Rye Barcott's signature presentation on social entrepreneurship takes audiences on a journey through the joy and heartbreak, the friendships and betrayals, and the failures and triumphs of creating a movement to spark change from within one of the world's largest and most volatile slums. As inspiring as it is informative, this presentation will spur you on your own quest to make a difference in the world, no matter your age or avocation.

"An unforgettable odyssey. We need more of these wonderful affirmative tales of how good can triumph in Africa, as it can anywhere."
-Alexander McCall Smith, author of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency

"A tremendous story of the power of friendship, love, and the transforming grace of God."
-Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Rye Barcott co-founded the non-governmental organization Carolina for Kibera (CFK) with Salim Mohamed and Tabitha Atieno Festo while he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earning his B.A. in Peace, War, and Defense. CFK invests in local leaders in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya through its model of participatory development.  After graduation, Barcott served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 5 years in Iraq, Bosnia, and the Horn of Africa. He then earned master's degrees in business and public administration from Harvard University, where he was a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. In 2006, ABC World News named then Captain Barcott a ‘Person of the Year' for his dual service to Kibera and the Marine Corps. In 2009, he joined the inaugural class of TED Fellows. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter and works in the Sustainability Office at Duke Energy.  His first book, It Happened On the Way to War, will be published by Bloomsbury on March 29th to coincide with the 10th Anniversary of CFK.

CO-SPONSORED BY THE HAAS CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE

Conventional wisdom holds that the emigration of highly skilled workers depletes local human capital developing countries.  But when the very prospect of emigration induces people to invest more in their education, the effects might not be so negative.  We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded expoduses of skilled workers from a developing country.  We use rich census and administrative microdata to show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji, but also raised the stock of tertiary-educated people in Fiji - net departures.

Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development where he leads the Migration and Development initiatiave.  His research focuses on the effects of international migration from and in developing countries.  Michael joined the Center after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard.  His past writings have focused on the effects of foreign aid, determinants of capital flows and effects of tariff policy in the 19th century and the historical determinants of school system expansion.  Michael has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program.

Lina Khatib is the manager and co-founder of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She is an expert on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, political media and conflict in the Arab world, and the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She is also a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School. She is currently writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East for IB Tauris, which examines the power struggles among states, political leaders, political parties, civil society groups, and citizens in the region. She has also recently led a research project on US public diplomacy towards the Arab world in the digital age. She is the author of two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (2006), and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (2008) and has published widely on Middle East politics. 

In this seminar, she will talk about how Lebanon reached the political crisis it is in right now, the political strategy that has led to it, and what this means for Lebanon's political future.

Dr. Brian Chen's research has examined the tradeoffs between moral hazard and efficiencies in the integration of physician and non-physician medical services in the presence of asymmetric information. He has looked at a policy intervention in Taiwan that prohibited self-referrals of patients to physician-owned pharmacies unless the physician group integrated pharmacy services into the clinic by hiring an onsite pharmacist. He found that the policy reduced drug expenditures by close to thirty percent among physicians that did not have an onsite pharmacist. However, these physicians responded by increasing the overprovision of diagnostic services not covered by the policy, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the policy. Forty-five percent of the clinics that did not have an onsite pharmacist prior to the policy hired one subsequent to the implementation of the policy. Overall, after integration, the policy applied to only seventeen percent of clinics, and only reduced average discretionary expenditures by about two-point-five percent. Chen's research also shows that despite the reduction in drug utilization, patients treated at clinics without an onsite pharmacist did not have greater observable adverse health events than patients treated at integrated clinics. His results show that moral hazard costs of self-referral incentives are large, that the “safe harbor” exemption severely reduces the effectiveness of the policy, and that the exemption explains much of the recent integration of ancillary services into physician offices.

Dr. Brian Chen recently completed his Ph.D. in business administration in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. He received a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1997, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1992.

This colloquium will feature presentations by two visiting scholars from China. First, Dr. Huijun Liu will present research on health risks associated with gender imbalance in China. The problems of abnormal sex ratio at birth and high female infant mortality have plagued many Asian countries with a strong male preference and gender inequality. In China, these problems having lasted for more than twenty years and contributed to a serious gender imbalance in the population. As a direct consequence, “surplus men” or “forced bachelors,” are expected to increase to more than 30 million. Dr. Liu will discuss the potential health risks and other social problems likely to be exacerbated by this large-scale gender imbalance in China.

Second, Dr. Dahai Zhao will present “How Is Health Insurance Coverage Utilized among Migrant Workers in Shanghai, China?” According to the regulations of the Chinese national and Shanghai municipal governments, migrant workers employed in Shanghai should all be entitled to the Shanghai Migrant Worker Hospitalization Insurance (SMWHI) without premium and the vast majority should also have coverage through the New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS). Dr. Zhao will present results from research, conducted jointly with Dr. Wei Yu and Dr. Alan M. Garber, examining the status of the coverage and utilization of health insurance among migrant workers employed in Shanghai. Through their study, they found that a significant minority of migrant workers in Shanghai still had no health insurance, and that health insurance utilization among migrant workers was strongly limited by hospital location.

Huijun Liu is an associate professor in the Public Policy and Administration School at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. She received her PhD in management science and engineering from the Management School of Xi'an Jiaotong University. Her main areas of research focus on gender imbalance, reproductive health, vulnerability, and social support. Her current research focuses on how gender imbalance and migration amplify the risk of HIV transmission in China. Liu has published over twenty papers in Chinese academic journals, including China Soft Science, Population and Economics, Psychological Science Advance, Collection of Women's Studies, and Modern Preventive Medicine.

Dr. Zhao is an assistant professor with the School of Public Economics and Administration at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE), and a fellow with the Center for Health Policy at SUFE. He earned a master's degree in medicine in 2005 and a PhD in 2008, both from Fudan University, China.

