Fourteen Stanford researchers addressing global poverty through a range of academic disciplines are receiving a total of $4.6 million in awards from the university-wide Global Development and Poverty (GDP) initiative.

Their projects, which are the first to be funded by the GDP, deal with challenges of health, violence, economics, governance and education in the developing world.

“GDP seeks to transform scholarly activity and dialogue at Stanford around the topic of global poverty, so that the university may have a greater impact on poverty alleviation in developing economies,” said GDP faculty co-chair Jesper B. Sørensen. “By focusing on placing a small number of big bets, GDP encourages researchers to think big, and to move beyond the conventional way of doing things. We are thrilled by the inaugural set of awardees, as they demonstrate the creative, inter-disciplinary approaches that will make Stanford a leader in this area.”

The GDP initiative is part of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) and is administered in partnership with Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). The GDP is co-chaired by Sørensen, the faculty director for SEED and the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business; and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, senior fellow and director of FSI and the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford Law School.

SEED, which seeks to alleviate poverty by stimulating the creation of economic opportunities through innovation, entrepreneurship and the growth of businesses, was established in 2011 through a generous gift from Robert King, MBA '60, and his wife, Dorothy.

Through complementary areas of focus, GDP funding and other SEED research initiatives will stimulate research, novel interdisciplinary collaborations and solutions to problems of global poverty and development. GDP research aims to pursue answers to crucial questions that are essential to an understanding of how to reduce global poverty and promote economic development. That includes governance and the rule of law, education, health, and food security – all of which are essential for entrepreneurship to thrive. By contrast, other SEED research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the growth of businesses in developing economies.

Since 2012, SEED’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Developing Economies Award program also has doled out 22 awards and seven PhD fellowships to help support and scale businesses in developing economies. Among the $1 million in funded projects were studies of how to improve the livelihoods of small-holder cacao farmers throughout the tropics; how to identify startups with high job- and wealth-creating potential in Chile; how political accountability affects the ability to attract investment in Sierra Leone; and how managerial practices affect trade entrepreneurship in China.

First GDP Awards

The first 14 GDP award recipients are professors of economics, political science, law, medicine, pediatrics, education and biology, and senior fellows from FSI, the Woods Institute, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

“Each of these projects cuts across disciplines, reflects innovative thinking, and has the potential to generate crucial knowledge about how to improve the lives of the poor around the world,” Cuéllar said. “These projects, along with a variety of workshops engaging the university and external stakeholders, will help us strengthen Stanford’s long-term capacity to address issues of global poverty through research, education and outreach.”

Among the award recipients is Pascaline Dupas, an associate professor of economics and senior fellow at SIEPR. Dupas, along with faculty from the Center for Health Policy and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, will launch the Stanford Economic Development Research Initiative using GDP funds.  This initiative will focus on collecting high-quality institutional and individual-level data on economic activity in a number of developing countries over the long term, and making these data available to scholars around the world.

Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at FSI, is receiving an award to lead a team focused on criminal violence and its effects on the poor in developing economies, and the practical solutions for increasing security in those regions.

Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine and FSI senior fellow, was awarded an award to help him lead a team that will develop models to estimate how alternative resource allocations for health interventions among the poor will influence health and economic outcomes.

Stephen Haber, a professor of political science and history and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, received an award to bring together Stanford researchers interested in examining the long-term institutional constraints on economic development. Their goal will be to provide policymakers with a framework for determining the conditions under which particular innovations are likely to have positive payoffs, and the conditions under which resources will likely be wasted.

Other projects will address the educational impacts of solar lighting systems in poor communities; identifying interventions to improve the profits and safety among poor, smallholder pig farmers in Bangladesh and China; the role of law and institutions in economic development and poverty reduction; and how to rethink worldwide refugee problems. Awards are also being provided to researchers focused on microfinance, online education and teacher training.

The project proposals were reviewed by an interdisciplinary faculty advisory council chaired by Cuéllar and Sørensen. 

“We were very encouraged by the impressive number of project proposals from a wide range of areas and are looking forward to introducing several new capacity and community-building activities in the fall,” Sørensen said.. “This wide range of research initiatives will form a vibrant nucleus for Stanford’s growing community of scholars of global development and poverty.”

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are some of the most dangerous places in the world. Havens for drug lords and their booming narcotics businesses, the urban slums that are home to 20 percent of the city’s population are notorious for soaring murder rates and a dearth of public services. Police often have little or no presence in most of Rio’s 800 favelas. And when they do, their conflicts with criminals frequently result in the killing of bystanders.

