Education, fundamental to economic growth and development, has become an arena for global competition in the digital information age. As in the United States, many Asian policymakers are now pushing for higher education reform in the belief that strong, innovative higher education systems will pave the way for their countries’ future economic and political strength.

Looking comparatively at situations across Asia and in the United States, the fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue considered possible solutions to the challenges of reforming higher education today.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012. In the discussion sessions following the presentations, participants raised a number of key, policy-relevant points, which are highlighted in the Dialogue’s final report. These include:

All countries face the challenge of preparing students to find meaningful employment, yet there is a lack of clarity in educational goals. Several participants felt the political expediency of government funding aiming for world university rankings must be balanced with the less politically attractive but potentially more critical vocational needs of economic development.

University administrators and government policymakers need to define their goals for “globalization” or “internationalization” as they launch new initiatives and policies. Participants noted that, while few are opposed to the principle of internationalization, without a sense of concrete and realistic goals, the cost-benefit of various measures may not make sense.

Online education promises great potential innovation in education, but it is still at a very early stage. While potentially valuable in enhancing traditional learning and research, serious challenges remain. There was a sense that far more needs to be done than simply taking existing forms of education and putting them online in order to truly harness the potential offered by online education.

The Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue series is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko. The final report from the 2012 Dialogue, and previous years, is available for download from the Shorenstein APARC website.

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil, but has come at the cost of expansion into non-protected forests in the Amazon and native savanna in the Cerrado. Over the past fifty years, production has increased from 26 million to 260 million tons. Area planted to soybeans has increased from roughly 1 million hectares in 1970 to more than 23 million hectares in 2010, second only to the United States.

A new study out of Stanford University examines the role of institutions and supply chain conditions in Brazil’s booming soybean industry and the relationship between soy yields and planted area. With the demand for soybeans projected to increase far into the future a better understanding of the economic and institutional factors influencing production can help policymakers better manage land use change.

Using county level data the researchers found that soy area and yields are higher in areas with high cooperative membership and credit levels, and where cheap credit sources are more accessible. Cooperatives help producers secure lower prices for inputs or higher prices for outputs through group purchases and sales. They also enable producers to store their grain past the harvesting period and sell it when prices are higher.

“This suggests that soybean production and profitability will increase as supply chain infrastructure improves in the Cerrado and Amazon,” said lead author Rachael Garrett, a PhD student in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.

The authors did not find a significant relationship between land tenure and planted area or land tenure and yields. But found that yields decline and planted area actually increases as transportation costs increase. More importantly, the study showed counties with higher yields have a higher proportion of land planted in soy.

“Policies intending to spare land through technological yield improvements could actually lead to land expansion in the absence of strong land use regulations if demand and per hectare profits are high,” said co-author Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

The current Forest Code requires rural land users in the Amazon to conserve 80% of their property in a ‘Legal Reserve’, and landowners in the Cerrado to conserve 20%. Historically, illegal clearings have been common and enforcement of the Legal Reserve requirements remains poor.

While this study focuses on Brazil, the results underscore the importance of understanding how supply chains influence land use associated with cash crops in other countries. Future demand for soybeans, as well as for cash crops like Indonesian palm oil, will continue to grow as demand for cooking oil, livestock feed, and biodiesel increase with income growth and changing dietary preferences in emerging economies. 

Those who live and die behind prison walls don’t usually get much public attention. Incarceration is, after all, meant to remove criminals from society. But contagious and potentially deadly diseases can’t be locked and left in a penitentiary, especially when infected inmates are eventually released.

The problem of prisoners and ex-convicts transmitting diseases to the general population is especially bad in the countries of the former Soviet Union, where rates of tuberculosis and drug-resistant strains of TB are among the world’s highest.

But Stanford researchers have identified solutions that could help curb tuberculosis in Russia, Latvia, Tajikistan and the 12 other countries in the region. Led by Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, an assistant professor of medicine, the team has shown that a genetic TB and drug resistance screening tool called GeneXpert is more cost effective and better at reducing the spread of the disease than other methods currently recommended by the World Health Organization. Their findings were published online Nov. 27 in PLoS Medicine.

“Tuberculosis doesn’t stop at any border or any locked gate,” said Goldhaber-Fiebert, who is also a faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a research center at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“Drug-resistant TB is rampant in prisons,” he said. “When infected prisoners get out, they are thought to drive the TB epidemic in the general population. We are looking to find better ways to deal with that.”

About 400,000 cases of TB were diagnosed last year in the 15 former Soviet Union states – 40 times the number reported in the United States. Nearly 80,000 of the sick had drug-resistant TB. According to several studies, the prevalence of TB among the region’s prisoners is 10 times greater than that of the general population.

The WHO suggests three ways to screen for TB in prisons: relying on inmates to report symptoms, actively interviewing prisoners about their health, and administering chest X-rays. The organization doesn’t recommend one method over another, and currently, prisoners in the former Soviet Union are screened annually with miniature chest X-rays.

While X-rays can show whether a lung looks healthy, they don’t always catch TB. And when they do, they cannot differentiate between a TB that can be cured with standard medications and its drug-resistant cousins that require more expensive and extensive treatments.

That’s where GeneXpert has an upper hand.

Since it was introduced in 2005, the diagnostic has been hailed as a potentially powerful tool that can help to cut TB and drug-resistance rates by more accurately diagnosing people and getting them treated. With just a small sample of mucous analyzed by a machine, the GeneXpert system can instantly detect TB and its drug-resistant genetic mutations, well suited to mass screening within the prison systems of the former Soviet Union.

But the GeneXpert test is more expensive than alternative screening methods. And while it promises to be more effective, its impact on total costs had not been quantified in the former Soviet Union region until Goldhaber-Fiebert and his colleagues began their work nearly three years ago.

By developing computer models of the former Soviet Union’s prison populations, the team predicted that using GeneXpert can cut the prevalence of TB among inmates by about 20 percent within four years – provided the screening is combined with standard regimens of drug treatment for infected patients and for those with drug-resistant TB.

“For this to make sense, you need to have the right drugs to cure those individuals you identify,” Goldhaber-Fiebert said.

The additional cost of screening with GeneXpert averages to $71 per prisoner compared to the next best alternative approach, he said.

When compared to the decreases in illness and increases in survival, and factoring the financial and societal costs of TB in the broader population, the method makes good economic sense, he said.

“There is a large, direct value to using this technology for screening in prison settings, and there are potentially substantial secondary benefits to the general population of the former Soviet Union and to the world,” Goldhaber-Fiebert said.

Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine who is one of the paper’s co-authors and director of Stanford Health Policy, said the findings could give governments and medical experts the evidence they need to change the way they tackle TB.

“This is the kind of work we hope will inform policymaking about TB control,” Owens said. “We’ve shown there’s a more effective approach for trying to catch TB in prisons, and that means a better chance for preventing the disease from spreading.”

Co-authors on the PLoS Medicine paper also include former Stanford medical student Daniel Winetsky and current Stanford doctoral student in Management Science and Engineering, Diana Negoescu.

The researchers collaborated with the AIDS Foundation East-West. Funding for the study came from Äids Fonds, the International Research & Exchanges Board, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and Stanford.