Prashant Loyalka is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on examining/addressing inequalities in the education of children and youth and on understanding/improving the quality of education received by children and youth in multiple countries including China, India, Russia, and the United States. He also conducts large-scale evaluations of educational programs and policies that seek to improve student outcomes.
Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political–social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the state’s financing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to influence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education financing in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education financing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the financing of elite and non-elite institutions.
India, as part of its bid to achieve universal health coverage, has expanded government health programs over the last two decades, most notably with the establishment of the National Health Mission and the rollout of public health insurance programs targeting poor households. However, national spending on health remains among the lowest in the world. As the government increasingly takes on the role of purchaser of health care, decisions about the allocation of scarce resources for health will have substantial fiscal and health consequences and must be based on evidence. Additionally, in order to control costs and effectively address the growing chronic disease burden, public programs will need to find ways to integrate curative hospital services with the most cost-effective preventive and primary interventions. Currently, in part because the evidence base on economic evaluations of health interventions in India remains sparse and of low quality, decisions about which health care services to cover are typically made by expert committees rather than through systematic assessments of efficacy and cost-effectiveness.
However, in recent years, the government has taken several steps towards establishing the infrastructure for evidence-based priority setting and resource allocation, including the establishment of a body for Health Technology Assessment in India (HTAIn) within the Department of Health Research to collate and generate evidence on the clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness of new and existing health technologies and programs. Research evidence on the cost-effectiveness of both preventive and curative health interventions in the Indian context is going to be a critical input to the HTAIn.
Across East Asia and South Asia, the prevalence of diabetes among adults is on the rise. An international, comparative study of “value for money” in diabetes management helps develop best practices in chronic disease control and provides an evidence base for policies to improve access to quality, affordable care.
About the Event: This chapter builds on my earlier writing during the West African Ebola outbreak, in which I argue that health security paradigms and militarized health interventions engender “defensiveness” in landscapes of care, while they also intensify already securitized landscapes and relationships of development and humanitarian aid. In this chapter, I include insights about the US-authored Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), to suggest that the Government of Sierra Leone’s 2014 adoption of the agenda has helped to strengthen containment and control paradigms at the expense of care, and to prioritize the collection and management of disease event data over other pressing concerns related to health care delivery (cf. Benton 2015). Specifically, I analyze global health security policy discourse and practice outlined in the GHSA and militarized health interventions as they travel and settle in four disparate sites: a rural clinic in eastern Sierra Leone (see Kardas-Nelson and Frankfurter 2018); abandoned and repurposed treatment centers; the Imperial War Museum’s temporary exhibit “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to Isis;” and US and Sierra Leonean political rhetoric explicitly linking Ebola virus disease and terrorism (whether by metaphor, analogy, or literal means). Reading across these sites, I show how projects of counter-terrorism and humanitarianism subtend global health policy, and become institutionalized in and through the everyday management of public health provision.
About the Speaker: Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the West African Ebola outbreak.
Virtual Seminar
Adia Benton
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Northwestern University
In September 1964, at the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Cairo, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike proposed that the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) be turned into a Zone of Peace (IOZP). Specifically, she called for the eradication of military bases from the area and the Ocean’s denuclearization. India, a neighboring littoral state, immediately supported the initiative and became one of its greatest champions through the end of the 1970s. Scholars have claimed that India’s enthusiasm stemmed from its non-aligned foreign policy and enduring commitment to Prime Minister’s Jawaharlal Nehru’s moralpolitik (27-28). But as Yogesh Joshi argues in his exemplary article, such interpretations miss the mark.
Ryan A. Musto reviews former CISAC Fellow Yogesh Joshi’s work on India’s use of selective alignment with the Great Powers to advance its regional ambitions in the 1960s and 1970s.
About the Event: What lies at the origins of major wars?
I argue that major wars are caused by the attempts of great powers to escape their two-front war problem: encirclement. To explain the causal mechanism that links encirclement to major war, I identify an intervening variable: the increase in the invasion ability of the immediate rival. This outcome unfolds in a three-step process: double security dilemma, war initiation, and war contagion.