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are some of the most dangerous places in the world. Havens for drug lords and their booming narcotics businesses, the urban slums that are home to 20 percent of the city’s population are notorious for soaring murder rates and a dearth of public services. Police often have little or no presence in most of Rio’s 800 favelas. And when they do, their conflicts with criminals frequently result in the killing of bystanders.

Brazilian officials have tried to bring order to the favelas with a set of policies and initiatives launched in 2008. A so-called pacification program has trained special teams of police to take a more targeted approach to fighting crime. The program has increased stability and reduced violence in about 30 favelas.

But Stanford researchers have found a hitch: When criminals are put out of business in one favela, they relocate to another. And that can lead to an increase in violence in the non-pacified slums.

“The cost of violence is disproportionately felt by the poor,” said Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “Where there is violence, there is no investment. We are working with the government and the police and the community on ways to make these places safer and reduce that poverty by improving the quality of the police and devising ways to reduce the level of lethality they tend to use.”

To support the research she’s doing and the relationships she’s building in Brazil, Magaloni is working with FSI’s International Policy Implementation Lab, a new initiative that will bolster impact-oriented international research, problem-based teaching and long-term engagement with urgent policy implementation problems around the world.

Collaborating with a team of Stanford students, Magaloni is working with community groups, police organizations, government officials and other scholars to study existing policies and training procedures that could broaden the pacification program and make it more effective. The relationships have paid off with access to high-level government data, exclusive research findings and a pipeline between academics and policymakers that can improve living conditions for some of Rio’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Her project is an example of the work being supported by the International Policy Implementation Lab, which recently awarded Magaloni’s project and those led by five other researchers a total of $210,000.

The lab, which is being supported in part by an initial $2 million gift from two anonymous donors, will grant another round of funding later this fiscal year to support projects led by Stanford faculty.

Recognizing that many Stanford scholars are engaged in international policy analysis, the Implementation Lab will help researchers who want to better understand policy implementation – a process often stymied by bureaucracy, politicking and budget constraints, but also often reflecting deliberation and experimentation by people across different countries, organizations, and cultures.

“The Implementation Lab will help us better understand health, security, poverty and governance challenges in an evolving world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.  “It will serve as a resource to foster communication across projects, so we can learn more about how implementation plays out in different settings and regions. Through the Implementation Lab, we can better engage faculty and students in understanding how policymakers and organizations change longstanding practices and actually execute policy.”

The Implementation Lab will support long-term projects grounded in policy-oriented research on a specific international topic. The projects must strive to connect scholarly research to interdisciplinary teaching, and will often involve long-term engagement with particular problems or international settings to better understand and inform the implementation of policy.

The first round of funding from the Implementation Lab will help shore up projects aimed at bolstering rural education in China, improving health care in India, curbing violence in Mexico and Brazil, and training government officials and business leaders in developing countries to improve economic growth and development.

And it will support a project led by political scientist Scott Sagan that uses online polling to better gauge the public’s tolerance for the use of nuclear weapons under certain scenarios – work that will lead to the collection of data that can inform how government officials craft military and diplomatic strategy.

“I can imagine two big benefits of the Implementation Lab,” said Sagan, a senior fellow at FSI and the institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“It will help pay for specific tasks that are sometimes not adequately funded elsewhere, especially in terms of student involvement,” he said. “And it will create a greater focus on policy implementation work that allows us to present our research results and see whether those results will have an impact on change.”

To encourage and support these ventures, the Implementation Lab will provide targeted funding, space for research projects and teaching, and a variety of support functions, including connections to on-campus resources that can assist with data visualization, locating interested students, and other tasks.  Those activities will be phased in during the next year based on the advice and feedback of faculty and others who are early participants.

The Implementation Lab is poised to be different from – but complementary to – other Stanford initiatives like the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. FSI’s Implementation Lab is specifically focused on supporting long-term relationships and engaging students and faculty in the study of policy implementation in different national, organizational, and cultural settings.

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FSI Senior Fellow Grant Miller is working on improving health care in India.

“The Stanford International Policy Lab is creating an exciting new community that will catapult our ability to have meaningful and sustained policy engagement and impact through common learning and sharing of experiences with like-minded scholars from all corners of campus,” said Grant Miller, an associate professor of medicine and FSI senior fellow whose project on improving health care in India is being supported by the Implementation Lab.

Ann Arvin, Stanford’s vice provost and dean of research, said the International Policy Implementation Lab will help and encourage faculty to make their scholarship more relevant to pressing problems.

Demands for specialized resources, narrowly focused engagement of students, the ability to consider a long-term horizon, and an understanding of the often opaque processes of policy formulation and implementation pose considerable challenges for researchers seeking to enhance the potential of their policy-oriented research to achieve real impact.

