Recent research suggests that enhancing voter information holds promise for increasing government accountability in new democracies. This project undertakes a field experiment in Mali, a model of an underperforming new democracy, to test the theory that information that sufficiently raises citizen voter expectations of government performance can have an important effect on governance. it will examine the impact of an intervention that provides citizens with a civics course on voter and government behavior.

Ha will examine how economic and political responses alter according to the types of financial crises -- currency crisis, banking crisis, and sovereign debt crisis -- encountered and how domestic political institutions influence government responses to these crises. She argues that fiscal and monetary policies tend to be more severely tightened under a currency crisis than under other crises, and the intensity of political atmosphere such as elections and electoral competitions pressures the governments to moderate the fiscal policies and even to adopt expansionary policies.

Ha is an assistant professor in the department of politics and policy in the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Her research areas include comparative politics, political economy, and political institutions. Her work has dealt primarily with the impact of globalization and domestic political institutions on domestic political economy, particularly as manifested in inequality, poverty, growth, unemployment, inflation, welfare spending, and taxation.

Ha received a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. In her dissertation, Distributive Politics in the Era of Globalization, she explains how globalization and government ideology have shaped income distribution in terms of welfare, inequality, and poverty. She currently works on government policy responses to financial crises and their political and economic effects.

Space is limited and RSVPs will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

Policies promoting ethanol and biodiesel production and use in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world since the mid-2000s have had profound—and largely unintended—consequences on global food prices, agricultural land values, land acquisition, and food security in developing countries. They have also created regional opportunities in the form of agricultural investments, crop yield growth, and booming farm economies. Rising incomes in emerging economies are generating increased demand for transportation fuels, thus stimulating further growth of the global biofuel industry. This seminar will explore the politics, economics, and global food security implications of the expanding biofuel sector. Several policy questions will be raised, including the role of biofuel mandates on food prices, the role of trade policies for stabilizing food prices in an era of increasingly tight demand, and the role of land policies and institutions for feedstock production and income distribution in the developing world.

Siwa Msangi, Senior Research Fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will provide commentary. Msangi's work focuses on the major socio-economic and bio-physical drivers affecting agricultural production and trade, and their impacts on nutrition, poverty and the environment. Dr. Msangi manages a research portfolio that includes the economic and environmental implications of biofuels, and has coordinated the project Biofuels and the Poor in partnership with FSE.  

Biofuels videos: Roz Naylor talks food security and energy with Near Zero