Professor Li Liang Dong of the Central Party School's Politics and Law Department advises directly senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party.  Professor Li received his doctorate from the Central Party School in Law.  His main research areas are:  democratic perspective, Western political thought, and political theory. 

Some of his key works include: "Contemporary Chinese Studies of Public Opinion" (Central Party School Press, 1996), "Mao Zedong and Chinese farmers" (China Farmers Press, 1993), "Contemporary Chinese Democracy Studies" (Contemporary World Press, 2001 edition) and "Third Wave and the Chinese Democracy" (Central Party School Press, 2001 edition).  He has published over 300 articiles.  Professor Li has hosted discussions on topics including "Public Discussion in China",  "Societal Transitions", and "Study of Political Stability".

Co-sponsored by The Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University

Frédéric Mitterrand is the French Minister of Culture and Communication. Throughout his career, he has been an actor, screenwriter, television presenter, writer, producer and director.

Sponsored by The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The San Francisco French Consulate, The Stanford Humanities Center and The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University.

This EWG talk will highlight PESD's first analysis using our new coal model by demonstrating how it can be used to analyze the effects of China's import behavior on world thermal coal consumption. We will explore China's capability as a consumer to exercise market power in the domestic Chinese markets, and to what extent this behavior affects the price, consumption, and production of steam coal globally. Two scenarios will be presented: 1) we assume Chinese consumers with import capability behave competitively and 2) we assume they exercise market power.

The use of coal as a fuel has increased tremendously over the past decade, with most of the growth coming from rapidly expanding economies like those in China and India. As coal continues to be the fuel of choice for electricity generation around the world, PESD is excited to be developing a model to further understand the global steam coal market.  In the future, we anticipate the model will help answer questions regarding climate and trade policies, market structure, and technology improvements.

Michael Joined PESD in July of 2010 as a research assistant after graduating from Stanford University with a BA in Economics.

About the speaker:

Dr. Franz Cede is a retired Austrian diplomat who served as the Austrian Ambassador to Russia (1999-2003) and to NATO (2003-2007). He also was the Legal Advisor to the Austrian Foreign Ministry. He has a strong California connection dating back to the time when he was the Austrian Consul General in Los Angeles 20 years ago. Dr Cede holds the degree "Doctor of Law" from Innsbruck University. He received an M.A. in international affairs from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and is currently an associate professor at the Andrassy University in Budapest, Hungary. Dr. Cede has published several books and articles in the field of international relations, international law and diplomacy.

Jointly sponsored by The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Audio Synopsis:

In this talk, Dr. Cede details his views on Russia's evolving relationships with the EU, NATO, and the US, drawing on his experiences as Austrian ambassador to the Soviet Union from1999 to 2003. Cede first outlines his perceptions of present-day Russia-US and Russia-NATO relations. Russia, he explains, still thinks in Cold War terms of bilateral relations and considers the United States to be its primary strategic partner on global security issues, especially in light of the Obama administration's recent "reset" of relations and ratification of the new START treaty. In contrast, Russia views NATO as outdated and yet still a threat. Its expansion to the East is viewed with suspicion by Putin's administration, which considers these developments to be distinctly anti-Russian. Russia engages with NATO only to the extent that it believes it can influence the organization's behavior and policies toward Moscow.  Still, in Cede's experience, the NATO-US-Russia triangle continues to be at the forefront of Russian policymakers' dialogue. Russian leaders prefer to avoid dealing with the EU because it lacks a coherent foreign policy, and also because Russia prefers bilateral relations with countries that offer a strategic benefit. Dr. Cede quotes Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote in a recent op-ed that "much of the Russian foreign policy elite treats the European Union as a kind of transient, post-modern late 20th century anachronism: flawed in principle, and feeble in practice. What matters in the 21st century, as much as it did in the 19th century, is the...determination of great powers." Dr. Cede cites the Georgian military intervention and recent Ukrainian gas crisis as examples of Russia's renewed attempts to reestablish dominance in its neighborhood.  

In the second portion of his talk Dr. Cede traces the evolution of Russian views of the EU and NATO.  Ten years ago, the EU-Russia relationship was largely ignored in the Russian media. When Cede asked Russian citizens for their views on the EU, they "either didn't know or didn't care." As Ambassador, Dr. Cede found Russian officials better informed, but  disdainful of being given orders by EU donors and "treated like a developing country." Cede illustrates this dynamic by recounting the 2004 incident in which the EU forced the residents of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast region to apply for EU Shengen visas, which then required special permits to travel throughout Russia.  Western assurances that EU expansion to the east was not an attack on Russia but rather an attempt to extend stability to the Eastern bloc fell on deaf ears. Cede believes that notwithstanding Russia's attitude, the country is too big to ever join the EU, or to be influenced by Europe in its policy decisions. Because Russia still views itself as "one of the poles in a multipolar world," Dr. Cede insists that any change must come from within the country. However, Cede views Russia's candidacy to the WTO, which would require a clearer commitment to democracy and open economic policies, as a glimmer of hope.

Finally, Dr. Cede outlines several "permanent" features of Russia's relationship with the world, including economic interdependence, lack of cooperation on security policy, and weak relations with stateless organizations like the EU and NATO. He lays out several recommendations, which are elaborated on during the Q&A session:

1. EU policymakers and other Western powers (notably the US) should strengthen their common Russia policy. Given the EU's dependence on Russia for oil and gas, it should also diversify its own energy sources to strengthen its bargaining position.
2. The EU should consider membership for "bridge countries" such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus.
3. Personal diplomacy between universities, civil society, and citizens is important.  This includes reevaluation of visa policy. Cede hopes that the advent of the internet will also help improve attitudes between Russia and the rest of the world.