“The International Policy Implementation Lab will help our faculty and students address these obstacles,” Arvin said. “We anticipate that this novel program will bring together Stanford scholars who seek solutions to different policy-related problems at various places around the world, but whose work is linked by the underlying similarities of these challenges. The Implementation Lab will give them the opportunity to learn from each other and share ideas and experiences about what succeeds and what is likely to fail when it comes to putting policy into practice.”

That’s what attracts Stephen Luby to the lab.

“The mistake that researchers often make is that they work in isolation,” said Luby, whose work on reducing pollution caused by the brick making industry in Bangladesh is being supported by the Implementation Lab. “Then they think they’re ready to engage in the implementation process, and realize they haven’t engaged with all the stakeholders. Policy implementation is an iterative process. You need feedback from all the right people along the way.”

Luby, a professor of medicine and senior fellow at FSI and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, is working with brick makers and suppliers, as well as anthropologists and government regulators, to identify better ways to curb the pollution created by the coal-burning kilns throughout Bangladesh.

“Pneumonia is the leading cause of death among kids in Bangladesh,” Luby said. “And the brick kiln pollution is largely responsible for that. They’re using a 150-year-old technology to bake bricks, and there are better, cleaner ways to do it.”

But swapping coal-burning kilns for ones that are fired with cleaner natural gas is expensive, and there is little incentive for brick makers to change.

The government has passed regulations aimed at reducing pollution, but corruption, toothless laws and poor enforcement continue to undermine those policies.

"The country is caught in an equilibrium where people are getting cheap bricks but at a high cost to health and the environment,” Luby said. “We need to disrupt that equilibrium, and I look to the Implementation Lab to help us think this through. There’s a community of scholars who want to transform their work into implementation, and the lab will help convene them.”

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For more information about FSI's International Policy Implementation Lab, please refer to this Concept Note or contact Elizabeth Gardner.

Comparative, policy-oriented research aimed at improving health care and the overall quality of life across the Asia-Pacific region is at the heart of AHPP’s mission and activities. As a research program within a world-class university, focusing exclusively on comparative health policy in Asia, it is unique. AHPP aims to provide evidence for addressing key health policy challenges in the Asia-Pacific, from links between poverty and ill health, to improving “value for money” and defining appropriate government and market roles in health systems. The program brings researchers to Stanford for on-site collaboration, and creates opportunities for Stanford students to conduct research in and about Asia.

The study of comparative health policy at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) dates back almost a quarter century, with its roots in the Comparative Health Care Policy Research Project inaugurated in 1990. Starting with pioneering research on health economics in Japan, the program has expanded since then to encompass research on health policy and demographic change throughout the region, albeit with a continuing focus on East Asia in comparative perspective.

Collaborative initiatives and global researchers

AHPP’s leading-edge research involves experts on both sides of the Pacific. Among its current core research initiatives, AHPP is investigating the economic and social implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic change, especially population aging and gender imbalance in China, as well as examining the determinants of health and health disparities among Asian populations.

AHPP is also analyzing evidence on health service delivery and financing in the Asia-Pacific region, such as the impact of expanding insurance coverage, reforming provider payment incentives, and contracting with the private sector. In addition, the program is conducting a comparative analysis of the historical development of health care institutions — like physician drug dispensing and recent reforms to separate prescribing from dispensing. AHPP also sponsors collaborative initiatives to address critical global health issues, including tobacco control, promotion of child health, and control of infectious diseases.

Preparing future health care policy experts

The program is dedicated to training the next generation of health policy experts: undergraduate and graduate students gain crucial research experience by their involvement in AHPP’s research initiatives, as well as invaluable mentoring for their own projects. A postdoctoral fellowship was initiated in 2008, followed three years later by a fellowship for young health policy experts from low-income countries of Asia.

In addition to numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, recent AHPP publications include Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea and Prescribing Cultures and Pharmaceutical Policy in the Asia-Pacific. AHPP also runs its own working paper series that is open to scholars and health policy experts around the world.

Annual workshops and engaging seminars

Each year, AHPP assembles some of the world’s greatest health policy minds at Stanford to examine focused topics at conferences and workshops, resulting in special issues of journals, edited volumes, and ongoing collaborative research. In this thirtieth anniversary year of Shorenstein APARC, director Karen Eggleston organized a conference on “Economic Aspects of Population Aging in China and India,” co-sponsored by several related research programs at Harvard University.

In addition, AHPP organizes numerous public seminars throughout the academic year. Recent topics have included the battle against HIV/AIDS in Cambodia; immunizations and child health in Bangladesh; population aging in Japan; Vietnam’s health policy challenges; tobacco control in China; air pollution in South Asia; private health insurance in South Korea; and many other important health policy-related issues.