This seminar is jointly hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) and Greater China Business Club (GCBC) at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

About the seminar

There is often much discussion about the current Chinese economic environment and how it impacts global economic growth. However, to gauge the true impact of China on the world economy, one should look at what will happen over the long term as the country gets closer to the United States in economic strength and maturity. This talk looked at the current trends in the Chinese political and economic arena, the long-term prospects for Chinese economic growth, and how these trends would impact the global economic order. Examples from the technology and internet industry were used to demonstrate this effect and how China would shape global industries.

About the speaker

Chris joined McKinsey & Company’s Asia leadership team in 2011 as a senior advisor in
technology. He leads engagements for clients in the technology, telecommunications and
semiconductor industries and is taking a leadership role in advanced technology areas both in Asia and globally. Previous to McKinsey, Chris was the General Manager of Intel China,
directly responsible for the overall region’s multi-billion dollar P&L. Chris managed Intel
China’s business operations, its technical and development operations, its strategic programs with enterprise, Internet & government customers, and owned the mobile, server, phone, embedded and consumer electronics product lines. Chris also managed Intel’s Olympics Program. During his 3-year tenure ending in 2010, overall revenue increased by over 80%.

Formerly, Chris was Chief of Staff to Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney, assisting
Mr. Maloney in leading Intel’s $15 billion mobile PC business as well as its $45 billion global
Sales & Marketing Group. Chris led Intel’s wireless business unit as well as various business
development, sales, marketing and product management teams at Intel. Chris was previously a private equity investor at The Blackstone Group in New York City. He served as a consultant for Bain & Company in South Africa and led the Board of Directors for Decortech, a privatelyheld technology company.

During a six months sabbatical in 2010, Chris led a major charity program in China and was a visiting professor of strategy at the MIT-Fudan University MBA program in Shanghai. Chris’s academic and policy works have been published by Stanford University; in Opportunity ’08 by the Brookings Institution; and in the Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation textbook by Clayton Christensen and Robert Burgelman. Chris has served as a senior fellow at Tsinghua University and was the author of the ‘Asia Diary’ column for Forbes Online. Chris is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and an Advisory Board Member for the Seva Foundation.

Chris received an MBA from Stanford Business School (2001), where he was an Arjay Miller
scholar; a Masters of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University (2001); and a Bachelors of Science in Economics, summa cum laude, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1996).

Chris was born in Washington, D.C., spent his entire childhood in rural Colorado, lived as an
expatriate in France and South Africa, and currently lives with his wife Xiaomin in China.

Infectious diseases, especially those transmitted from person to person through the respiratory route, continue to pose a threat to the global community. Public health surveillance systems and the International Health Regulations are intended to facilitate the recognition of and rapid response to infectious diseases that pose the risk of developing into a pandemic, but the response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic illustrates the continuing challenges to implementing appropriate prevention and control measures. The response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic will be discussed and its implications examined.

Speaker biography:

This colloquium will discuss the state of evidence, challenges, and research agenda regarding the growth of private hospitals and public-private hospital partnerships in developing Asia.

Dominic Montagu is an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and lead of the Health Systems Initiative at the Global Health Group of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His work is focused on private delivery of health services in developing countries and on market function for health services and health commodities. He has active field research projects ongoing in Nigeria and Myanmar. Montagu holds masters degrees in business administration and public health, as well as a doctorate in public health, from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). He has worked extensively in Africa and Asia, and teaches on the private sector in developing countries, and on the regulation of private hospitals and public-private-partnerships at UCSF, UC Berkeley, and on behalf of the World Bank Institute.

Italy is the 8th biggest national economy in the world and the 3rd biggest in the Euro zone after Germany and France. Although it holds the third-largest gold reserves in the world, enjoys a high living standard with comparatively low private debts and is technologically innovative, as for example the recent takeover of parts of the U.S. car industry during the financial crisis 2008-11 underscored, it is currently considered to be the most vulnerable national economy threatened by the European debt crisis because of its huge public debt which reached 118% of the GDP in 2011. Although Italy is considered as "too big to fail" because it could hardly be saved by the European rescue funding programme with a GDP of more than 2.1 trillion Euro, there are fears that a further loss of trust by the international money markets could trigger an unprecedented crisis. Interest rates payed for Italian public debt rose to record numbers in fall 2011 due to the downgrading by leading rating agencies since summer 2011. The seminar gives a concise overview over the current state of affairs in Italy, including its debt and economic crises, and discusses their potential interweavement with the social crisis the country is undergoing in the view of international observers. In the age of media democracy, contextual political factors like social and cultural psychology, public appearances and symbolic events are increasingly impacting Italian politics and economics in ambivalent ways.

