What's next for Korean democracy? How can Korea advance the next state of its develoment? APARC and Korea Program director Gi-Wook Shin addresses these and other questions in his new book, The Adventure of Democracy.

Available in Korea on June 15, this publication is compilation of Shin's recent essays, Shin's Reflections on Korea, presenting a road map for realizing the vision of a "Next Korea" across the realms of politics, economics, society, culture, and foreign policy.

If you find yourself in Seoul, we invite you to join Professor Shin for an engaging book talk that will delve into the pressing questions surrounding Korean democracy.

Discussants:

Shin-wha Lee, Professor of Political Science, Korea University; Ambassador of International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights, Republic of Korea

Tae Gyun Park, Professor of Korean Studies, Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University

Sang-hun Choe, New York Times Seoul Bureau

The discussion is moderated by Ho-ki Kim, professor of sociology at Yonsei University.

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

July 11th, 5-6 pm PST; July 12th, 2023, 8-9 am Beijing Time

Scientific evidence documents an ongoing mass extinction of species, caused by human activity. Allocating conservation resources is difficult due to scarce evidence on the damages from losing specific species. This paper studies the collapse of vultures in India, triggered by the expiry of a patent on a painkiller. Our results suggest the functional extinction of vultures --- efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment --- increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation. These effects are comparable to estimates of heat deaths from climate change. We quantify damages at $69.4 billion per-year.

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Eyal Frank is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and the Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago. He works at the intersection of economics and conservation, addressing three broad questions: (i) how do natural inputs, namely animals, contribute to different production functions of interest, (ii) how do market dynamics reduce natural habitats and lead to declining wildlife population levels, and (iii) what are the costs, indirect ones in particular, of conservation policies. To overcome causal inference challenges—as manipulating ecosystems and species at large scales is often infeasible—his work draws on natural experiments from ecology and policy, and uses econometric techniques to advance our understanding regarding the social cost of biodiversity losses.

Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 849 6673 1656
Passcode: 110194

About the Event: Nuclear-armed states–including Russia and China–have sought to secure their nuclear arsenals from preemptive attack by deploying mobile ground-launched missiles. However, a spate of technological developments remote-sensing technologies has spurred a debate about whether nuclear arsenals will remain survivable. Current scholarship implicitly assumes that mobile missiles will be operated sub-optimally, vastly underestimating the difficulty of tracking mobile missiles and hence their survivability. In this paper, I introduce a qualitative model of tracking and use it to analyze how a set of remote sensing technologies, including space-based radar, could be used in concert to attempt to track mobile missiles. Using this model, I show that mobile missiles can be easily made survivable today using simple operational countermeasures. I then show how technological countermeasures, some of which are already deployed today, could allow mobile missiles to remain survivable into the near future, even as remote sensing capabilities continue to develop.

About the Speaker: Thomas MacDonald is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has an interdisciplinary scientific background which he applies to interesting technical problems which are interwoven with political concerns. His current research focuses on the verification of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation agreements. This work is along two tracks, developing verifiable and feasible arms control proposals to revitalize a flagging arms control establishment, and researching probabilistic methods to find novel approaches to stubborn arms control challenges.

He completed his PhD in nuclear science and engineering at MIT. His dissertation work studied the national security implications of advancing and emerging technologies, specifically remote sensing technologies used to track mobile missiles carrying nuclear weapons. He also completed a MSc in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Toronto where he synthesized nanoparticles for detecting and treating cancer, and holds a BSc in biochemistry from the University of Waterloo.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls’ empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years of incentive are 19% less likely to marry underage, the empowerment program failed to decrease adolescent marriage. We show that these results are consistent with a signaling model in which bride type is imperfectly observed but preferred bride types (socially conservative girls) have lower returns to delaying marriage. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we observe substantial spillovers of the incentive on untreated non-preferred types.

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Erica Field is a Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University specializing in the fields of Development Economics, Health Economics and Economic Demography. Professor Field’s work examines the microeconomics of household poverty and health in developing countries, with an emphasis on the study of gender and development. She has written papers on several topics in development in many different parts of the world, including microfinance contract design and social networks in India, marriage markets in Bangladesh, micronutrient deficiencies in Tanzania, health insurance for the poor in Nicaragua, household bargaining over fertility in Zambia.  Her work has been published in several leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Journal. Professor Field received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003. Prior to joining the Economics Department at Duke, she was a John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University. 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85156177922?pwd=RzFaKzlMVUdleVF2N0M3YUFBd3ZlZz09
Meeting ID: 851 5617 7922
Passcode: 410360

India and China are strategic rivals. The Indian government has hardened its policies on China in recent years – but how do the Indian people see China? How a public regards key foreign policy issues could give the government space to develop or change policy; conversely, it could limit a democratic government’s options, especially in times of crisis. In this webinar, APARC post-doctoral fellow Aidan Milliff presents groundbreaking research on Indian public attitudes towards China. Examining some 60 years of data on how Indians see China, the research shows clear historical trends in Indian opinion towards China. In recent years, Indian views of China had been souring well before the border crisis of 2020, and before government policy began to harden. Using this rich body of new polling data, this webinar will examine how the government is constrained by, and seeks to shape, its public’s opinion towards China. 

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Aidan Milliff is the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He uses computational social science methods combined with qualitative tools to answer questions about the cognitive, emotional, and social forces that shape political violence, forced migration, post-violence politics, and the politics of South Asia. Before coming to Stanford, Aidan earned a PhD in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, he was affiliated with the MIT Security Studies Program and Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute. Prior to graduate school, Aidan was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was born and raised in Colorado.

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Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the South Asia Initiative. His research focuses on military strategy, Indian defense policy, and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defense Department. Arzan holds a PhD from King’s College London.

Thailand is at a crossroads. On 14 May 2023, Thai voters took part in their country’s first fully free and fair election after nearly a decade under military and conservative-elite rule. The results gave a resounding victory in the 500-member House of Representatives to Thailand's two most progressive parties: the Pheu Thai Party affiliated with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the relative newcomer Move Forward Party. Exceeding even the most optimistic predictions, Move Forward won the most House seats, while the two most pro-military parties together took only 12 percent. Thai voters have conveyed their preferences. But will their votes decide who forms the government and what if any policy reforms are allowed to proceed? Looming over that question for the present is the chance of a more democratic future and the legacy of an authoritarian past.

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Allen Hicken, in addition to his professorship, is affiliated with the University of Michigan’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, its Center for Political Studies, and its Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. His work focuses on political institutions, political economy, and policymaking with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. His many publications include a recent co-authored book, Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (2022). Prof. Hicken has held visiting-scholar positions in Thailand (twice), the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia. His higher degrees are from the University of California San Diego (PhD) and Columbia University (MA).

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Ken Mathis Lohatepanont, alongside his doctoral studies, writes regularly for the Thai Enquirer, an English-language news website based in Bangkok.  Before coming to the University of Michigan he worked for the Thailand Development Research Institute as part of its Innovation Policy for Sustainable Development Team.  In that capacity he helped to generate policy recommendations as to how the Thai economy could be restructured to make it more competitive. Earlier affiliations included a stint as a Journalism Intern with the Asia Focus section of the Bangkok Post reporting and commenting on economics, politics, and business in the Asia-Pacific region.  His BA in political science is from UC-Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual and reproductive health outcomes and offers their male partners a soccer intervention, which educates and inspires young men to make better sexual and reproductive health choices. Both interventions reduce female reports of intimate partner violence. Impacts are larger among females who were already sexually active at baseline. We develop a model to understand the mechanisms at play. The soccer intervention improves male attitudes around violence and risky sexual behaviors. Females in the goal setting arm take more control of their sexual and reproductive health by exiting violent relationships. Both of these mechanisms drive reductions in IPV.

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Manisha Shah is the Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., Endowed Chair in Social Justice and Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Global Lab for Research in Action. She is an affiliate of NBER, CEGA, JPAL, BREAD, and IZA. Her research focuses on development economics, particularly applied microeconomics, health, and development. She has written several papers on the economics of sex markets in order to learn how more effective policies and programs can be deployed to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. She also works in the area of child health and education. . Shah has been the PI on various impact evaluations and randomized controlled trials and is currently leading projects in Tanzania, Indonesia, and India. She has also worked extensively in Ecuador and Mexico. Her research has been supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the World Bank, and the National Science Foundation among others. She is an editor at Journal of Health Economics and an Associate Editor at The Review of Economics and Statistics. Shah received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

About the Event: This talk will look at the experience of India in terms of its security, identity, and the command of nuclear weapons since 1998.

About the Speaker: Professor Amitabh Mattoo is Professor of Disarmament Studies at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. He has been an Advisor of Cabinet-Rank to the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and a Vice Chancellor of the University of Jammu. He has been a member of India’s National Security Council’s Advisory Board and a member of the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India for his contribution to public life.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.