Stanford University

Health and Medicine

FSI’s researchers assess health and medicine through the lenses of economics, nutrition and politics. They’re studying and influencing public health policies of local and national governments and the roles that corporations and nongovernmental organizations play in providing health care around the world. Scholars look at how governance affects citizens’ health, how children’s health care access affects the aging process and how to improve children’s health in Guatemala and rural China. They want to know what it will take for people to cook more safely and breathe more easily in developing countries.

FSI professors investigate how lifestyles affect health. What good does gardening do for older Americans? What are the benefits of eating organic food or growing genetically modified rice in China? They study cost-effectiveness by examining programs like those aimed at preventing the spread of tuberculosis in Russian prisons. Policies that impact obesity and undernutrition are examined; as are the public health implications of limiting salt in processed foods and the role of smoking among men who work in Chinese factories. FSI health research looks at sweeping domestic policies like the Affordable Care Act and the role of foreign aid in affecting the price of HIV drugs in Africa.

Single-mothers in Japan: Living Arrangements and Well-Being

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

The prevalence of single-mother families in Japan has increased markedly as a result of rising divorce rates. Unlike in the U.S, where the well-being of single mothers and their children is a central research and policy focus, we know very little about single-mother families in Japan. The most widely-discussed characteristic of these families is their economic deprivation. Over half of Japanese single mothers live in poverty despite the fact that nearly all are employed. In the context of limited public income transfers and low earnings, intergenerational coresidence is a potentially important source of support that may buffer the impact of single-parenthood for the nearly one-in-three single mothers who live with their parents.

In this talk, Professor Raymo will present results from the first two studies to examine the role of living arrangements in moderating relationships between single parenthood and well-being in Japan. In the first study, he uses data from a survey of single mothers to examine differences in the self-rated health and subjective economic well-being of those living with parents and those living alone. In the second study, he uses data from two rounds of a nationally-representative survey to compare time spent with children in single-mother families and two-parent families, paying attention to the ways in which the presence of coresident grandparents may moderate relationships between family structure and parent-child interactions. In both studies, I find that single mothers living alone are characterized by relatively poor outcomes, net of theoretically relevant controls. In the second study, he also finds that single mothers living with parents are no different than their married counterparts in terms of the time spent playing with, instructing, and eating dinner with children. He discusses the potential implications of these findings for inequality and the reproduction of disadvantage in Japan.

Jim Raymo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is also an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Center for East Asian Studies. Raymo's research focuses primarily on evaluating patterns and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with rapid population aging in Japan. He has published widely on key features of recent family change in Japan, including delayed marriage, extended coresidence with parents, and increases in premarital cohabitation, shotgun marriages, and divorce. In two other lines of research, he has examined relationships between work, family characteristics, and health outcomes at older ages in Japan and patterns of retirement and well-being at older ages in the U.S. He is currently involved in the early stages of a project that will examine family change and inequality in Japan in cross-national comparative perspective. His research has been published in top U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, Demography, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences as well as in Japanese journals.

Raymo teaches classes on Family and Household Demography, Demographic Techniques, and Research Methods. He is currently the Associate Director of Training at the Center for Demography and Ecology and the faculty director of the Sociology Department's Concentration in Analysis and Research. He also serves on the editorial boards of Demography and Journal of Marriage and Family. Raymo received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan after completing his M.A. in Economics at Osaka City University in Japan.

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James Raymo Professor of Sociology Speaker University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Shorenstein APARC Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera

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Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.

Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford

Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.

Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation. 
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.

Wallenberg Theater

Katherine Hoffman M.A. Candidate, International Policy Studies, Global Health Speaker Stanford University
Sunny Jeon Ph.D. Candidate,Political Science Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Food price volatility and the world's poor

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Rosamond L. Naylor
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An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

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Choice Set Size and Decision Making: The Case of Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plans

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Abstract

Background. The impact of choice on consumer decision making is controversial in US health policy. Objective. The authors’ objective was to determine how choice set size influences decision making among Medicare beneficiaries choosing prescription drug plans. Methods. The authors randomly assigned members of an Internet-enabled panel age 65 and older to sets of prescription drug plans of varying sizes (2, 5, 10, and 16) and asked them to choose a plan. Respondents answered questions about the plan they chose, the choice set, and the decision process. The authors used ordered probit models to estimate the effect of choice set size on the study outcomes. Results. Both the benefits of choice, measured by whether the chosen plan is close to the ideal plan, and the costs, measured by whether the respondent found decision making difficult, increased with choice set size. Choice set size was not associated with the probability of enrolling in any plan. Conclusions. Medicare beneficiaries face a tension between not wanting to choose from too many options and feeling happier with an outcome when they have more alternatives. Interventions that reduce cognitive costs when choice sets are large may make this program more attractive to beneficiaries.

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Aging Asia

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AgingAsia

In the past fifty years, two factors have led to global population aging: a decline in fertility to levels close to—or even below—replacement and a decline in mortality that has increased world average life expectancy by nearly 67 percent. As the population skews toward fewer young people and more elderly who live longer postretirement lives, demographic changes—labor force participation, savings, economic growth, living arrangements, marriage markets, and social policy—are transforming society in fundamental, irreversible ways.

Nowhere are these effects of aging and demographic change more acute—nor their long-term effects more potentially significant—than in the Asia-Pacific region. How will these developments impact the economies and social protection systems of Japan, South Korea, China, and, by extension, the United States?

To assess this question, Aging Asia showcases cutting-edge, policy-relevant research. The first section focuses on demographic trends and their economic implications; the second section approaches select topics from a global comparative perspective, including social insurance financing, medical costs, and long-term care.

Desk, examination, or review copies can be requested through Stanford University Press.

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 The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea

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Karen Eggleston
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Nathan Eagle on mobile phone usage in the developing world

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Nathan Eagle, Founder and CEO of txteagle spoke at the weekly Liberation Technology Seminar Series on Dececember 2, 2010 about mobile phone usage in the developing world.

Although txteagle began in 2007 as a purely academic project, the current goal of the company and of its founder and CEO, Nathan Eagle, is to give one billion people a five percent raise. In his presentation, Eagle described the context for which txteagle was designed, how the company's focus has evolved over the past three years, and what steps the company is taking to move closer to achieving this goal in the future.

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Eagle began by offering some background information to explain the initial impetus behind txteagle. Today, about 63% of global mobile phone usage takes place in the developing world, making airtime usage in emerging markets worth about $200 billion a year. Mobile phone users at the so-called "Base of the Pyramid" typically spend 10% of their income on mobile phone airtime. Through his experience living in emerging markets and teaching mobile application development in universities across sub-Saharan Africa, Eagle began to see that a significant opportunity space existed to reduce the cost of airtime for people at the base of the pyramid, in effect giving these people a raise.

Mobile applications developed as a part of MIT's Entrepreneurial Research on Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) project offered some insights into the potential of mobile-based tools. In Rwanda, where electricity is a prepaid service, one of Eagle's former students quickly cornered a significant share of the market by creating scratch cards for crediting one's electricity bill via mobile phone. In Eastern Kenya, a program called SMS Blood Bank was created to enable real time monitoring of blood supplies at local district hospitals in Eastern Kenya. Although SMS reporting of low blood levels resolved the huge amount of latency in the system of local district hospitals (where responses to dips in supply had typically taken up to 4 weeks), the price of reporting blood levels via SMS represented a pay cut for local nurses; despite nurses' initial enthusiasm, SMS reporting tapered off within weeks. When the idea of sending about 10 cents of airtime to compensate nurses for each SMS report of blood level data proved a success, the model behind txteagle was born.

Designed as a means to monetize people's downtime, txteagle has grown rapidly through partnerships with over 220 mobile operators in about 80 countries around the world. In turn for helping these operators analyze their customer data, txteagle has gained access to about 2.1 billion mobile subscribers. Partnering with txteagle is a winning proposition for mobile operators, since the airtime compensation mobile subscribers receive from txteagle improves operators' Average Revenue per User (ARPU), a statistic that had been plummeting as more and more poor people became mobile phone users. By enabling people to carry out work via web browsers or SMS and compensating them via mobile money or airtime, txteagle has become a market leader at efficiently gathering data in the developing world.

Since txteagle was first created, the company has attempted to move from an outsourcing/back-office model to an emphasis on work that leverages a person's unique local knowledge and information. Typically outsourced tasks such as forms processing, audio transcription, inventory management, data cleaning, tagging, and internet search, tend to be less rewarding to the worker. By focusing on local data instead, txteagle enables unprecedented insight into emerging markets, all while optimizing engagement with local customers. Typical tasks include: maps and directions, local market prices and businesses, survey research and polling, and other forms of local knowledge gathering.

One of txteagle's central initiatives, GroundTruth, leverages this local knowledge-based model to carry out better market research. Today, global brands are already spending about $125 billion annually in emerging markets to engage the "next billion," but they typically carry out this research in a sub-optimal way. Through the txteagle platform, Eagle suggests, brands and organizations can use advertising money to design better products and services, conduct market research, and carry out brand engagement. Recent success cases include the use of txteagle to help a program of the United Nations to reach survey respondents directly and to enable the World Bank to obtain better local market price data at lower cost. 

Although txteagle's rapid growth and early successes have been encouraging, the company has ambitious goals for the next two years. The company began by focusing on outside sales through its GroundTruth market research program. Next year, the company  hopes to generate syndicated data and ultimately to create a self-source platform enabling anyone to conduct their own population-level surveys.  By continuing to focus on improving the quality of both their data and workers over time, txteagle aims to have an even greater positive impact on the incomes of the hundreds of millions of mobile phone users at the base of the pyramid.

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Comparative Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia: Defining a Research Agenda

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Demographic changes are profoundly shaping the political, economic, and social landscape of the Asia-Pacific region. How have individuals, families, communities, and policymakers responded? How should they? For example, how will national and social identities transform as population ageing strains traditions of filial piety and immigration disrupts ethnic homogeneity? Will the economies of East Asia languish, or will a "second demographic dividend" spur renewed economic growth? Demographic change can have important psychological and political effects. For example, can one seriously imagine a resurgent, militaristic Japan with a declining and aging population? The responses to demographic change in Japan, South Korea, China, and their neighbors will have great potential long-term effects in the Asia-Pacific region.

This panel discussion, the opening and public portion of a 1-1/2 day workshop that will define a research agenda for the next three years, will bring together selected outside experts and faculty within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for an interdisciplinary and comparative discussion of the policy responses to rapid demographic change in East Asia.

  • 3:00p.m. – 3:10p.m.
    Gi-Wook Shin, Director, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University: Introduction and welcome
  • 3:10p.m. – 3:25p.m.
    Brian Nichiporuk, RAND Corporation: The Security Implications of Demographic Trends in East Asia
  • 3:25p.m. – 3:40p.m.
    Michael Sutton, East-West Center, Washington, DC: Political & Security Implications of Population Aging in Japan
  • 3:40p.m. – 3:55p.m.
    John Skrentny, Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego: An East Asian Model to Managing Immigration? Durability & Change in the 2000s.
  • 3:55p.m. – 4:10p.m.
    Chong-En Bai, Chair, Department of Economics, Freeman Chair Professor of Economics, Tsinghua University: Policy Responses to Demographic Change in China
  • 4:10p.m. – 4:25p.m.
    David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard University: Demographic Change in East Asia: Challenges, Options and Evidence
  • 4:25p.m. – 4:40p.m.
    Naohiro Ogawa, Director, Population Research Institute, Nihon University: Population Aging & Changing Human Capital in Japan & other East Asian Countries
  • 4:40p.m. – 4:55p.m.
    Andrew Mason, Professor of Economics, University of Hawaii, Manoa & Senior Fellow, East-West Center, Hawaii: Population Aging and the Generational Economy: Key Findings
  • 4:55p.m. – 5:10p.m.
    James Raymo, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison The “Second Demographic Transition” and family change in Japan
  • 5:10p.m. – 5:30p.m.
    Discussion/Conclusion
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Gi-Wook Shin

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall E301
616 Jane Stanford Way
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Sociology
William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea
Professor, by Courtesy, of East Asian Languages & Cultures
Gi-Wook Shin_0.jpg PhD

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.

In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is a new research initiative committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia. Across four research themes– “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform”–the lab brings scholars and students to produce interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India to be published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2025, is an outcome of SNAPL.

Shin is also the author/editor of twenty-seven books and numerous articles. His books include The Four Talent Giants: National Strategies for Human Resource Development Across Japan, Australia, China, and India (2025); Korean Democracy in Crisis: The Threat of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); Criminality, Collaboration, and Reconciliation: Europe and Asia Confronts the Memory of World War II (2014); New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (2014); History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (2011); South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (2011); One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (2010); Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007);  and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (2006). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. His articles have appeared in academic and policy journals, including American Journal of Sociology, World Development, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Education, International Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs.

Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea's foreign relations, historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia, and talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.

Before joining Stanford in 2001, Shin taught at the University of Iowa (1991-94) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2001). After receiving his BA from Yonsei University in Korea, he was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Washington in 1991.

Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL)

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Director of the Korea Program and the Taiwan Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Director of Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, APARC
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Gi-Wook Shin Director Speaker Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Andrew Mason Professor of Economics, University of Hawaii, Manoa & Senior Fellow Panelist East-West Center, Hawaii
Naohiro Ogawa Director, Population Research Institute Panelist Nihon University
David Bloom Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population Panelist Harvard University
Chong-En Bai Chair, Department of Economics, Freeman Chair Professor of Economics Panelist Tsinghua University
John Skrentny Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, Professor of Sociology Panelist University of California, San Diego
Michael Sutton Panelist East-West Center, Washington, DC
Brian Nichiporuk Panelist RAND Corporation
James Raymo Professor of Sociology Panelist University of Wisconsin, Madison
Panel Discussions
Comparative Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia

Health-damaging and Climate-changing Air Pollution in Asia

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Kirk R. Smith will speak about his current research on health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution from household energy use in developing Asia, including field measurement and health-effects studies in India, China, and Nepal, compared to other countries such as Mexico and Guatemala. The work encompasses developing and deploying small, smart, and cheap microchip-based monitors as well as tools for international policy assessments.

Dr. Smith is Professor of Global Environmental Health and Director of the Global Health and Environment Program at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.  Previously, he was founder and head of the Energy Program of the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he still holds appointment as Adjunct Senior Fellow in Environment and Health after moving to Berkeley in 1995. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory committees including the Global Energy Assessment, National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate, the Executive Committee for WHO Air Quality Guidelines, and the International Comparative Risk Assessment. He participated along with many other scientists in the IPCC's 3rd and 4th assessments and thus shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He holds visiting professorships in India and China and bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley. In 1997, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he received the Heinz Prize in Environment.

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Kirk R. Smith Professor of Global Environmental Health and Director of the Global Health and Environment Program at the School of Public Health Speaker University of California, Berkeley
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On demographic change in East Asia: An interview with Karen Eggleston

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Over the past year, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) has engaged in leading-edge research on demographic change in East Asia. Karen Eggleston, director of the Asia Health Policy Program at Shorenstein APARC, discusses the recent book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea, and the workshop on the economic, social, and political/security implications of demographic change in East Asia, held January 20-21 at Shorenstein APARC.

Across Northeast Asia, countries are facing the issue of an aging population, which causes socio-economic challenges that have policy implications. You explore this phenomenon in your forthcoming book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea. When did aging begin to become an issue and what are some of the greatest factors that you address in the book?

Aging started at different times in the countries of East Asia. The country with the oldest life expectancy in the world and the oldest age structure of its population is Japan. It had a very short baby boom after the war and has had a steep decline in fertility. Mortality has also been falling around the world, and so this creates a change in the population. Japan is already at the fourth stage of demographic transition. South Korea is rapidly moving towards that and already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Of course, neither of them have policies to reduce fertility; in fact, they are trying to encourage it. China, on the other hand, has long been trying to control fertility and is not as extreme in terms of the population age structure, but it is rapidly changing. China will be older in median age than the United States soon—this is not a trivial factor when you think in terms of the absolute size of the Chinese population.

One of the things that we wanted to study in this project is the premise that the demographic transition is a "problem." It is true that you need to think about and have policy responses to it. But it can also be seen as a sign of success, and as an opportunity. We wanted to reframe the issue and think about evidence on both sides. There is some research highlighted in the book, for example, that looks at the impact of population aging on economic growth, which is one of the first things that comes to many people's minds. For example, if you have a lot of elderly people, they are not in the work force and they need to be supported. It is true that this can be bad for economic growth, but there also are policy and individual responses that may moderate the effects. Our research is trying to highlight several different aspects of aging, including the question of opportunity. For example, there is more investment in individual children now and elderly persons' savings have actually contributed to economic growth. In some aspects, this has been a sign of resiliency for Japan where there are a lot of transfers to the working-age population.

Ronald Lee at the University of California, Berkeley and Andrew Mason at the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i, who is participating in the January workshop, have been working on the concept of a "second demographic dividend." They find that as countries have an older age structure, there are more people that are saving. In the widely accepted "first demographic dividend," there are more people in the working-age part of the population—more people employed and more people contributing to the GDP. You get a boom contributing to growth. We know that this contributed to Japan and South Korea's earlier growth, and to China's in the 80s and part of the 90s, but only one or two percent of GDP. The question then is whether it is a problem that with aging you are losing that first demographic dividend. A second demographic dividend might arise because people who are preparing for a longer retirement life are saving more, and those savings are then invested in the economy and the investment drives economic growth.

Is there any correlation to demographic issues faced by the United States?

Interestingly, the aging issue is more pronounced in East Asia than in the United States for several reasons. We have a higher fertility rate than in Japan and South Korea, and many other countries in Europe as well. We also historically are much more open to immigration than most other countries, and this has led to a certain vitality in the population mix that has slowed the impact of demographic change. That said, of course, there are issues with having a lot of baby boomers. Sometimes, depending on the specific question or the specific area of policy, you find other factors that are much more important than aging. For example, the growth of healthcare spending has been in the news a lot lately. Although obviously there is an impact from having more elderly people, there are much bigger issues, such as what we are spending per person per age group and the growth of that spending. Just aging per se is not as big of an issue as people might think.

In late January, you will be holding the workshop Comparative Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia: Defining a Research Agenda. What are the major issues you will explore in the conference? Who will be involved? Finally, what is the publication or research project that you will launch from this?

We had an Aging Asia conference in February 2009, co-sponsored with the Global Aging Program at the Stanford Center on Longevity. The outcome of this is the forthcoming volume, co-edited with Shripad Tuljapurkar of the Department of Biology at Stanford University. We started with a basic survey of the region and thought about the basic trends-demographic, social, and economic-and built upon that to figure out where the gaps are in the literature and where the interesting research questions are. That is where the January 2011 workshop comes in as the next step. We are bringing in some of the same and some different people to focus on three specific themes: economics, society, and politics/security. The upcoming event again focuses on East Asia and there will be a public component, but it is a smaller event and its main goal is to dig deeper into these themes to figure out an interesting research agenda on the policy responses to demographic transition.

We decided to focus again on East Asia, which is the research focus of a lot of our Shorenstein APARC faculty. Masahiko Aoki and Michael Armacost are going to chair sessions, and Gi-Wook Shin is going to kick it all off and talk about the social aspects of demographic change. Andrew Walder will be participating in that session as well. Thomas Fingar will be covering the political and security implications. All Shorenstein APARC faculty have been invited to participate and think about how this issue of demographic change—and particularly policy responses—might be related to their own areas of research. 

An illustration that I like to give when people ask about how demographic change is related to other things is from Andrew Walder when he was talking about China's transition in the 1980s. He received a question about whether or not there had been an impact from the One Child policy. He said that obviously there are many different impacts, but the one thing that he noted was that students in China now, especially if they are only children, are under a lot of career pressure. This has changed the space or the freedom for self-exploration. Why does this have broader implications? Young people see access to political power as one key for their careers and this changes their views about joining the Communist Party, which has big implications for China's political future. This is just one illustration of how we are trying to explore the broader implications of demographic change.

Finally, what is the outcome that you would most hope to achieve through Aging Asia and the upcoming demographic change workshop?

I think that the biggest hope would be to develop a much better understanding of what is going on with demographic change: what are the processes and how is society changing? What are the individual challenges that families are facing and what are they are doing about it? What is the broader social or even global perspective on how this is going to shape our future world? For me, I think about the world that my children are going to grow up in.

Through our research, I hope that we will impact not only the understanding of what has driven past developments, but create policy recommendations for each of the societies that were are examining—including our own—on the opportunities and the challenges related to changes in population. That hopefully will be useful as these different societies think about how to respond.

Our research on the economic, the social, and political/security aspects of demographic change is intended to be tangible for individuals and families as well as for broader national policy.

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Nothing Short of A Revolution: Women's Movements Might Just Liberate Us All!

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Kavita Ramdas is an inspirational and mindful leader, an advocate for human rights, open and civil societies, and a respected advisor and commentator on issues of social entrepreneurship, development, education, health, and philanthropy.  Kavita has spent her professional life shaping a world where gender equality can help ensure human rights and dignity for all.  She is currently a Visiting Scholar and Fellow at Stanford University, The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).  In 2011, Kavita will be a Visiting Scholar abd Practitioner at Princeton University's Wodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

From 1996 to 2010, Kavita served as President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, which grew to become the world's largest public foundation for women's rights under her leadership.  During her tenure, the Global Fund assets grew to $21million from $3 million, giving women in more than 170 countries critical access to financial capital that fueled innovation and change. Kavita serves as Senior Advisor for the Global Fund for Women.

An instinctive entrepreneur, Kavita's leadership skills were recognized early in her tenure at the Global Fund for Women when she was chosen to be a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.  Her vision, drive, and management skills helped the Global Fund launch programs to promote girls' education, defend women's right to health and reproductive rights, prevent violence against women, and advance women's economic independence and political participation. Among these were a pioneering Africa Outreach Initiative that channeled over $30 million in grants to women's rights activists in Sub Saharan Africa, and the ground-breaking Now or Never Fund which infused $10 million over 5 years to groups working to preserve women's reproductive health and rights, combat religious extremism, and sustain communities in the midst of war and conflict.

Prior to her time at the Global Fund for Women, Kavita developed and implemented grantmaking programs to combat poverty and inequality in inner cities across the United States as well as advance women's reproductive health in Nigeria, India, Mexico and Brazil in her capacity as a Program Officer at the Chicago based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Kavita's extensive experience in the fields of global development, human rights, women's leadership, and philanthropy have led to her service as an Advisor and Board Member for a wide range of organizations; the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the Women's Funding Network,  and the Global Development Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of the Asian University for Women Support Foundation, the Global Health Initiative of the University of Chicago, PAX World Management, and the Council of Advisors on Gender Equity of the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.

Kavita Chairs the Expert Working Group of the Council of Global Leaders for Reproductive Health, an initiative led by Mary Robinson, former President for Ireland.  She serves on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University, Mount Holyoke College, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. 

An accomplished writer and public speaker, Kavita's thought leadership is evident in writings published in a wide variety of journals, newspaper, and magazines, including the Nation, Foreign Policy, and Conscience. She has spoken at many venues, including the Global Philanthropy Forum, TED, and the United Nations.  Her media commentary and interviews include appearances on NOW with the Bill Moyers Show, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Democracy Now!, and CNN.

Kavita is the recipient of numerous philanthropic and leadership awards including in 2010, the Council on Foundation's Robert Scrivner Award for Most Creative Grantmaker of the Year, and the Frances Hesselbein Award for Excellence in Leadership. She is a 2011 Awardee of the Legal Momentum Award.

Kavita was born and raised in India and is married to Zulfiqar Ahmad, an independent researcher on South Asia security issues. Their daughter, Mira Ahmad, is a junior at Palo Alto High School.  Kavita enjoys hiking, cooking, writing, poetry, and is a long time practitioner of yoga. 

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Kavita Ramdas Visiting Scholar 2010-2011 Speaker CDDRL
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