.S. countering-WMD efforts, how they have changed, and what the Department of Defense is doing to address the threats that face us today. 

Speaker biography:

Andrew Weber is the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics for matters concerning nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs. He is the Staff Director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, which manages the nuclear weapons stockpile, and he oversees the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.

Prior to his appointment by President Obama, he served for 13 years as an Adviser for Threat Reduction Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He played a key role in Nunn-Lugar operations to remove weapons grade uranium from Kazakhstan and Georgia, and nuclear capable MiG-29 aircraft from Moldova. Weber also developed and oversaw the Department of Defense Biological Threat Reduction Program. He has a Master of Science in Foreign Service degree from Georgetown and is a graduate of Cornell University.


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Andrew Weber Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs Speaker
Seminars

Srinivasan speaks to using social media to create connections

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RRamesh Srinivasan, assistant professor at UCLA in design and media/information studies, delivered the Oct. 20 Liberation Technology seminar. The talk was entitled, “Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt.” This wide ranging talk takes us through his fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, India and other countries and culminates with his recent fieldwork in Egypt on the use of social media in the revolution. Through these journeys he argues that technology has the potential to act as a ‘bridge’ that could connect peoples across cultures.

Ramesh discusses his field experiments in India where he provided people in his fieldwork villages with video cameras to document any issue that was valuable to them, and discovered that the process of recording and watching the videos helped in developing broad social priorities. Similarly during his work in Kyrgyzstan and in Egypt he observed that a small sphere of bloggers used social media to create strong ties among themselves, and given the media ecology with the social media having connections with other media, they ended up having a broader reach among the international community. In essence, they served as bridges communicating across boundaries.

The key themes of the talk revolved around the concepts of bridges, interfaces and networks. Ramesh argued that he has sought to understand the role that technology could play in fostering meaningful dialogue among peoples who have different vocabularies and understandings with which they approach the world i.e. “What bridges will bring people together in terms of multi-cultural interaction?” Ramesh argued that technologies are culturally constructed, and culturally created and that technologies can serve as bridges if diverse cultural values or ontologies are considered in their design. Technologies can then act as bridges to connect people across networks.

The talk takes us through the complexities of social media serving as a bridge and discusses preliminary ideas for designing an online architecture that could provide a space for multiple voices and serve as a bridge across different cultures.

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Incomplete Assimilation among Muslims in France

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Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians)  in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.

Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Event Summary

Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?

Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.

During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?

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David Laitin

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
laitin.jpg PhD

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
David Laitin Speaker
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Islam and Contemporary Europe

Stable peninsula important to China's economy

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Sang-Hun Choe
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North Korea is launching several joint mining projects with China and Russia, including copper and coal, which will help boost its economy. David Straub, associate director of the Korean Studies Program, spoke with the New York Times about how China's policy toward North Korea is influenced by its own economic interests.
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A railway border crossing between China and North Korea, August 2011.
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