Nathan Nunn is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn was born in Canada, where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in international trade, economic development, and economic history. He is an Associate editor of the Journal of International Economics and an NBER Faculty Research Fellow.

One stream of Nunn’s research focuses on the relationship between historic events and current economic performance within Africa. In “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to its Current Underdevelopment”, published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2007, Nunn develops a game-theoretic model showing how the slave trade and colonial rule could have had permanent long-term effects on economic performance. In “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008), Nunn documents the long-term adverse economic effects of Africa’s slave trades.

A second stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the importance of hold-up and incomplete contracting in international trade. He has published research showing that a country’s ability to enforce written contracts is a key determinant of comparative advantage (“Relationship-Specificity, Incomplete Contracts and the Pattern of Trade”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007).

Summary of talk:

In his presentation "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa", Nathan Nunn offers an empirical investigation into the relationship between Africa's Slave Trade (1400 to 1900) and its culture of mistrust today. The project is an individual-level analysis of whether members of heavily enslaved ethnic groups in Africa display lower levels of trust today. The underlying argument posits that the slave trade created a culture of "enslave or be enslaved", where a non-trivial proportion of slaves were actually tricked and sold off into slavery by their own friends or family members. These conditions left a legacy of mistrust that has persisted to this day.

The empirical analysis relies on estimates of slave flows and records of slaves' ethnic membership. It also relies on 2003 Afrobarometer survey data to measure individual attitudes of trust toward neighbors, family members, local councilmen and co-ethnics in 17 sub-Saharan African countries. The results indicate a negative effect of Africa's slave trade on individual levels of trust: ethnic groups most affected by the slave trade are most likely to be distrusting today. The results further show that this occurs not through the effect the slave trade had on the locality in which the individual currently resides, but rather through the effect the slave trade had on that individual's ethnic ancestors.

» Paper: "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" (pdf)

This daylong discussion, attended by roughly 40 scholars and practitioners from universities, labor organizations, corporations and NGOs, focused on how companies can move beyond monitoring and compliance to build socially and environmentally responsible supply chains.

At two workshops in 2008, the group discussed a few key strategies, leading Josh Cohen and Rick Locke to seek funding for a new research center. These included:

1. Scaling up codes of conduct
2. Reinvigorating national regulation
3. Combining labor standards and trade rules

The event on January 29th covered the following topics, summarized below:

Panel 1.   Recent research on ethical consumption

• Michael Hiscox, Jens Hainmueller, Sandra Sequeira (Harvard)
• Margeret Levi (University of Washington)
• Yotam Margalit (Stanford University)
• Dara O’Rourke (GoodGuide, UC Berkeley)

Selected findings:

• The Average “Fair Trade” effect is 9%, based on a coffee experiment with Whole  Foods
• Consumers are willing to pay some premium for social labels (7.3-13.1%)
• Berkeley: Personal health and wellness and the environment outrank labor concerns for consumers of products listed on GoodGuide.com

Panel  2.   Best practices in the environmental area that might be carried over to labor/trade

• Edgar Blanco (MIT)
• Bonnie Nixon (HP)
• Erica Plambeck (Stanford)
• Charles Sabel (Columbia)

Selected discussion points:

•  Compliance-based regulation no longer works; there are new roles for NGOs, government, and public-private partnerships in creating incentives for suppliers
• Suppliers care most about volume and length of contracts; since not everyone is Wal-Mart, buyers may need to come together to encourage ethical behavior

Panel 3.   New regulatory strategies in labor markets in emerging economies

• Salo Vinocur Coslovsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan
• Andrew Schrank, University of New Mexico
• Rick Locke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Selected discussion points:

• Evidence from Brazil shows that law enforcement operates in parallel with private auditors in monitoring suppliers, becoming “shock troops of sustainable development”; some issues require state regulation
• There may be trade-offs between bureaucratic efficiency and equity in a compliance system, as in the Dominican Republic
• In some cases, the state’s role is to delegate work so private sector can police more effectively

Panel 4.   Looking Forward

• Caitlin Morris (Nike)
• Marcela Manubens (Phillips-Van Heusen)

Selected discussion points:

• Key issue is how to tie labor and environmental agenda together; for some companies, environmentalism is self-interest—materials like bamboo often resonate with designers. But who makes the bamboo shirt is less of an issue. One option is to derive cost savings from environmental policies and direct that money to programs for workers.
• Big question: in an entry-level sector, how far across the spectrum from minimum or entry-level to living wage do we go? How do we measure progress? Is it a 3% increase in labor value /product each year?
• Another issue in need of further exploration: where upgrading doesn’t reach lower down in the supply chain. There’s got to be a virtuous circle where technical upgrading and labor issues can be joined
• Environmental issues have won the battle because regulatory environment incents companies to care about it, and consumers care, too—it’s become hip. Maybe what’s needed is to institutionalize the “triple bottom line” approach to business such that companies with good labor policies get tax breaks.

» Notes and Presentations (password protected)

Co-sponsored with the Global Supply Chain Management Forum

Olena Nikolayenko (Ph.D. Toronto) is a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar and the recepient of post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include comparative democratization, public opinion, social movements, youth, and corruption. In her dissertation, she analyzed political support among the first post-Soviet generation grown up without any direct experience with communism in Russia and Ukraine. Her current research examines why some youth movements are more successful than others in applying methods of nonviolent resistance to mobilize the population in non-democratic regimes. She has recently conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Dr. Rozelle received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley; and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Before arriving at Stanford, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis (1998-2000) and an assistant professor in the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics at Stanford University (1990-98). Currently, he is a member of the American Economics Association, the American Agricultural Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, the Asian Studies Association, and the Association of Comparative Economics. He also serves on the editorial board of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, China Journal, and the China Economic Review.

Dr. Rozelle's research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with three general themes: a) agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; b) the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and c) the economics of poverty and inequality.

In the past several years, Dr. Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. He is the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the Agricultural Issues Center (University of California); and a member of Stanford's new Food, Security, and the Environment Program.

CO-SPONSORED BY LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY

Reckoning with the Past:  Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia

Is it possible to come to terms with the violent past and foster reconciliation with former foes, what are the obstacles and how can they be overcome? These are some of the questions we are asking in the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation" project. This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the ‘history problem' in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.

In November of 2008, the head of the Japanese air self defense force, General Tamogami Toshio, resigned in a swirl of controversy over an essay he wrote entitled "Was Japan An Aggressor Nation?" The essay argued that Japan's seizure of Korea and of northern China was a legal act and that it had pursued a moderate policy of modernization in its colonial rule of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, superior to the colonial rule of the Western imperial  powers. General Tamogami also argued, in his published essay, that Japan's war with the United States was a result of being "ensnared in a trap that was carefully laid by the United States to draw Japan into a war." What is the story behind this controversial incident? What does it mean when a senior Japanese military officer holds such views of the wartime past? What are the implications of this for Japan's security relations with its neighbors and the United States?

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

» Workshop memos (password protected)