Indonesia is the world’s third most populous democracy. Indonesians will vote to elect a president, vice-president, and national and local legislators on 14 February in the world’s largest election held on a single day. If none of the three presidential candidates receives more than half of the total popular vote, the two with the most votes will compete in a second round on 26 June. Leading in the polls is Indonesia’s current minister of defense and former army general Prabowo Subianto. Implicated in human rights violations, he was dishonorably discharged from the military in 1998 and later denied entry into the United States, a ban lifted in 2020. Opposing him are Ganjar Pranowo and Anies Baswedan, former governors of Central Java and Jakarta, respectively, and both younger than Prabowo. The panel will discuss the impact of the election on Indonesia’s democracy and the country’s domestic and foreign policies going forward. 

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Sana Jaffrey, resident at ANU, is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  She has more than 15 years of experience doing research in Indonesia.  As director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta (2021-2022), she and her research team reported on violent conflict and extremism in Southeast Asia. At the World Bank (200-2013) she led the implementation of its National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) data project in Indonesia. Outlets that have carried her writings include Comparative Politics, Foreign Policy, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Studies in Comparative International Development.  Her doctorate is from the University of Chicago.

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R. William Liddle specializes in the politics of Southeast Asia, especially political leadership and voting behavior in Indonesia. His many publications include Dua Negeri, Empat Pemimpin [Two Countries, Four Leaders] (2021) comparing Indonesian and American presidents, written in Indonesian for the Jakarta daily Kompas. His media venues have included the PBS NewsHour, the BBC, and many Indonesian TV and radio broadcasts. His scholarship and his mentorship of Indonesian students were honored by Indonesia’s Ministry of Education in 2018 and the Achmad Bakrie Foundation and the Freedom Institute in 2022. He is the first non-Indonesian to have received the Bakrie Award since its inception in 2003. His doctorate is from Yale.

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Gita Wirjawan, at Stanford, is researching the directions that nation-building is taking in Southeast Asia and related sustainability issues involving the US. His experience in government and business has included positions such as Indonesia’s Minister of Trade; chair of Indonesia’s Investment Coordinating Board; and founding chair of the Jakarta-based equity fund Ancora Group and the Ancora Foundation. He has held key positions with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, served as commissioner of Indonesia’s state oil company, Pertamina, and continues to host the popular education podcast “Endgame.” His advanced degrees are from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA) and Baylor University (BA).

In this talk, Professor Victor Cha will discuss historical behavioral patterns of North Korean missile tests, military provocations, and weapons demonstrations, and what all these might mean for security on the Korean peninsula in 2024.

About the Speaker:

Victor Cha is Distinguished University Professor, D.S. Song-KF Chair, and Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is also Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. He is the author of seven books including Korea: A New History of South Korea and North (Yale University Press, 2023) with Ramon Pacheco Pardo. Black Box: Methods and Data in the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2024) is forthcoming.

Professor Cha was appointed in 2021 by Biden administration to serve on the Defense Policy Board in an advisory role to the Secretary of Defense. He formerly served on the White House National Security Council where he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand and Pacific Island affairs. He was also the Deputy Head of Delegation for the United States at the Six Party Talks in Beijing, and received two Outstanding Service Commendations during his tenure at the NSC.

Directions and Parking

Note: This talk is also offered as an in-person seminar on April 5 at 12 p.m.

International procurement institutions have played an important role in drug supply. This paper studies price, delivery, and procurement lead time of drug supply for major infectious diseases (antiretrovirals, antimalarials, antituberculosis, and antibiotics) in 106 developing countries from 2007-2017 across four procurement institution types. We find that pooled procurement institutions lower prices: pooling internationally is most effective for small buyers and more concentrated markets, and pooling within-country is most effective for large buyers and less concentrated markets. Pooling can reduce delays, but at the cost of longer anticipated procurement lead times. Finally, pooled procurement is more effective for older-generation drugs, compared to intellectual property licensing institutions that focus on newer, patented drugs. We corroborate the findings using multiple identification strategies, including an instrumental variable strategy, the Altonji-Elder-Taber-Oster method, and reduced-form demand estimation. Our results suggest that the optimal mixture of procurement institutions depends on the trade-off between costs and urgency of need, with pooled international procurement institutions particularly valuable when countries can plan well ahead of time.

Coauthor: Nahim Bin Zahur (Queen’s University).

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Dr. Lucy Xiaolu Wang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Faculty Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Germany, and a Faculty Associate at the Canadian Centre for Health Economics. Her research focuses on the economics of innovation & digitization in health care markets (national and global), particularly in the biopharmaceutical and digital health industries. Dr. Wang earned her PhD in economics from Cornell University, her master’s degree in economics from Duke University, and her bachelor’s degree in applied economics (specialty: insurance) from Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, China. 

Talk Title: The Economics of Infertility—Evidence from Reproductive Medicine

Petra Persson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford’s Department of Economics. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Stanford Center for International Development, and a Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development. Her research agenda centers on social insurance and family structure, and explores the interaction between government-provided insurance and intra-family insurance.

Natalia Serna is an economist with an interest in health economics and industrial organization. Her research agenda broadly examines the impact of government policies and insurance market structure on access to care through hospital networks, health outcomes, and health-care costs. Specifically, her research shows that health insurers engage in risk selection by providing narrow hospital networks for services that most patients tend to claim. Serna’s research shows that strong competition between private insurers is needed to achieve appropriate access to health services to avoid insurance monopolies. 

Fernando Alarid-Escudero, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. in Health Decision Sciences from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) Región Centro, Aguascalientes, Mexico, from 2018 to 2022, prior to coming to Stanford. His research focuses on developing statistical and decision-analytic models to identify optimal prevention, control, and treatment policies to address a wide range of public health problems and develops novel methods to quantify the value of future research.

About the Event: While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success.  To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation.  This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.