A podcast of this talk will soon be made available.

**Due to space restrictions, this event has reached capacity and we will no longer be taking RSVPs. Everyone is still welcome to attend but please plan to arrive early as seating is on a first come, first serve basis.**

Under the Hu-Wen leadership, China announced a shift in its development policy from a policy program that mainly emphasizes economic growth to one that pursues a “harmonious society.” The harmonious society program was a response to rapid increases in inequality during the 1990s, and its aim has been to ensure that the benefits from growth are widely shared.    

In recent years have the benefits from growth been widely shared? Has income inequality increased or decreased during the Hu-Wen era?

Drawing on recent findings from the China Household Income Project, a collaborative survey research project monitoring changes in incomes and inequality, Professor Terry Sicular will discuss recent trends in inequality and poverty in China. 

Terry Sicular is professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. She received her doctorate at Yale and has taught at Stanford and Harvard. She is a specialist on the Chinese economy, speaks Mandarin, and has been studying and travelling to China for more than 30 years. Her recent research examines incomes and inequality in China, as well as related topics such as educational attainment and its intergenerational transmission, and the impact of housing reforms on household income and wealth. She has published widely in scholarly journals and books, and is as a contributor to and co-editor of Inequality and Public Policy, published by Cambridge University Press (2008). She has served as a consultant to international donor organizations, and is a leader in the ongoing, China Household Income Project, a collaborative research project that conducts a nationwide household survey and monitors trends in China’s incomes and inequality.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

The global health community has been aiming at ensuring health coverage for all. To achieve universal health care coverage, the German Social Health Insurance model is one solution. However, one major disadvantage of Social Health Insurance is the fragmented insurance plans, exemplified by 3,500 insurance plans in Japan’s public universal health insurance system. To improve the financial sustainability of Japan’s public universal health insurance, policy options include consolidating fragmented plans as already implemented in Germany and South Korea.

This presentation has two major goals. One is to evaluate the optimal health insurance size in consolidating 3,500 insurance plans in Japan through a simulation analysis using the best available micro data in Japan. The other goal is to discuss the global policy implications based on the experiences of Japan's public universal health insurance.

Dr. Byung-Kwang Yoo is an associate professor in health policy in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Yoo’s unique career includes clinical medicine (MD) in Japan and research experience as a health services researcher/health economist in the United States. He obtained an MS in health policy and management from Harvard University, and a PhD in health policy and management (concentration on health economics) from Johns Hopkins University. Yoo used to work as a research associate at the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University, as a health economist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and as an assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York State. He has published his work in leading journals such as Lancet, Health Economics, Health Services Research, the American Journal of Public Health, and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The team of leaders who will take the helm in China beginning next year—the so-called “Fifth Generation”—will be better educated, have greater exposure to the outside world, and extensive experience implementing policies that have facilitated sustained economic growth and growing international influence. They may view issues somewhat differently than their predecessors but have risen to the top by going along to get ahead and are unlikely to propose radical policy initiatives.  But they must confront a growing number of challenges fueled by China’s past success and recent behavior and will be constrained by structural features of the Chinese system and integration into the global market.

Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). In 2009, he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at FSI. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

Since 2006, more than 40,000 people in Mexico have died in drug-related homicides, and recent figures indicate that the pace and severity of drug-related violence is increasing. Experiencing a significant breakdown of its rule of law, the population of Ciudad Juárez alone suffered more than 3,000 homicides in 2010, making it the most dangerous city anywhere in the world. Dr. Poiré Romero will address the characteristics of the security situation in Mexico, the historical events and situations that made it what it is now, and the current strategy that the Federal Government is implementing to achieve security. Dr. Poiré’s talk will be completely off-the-record, and is by invitation only.

Speaker biography:

On September 9, 2011, Dr. Alejandro Poiré Romero was appointed as Director of Mexico´s National Security Agency by President Felipe Calderón. Prior to that, Dr. Poiré served as Secretary of the National Security Council and Cabinet, and has held a variety of cabinet-level positions since 2007. He also worked as an adviser to the National Institute of Statistics on the creation of the first National Survey on Political Culture and Citizenship Practices. He has published several academic pieces analyzing public opinion, campaign dynamics and voting behavior in Mexico, in addition to two books on Mexico’s democratic process, Towards Mexico’s Democratization: Parties, Campaigns, Elections, and Public Opinion and Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election.

Dr. Poiré holds a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s degree in the same field from Mexico’s Autonomous Technological Institute (ITAM), where he has been a professor and the Political Science Department Chair. He has also been a visiting researcher and lecturer at several institutions in the USA, including MIT, and Latin America.