Yun-han Chu is President of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Political Science of the Academia Sinica. He is one of Taiwan's most distinguished and widely quoted political scientists. He is also the author of Crafting Democracy in Taiwan, the lead coordinator of the East Asia Democracy Barometer, and author of numerous articles on Taiwan's democracy, politics, political economy and cross strait relations.

Studies of China's inequality almost universally report that the gap between urban and rural household incomes in China is large, has increased over time, and contributes substantially to overall inequality. Whether or not concerns about the urban-rural income gap are justified depends, among other things, on the true magnitude of the gap and also on the factors that underlie the gap. Using a new and rich data, this study investigates the size of China's urban-rural income gap, the contribution of that gap to overall inequality, and the factors underlying the gap in 1995 and 2002. The analysis improves on past estimates by adjusting for spatial price differences and including migrants. It also measures the extent to which the urban-rural income gap is due to differences in household and individual characteristics, rather than the advantages of location of residence. Professor Sicular will present the key findings of this research undertaken with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, University of Goteburg, and Beijing Normal University.

Terry Sicular received her PhD from Yale University in 1983 and has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University. Her publications include Food Price Policy in Asia: A Comparative Study. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, What Can We Learn from the Chinese Revolution? Homo Oeconomicus (2004), and Moving toward Markets? Labor Allocation in Rural China Journal of Development Economics (2003). She is currently working on The Political Economy of the Chinese Revolution and Rural Labour and Employment in China (with Yaohui Zhao)

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

Professor Andrew Mack is the Director of the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. Prior to establishing the Human Security Centre, he was a Visiting Professor at the Program on Humanitarian Policy at Harvard University (2001) and spent two and a half years as the Director of Strategic Planning in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations (1998-2001).

Professor Mack has held the Chair in International Relations at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Australian National University (1991-1998), was the Director of the ANU's Peace Research Centre (1985-91) and was the ANU's Senior Research Fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (1984-85).

He has held research and teaching positions at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) the London School of Economics, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Fudan University in Shanghai and the International University of Japan.

His pre-academic career included six years in the Royal Air Force (engineer and pilot); two and a half years in Antarctica as meteorologist and Deputy Base Commander; a year as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and two years with the BBC's World Service producing the current affairs program "The World Today".

Gideon Rose has been Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs since December 2000. From 1995 to December 2000 he was Olin Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, during which time he served as Chairman of the Council's Roundtable on Terrorism. He has taught American foreign policy at Columbia and Princeton. In 1994-95 Rose served as Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. He has written extensively on US foreign policy as well as co-editing with James Hoge, "How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War" (Random House, 2001). Rose received a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University and a B.A. in Classics from Yale University.

One of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s was that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new information technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have carved out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries.

Breznitz argues that emerging economies have more than one option for developing their high technology industries. His research shows how state actions shaped the structure of these three IT industries and that the industry's developmental path was influenced by four critical decisions of the state. His work provides a basis to advance a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems.