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Economic Affairs

Win-Win U.S. Strategy for Dealing with Iran

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In an article written for the current issue of the Washington Quarterly Larry Diamond, Michael A. McFaul and Abbas Milani, suggests that the U.S. government seek a comprehensive agreement with Tehran that would "end the economic embargo, unfreeze all Iranian assets, restore full diplomatic relations, support the initiation of talks on Iran's entry into the WTO, encourage foreign investment, and otherwise move toward a normal relationship with the Iranian government." In exchange, Iran would have to suspend its nuclear weapons program...
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A Parsimonious Critique of Some Elegant Theories of Democratization: Reading Acemoglu & Robinson from Singapore and Beyond

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David Yang is a pre-doctoral fellow in CDDRL's Democracy in Taiwan program. He is finishing a cross-country comparative study entitled The Social Basis of the Third Wave: Class, Development, and the Making of the Democratic State in East Asia. He looks in particular at late authoritarian Taiwan and contemporary Singapore. Mr. Yang is interested in the social basis of pro-democratic opposition movements and the political implications of various developmental strategies - corporatist versus pluralist, for example. Before entering the doctoral program at Princeton, David Yang completed an MBA in Economics and International Business at NYU, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science at Brown.

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David D. Yang

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Visiting Scholar 2007-2008<br />CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow 2006 - 2007
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David is our inaugural, and hopefully annual, fellow in CDDRL's new Democracy in Taiwan program. He is finishing a cross-country comparative study entitled The Social Basis of the Third Wave: Class, Development, and the Making of the Democratic State in East Asia. He looks in particular at late authoritarian Taiwan and contemporary Singapore. David is interested in the social basis of pro-democratic opposition movements and the political implications of various developmental strategies - corporatist versus pluralist, for example. David has been advised on his thesis by Lynne White, and Atul Kohli at Princeton, as well as Andy Nathan and Sheri Berman at Columbia and Barnard respectively. Before entering the doctoral program at Princeton, David completed an MBA in Economics and International Business at NYU, and a BSc in Computer Science at Brown.

David D. Yang Pre-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
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Local Government in South Africa

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Barak Hoffman recently defended his doctoral dissertation at UCLA. His dissertation focused on identifying the determinants of political accountability at the local level in sub-Saharan Africa, using Tanzania and Zambia as cases, where he did extensive fieldwork as a Fulbright Scholar. At CDDRL, he intends to expand the focus to include Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to also take into account cases where ethnic tensions are potential sources of instability. Barak Hoffman completed his BA at Brandeis, majoring in Economics, and has an MA in Economics from the Broad School of Management at Michigan State.

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Barak D. Hoffman

Center for Democracy and Civil Society
Georgetown University
3240 Prospect Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20007

(858) 248-9087
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CDDRL Post-doctoral Fellow 2006 -2007
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Barak has just defended and filed his dissertation at UCSD. His dissertation focused on identifying the determinants of political accountability at the local level in sub-Saharan Africa, using Tanzania and Zambia as cases, where he did extensive fieldwork as a Fulbright Scholar. At CDDRL, he intends to expand the focus to include Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to also take into account cases where ethnic tensions are potential sources of instability. His advisors at UCSD were Stephan Haggard, Matt McCubbins and Clark Gibson. Barak completed his BA at Brandeis, majoring in Economics, and has an MA in Economics from the Broad School of Management at Michigan State.

Barak Hoffman Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Why did Russia Succeed in Building a Market Economy But Not a Democracy?

Political Liberalism Abroad

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This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on January 19, 2007.

Excerpt from pages 2 through 3 of Michael Blake's "Political Liberalism Abroad":

Whereas Rawls himself emphasizes political liberalism's notions of reciprocity and tolerance in his extension to the international realm, we might instead emphasize political liberalism's commitment to the justification of political coercion to all individuals subject to such coercion. The result, I believe, is an attractive vision of how a liberal state might understand the normative constraints on its actions abroad. This vision of political liberalism will not privilege agreement between collective groups such as peoples, but rather demand that political communities seek to justify their domestic actions through appeal to the moral categories implicit in political liberalism itself. The specific package of international rights and duties thereby produced, I believe, will be quite unlike those developed in The Law of Peoples, but might nonetheless stand as a plausible and attractive vision of how liberalism might be applied internationally.

About the Author

Michael Blake is associate professor of philosophy and public affairs at the University of Washington. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Toronto, and his legal training at Yale Law School. He specializes in social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and international ethics.

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Randomization and Foreign Assistance

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Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Poverty Action Lab, and past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD).

Banerjee received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1988, and has taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining the MIT faculty in 1996. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Malcolm Adeshesiah Award, and was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2000. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is coeditor with Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee of Understanding Poverty and, with Philippe Aghion, coauthor of Volatility and Growth. His areas of research are development economics, the economics of financial markets, and the macroeconomics of developing countries.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

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Abhijit Banerjee Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Poverty Action Lab Speaker
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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Social Security and Poverty Alleviation in Mexico: An Economic Perspective

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Santiago Levy is a Mexican economist and former General Director of the Mexican Social Security Institute. As director of the Institute, he championed pension reform and extended social security coverage to rural workers. Prior to that, Levy was Chief economist and head of the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (2001 - 2002). From 1994 to 2000, he was Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Finance in Mexico, where he was the force behind Progresa-Oportunidades, Mexico's widely acclaimed incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor.

Levy has taught at Boston University, where he was the Chair of the Economics Department. He has published a number of books and numerous academic and newspaper articles on economic development, budgetary and tax policy, trade policy reform, social policy, rural and regional development.

Santiago Levy obtained his, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Boston University.

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Santiago Levy Economist, former General Director of the Social Security Institute, Mexico Speaker
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Capital Account Liberalization, the Cost of Capital, and Economic Growth

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Capital account liberalization was once seen as an inevitable step along the path to economic development for poor countries. Liberalizing the capital account, it was said, would permit financial resources to flow from capital-abundant countries, where expected returns were low, to capital-scarce countries, where expected returns were high. The flow of resources into the liberalizing countries would reduce their cost of capital, increase investment, and raise output (Fischer, 1998; Summers, 2000). The principal policy question was not whether to liberalize the capital account, but when - before or after undertaking macroeconomic reforms such as inflation stabilization and trade liberalization (McKinnon, 1991). Or so the story went.

In recent years intellectual opinion has moved against liberalization. Financial crises in Asia, Russia and Latin America have shifted the focus of the conversation from when countries should liberalize to if they should do so at all. Opponents of the process argue that capital account liberalization does not generate greater efficiency. Instead, liberalization invites speculative hot money flows and increases the likelihood of financial crises with no discernible positive effects on investment, output, or any other real variable with nontrivial welfare implications (Bhagwhati, 1998; Rodrik, 1998; Stiglitz 2002).

While opinions about capital account liberalization are abundant, facts are relatively scarce. This paper tries to increase the ratio of facts to opinions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of developing countries liberalized their stock markets, opening them to foreign investors for the first time. These liberalizations constitute discrete changes in the degree of capital account openness, which allow for a positive empirical description of the cost of capital, investment, and growth during liberalization episodes.

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Peter Blair Henry

A Panel Discussion: The Struggle across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China Problem

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This is a special event within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program. In this panel discussion, three leading scholars in the field of China studies will address the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China from a long-term perspective.

Ramon H. Myers, senior fellow emeritus, was curator of the Hoover Institution's East Asian Collection for nearly three decades. He now is responsible for building the Hoover Institution's Chinese Archives and Special materials. He has written numerous books and articles related to Chinese economic history, Taiwan political and economic history, Japanese imperialism, and East Asian international relations. His most recent book, co-authored with Jialin Zhang and published by Hoover Institution Press is titled The Struggle Across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China problem (2006).

Chih-yu Shih teaches cultural studies, political psychology and China studies at National Taiwan University and National Sun Yat-sen University. His recent publication includes Autonomy, Ethnicity and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down (2007), Navigating Sovereignty: World Politics Lost in China (2004), and Negotiating Ethnicity in China: Citizenship as a Response to the State.

Jialin Zhang is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He received his degree at the Moscow Institute of International Relations in 1960, and served as a senior fellow of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, PRC. His academic appointments include visiting scholar at the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, Institute of International Economics in Washington, D.C., Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, etc. He is author and co-author of several Hoover essays, China's Response to the Downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, An Assessment of Chinese Thinking on Trade Liberation, U.S.-China Trade Issue after the WTO and the PNTR Deal-A Chinese Perspective, Some Implications of the Turnover of Political Power in Taiwan, The Debate on China's Exchange Rate-Should or Will it be revalued?

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Ramon Myers Senior Fellow Panelist Hoover Institution
Chih-yu Shih Professor Panelist National Taiwan University
Jialin Zhang Visiting Fellow Panelist Hoover Institution

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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