Encirclement is a geographic variable that occurs in presence of one or two great powers (surrounding great powers) on two different borders of the encircled great power. The two front-war problem triggers a double security dilemma (step 1) for the encircled great power, which has to disperse its army to secure its borders. The surrounding great powers do not always have the operational capability to initiate a two-front war (latent encirclement) but, when they increase their invasion ability (actualized encirclement), the encircled great power attacks (war initiation, step 2). The other great powers intervene due to the rival-based network of alliances for preventing their respective immediate rival from increasing its invasion ability (war contagion, step 3).
I assess my theory in the outbreak of WWI. This article provides ample support to the claim that major wars are caused by a great power that has the limited goal of eliminating its two-front war problem. These findings have important implications for the prospects of major wars, since I anticipate that in the long term China will face the encirclement of India and Russia.
About the Speaker: Andrea Bartoletti holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. His research interests span on international security and IR theory with a focus on the origins of major wars, polarity and war, U.S. grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific region, and great powers' intervention in civil wars.
Virtual Seminar
Andrea Bartoletti
Postdoctoral Fellow
Stanford University
The demand for large-scale assessments in higher education, especially at an international scale, is growing. A major challenge of conducting these assessments, however, is that they require understanding and balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders (government officials, university administrators, and students) and also overcoming potential unwillingness of these stakeholders to participate. In this paper, we take the experience of the Study of Undergraduate Performance (SUPER) in conducting a large-scale international assessment as a case study. We discuss ways in which we mitigated perceived risks, built trust, and provided incentives to ensure the successful engagement of stakeholders during the study’s implementation.
India is facing a mounting burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancers, and cardiovascular diseases. NCDs affect more than 20 percent of the Indian population and their prevalence is projected to expand substantially as the population aged 60 and over increases. Left unchecked, the costs of managing chronically ill and aging sectors of the population grow exponentially.
To control costs and address the growing chronic disease burden, India’s public programs must integrate curative hospital services with the most cost-effective preventive and primary interventions, argue Karen Eggleston, APARC’s deputy director and the director of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP), and Radhika Jain, a postdoctoral research fellow with AHPP. India must also urgently expand and improve the evidence base on economic evaluations of both preventive and curative health interventions in the country.
In a correspondence piece published by BMC Medicine,Eggleston and Jain examine the features and limitations of a study that takes an important first step in that direction: acost-effectiveness study of the Kerala Diabetes Prevention program (K-DPP) that adds such evidence on how to prevent diabetes cost-effectively in India and other low- and middle-income countries.
The study’s authors present a cost-effectiveness analysis of 1007 participants in the K-DPP, and their estimates indicate that K-DPP was cost-effective. Indeed, Eggleston and Jain determine that the analysis shows potential cost-effectiveness in “nudging” the participants towards a healthier lifestyle through suggestive reductions in tobacco and alcohol use and waist circumference. The results of the cost-effectiveness analysis of the K-DPP “highlight the importance of continued research on community-based promotion of healthy lifestyles,” say Eggleston and Jain.
Evidence-based approaches to chronic noncommunicable disease intervention are essential for providing cost-effective care and creating models for future programs like the K-DPP. Eggleston and Jain conclude that future studies advancing evidence-based approaches to chronic noncommunicable disease intervention — ones that cover larger and more representative populations over longer time periods — remain important for more generalizable assessments to inform policy decisions.
The Net Value in Diabetes Management research project, led by Shorenstein APARC’s Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP), compares health care use, medical spending, and clinical outcomes for patients with diabetes in Asia and other parts of the world as a lens for understanding the economics of caring for patients with complicated chronic diseases across diverse health systems.
Researchers Develop New Method for Projecting Future Wellness of Aging Populations
Asia Health Policy Director Karen Eggleston and her colleagues unveil a multistate transition microsimulation model that produces rigorous projections of the health and functional status of older people from widely available datasets.
Addressing the epidemic of chronic diseases in India and other low- and middle-income countries requires comprehensive evidence on the cost-effectiveness of health interventions, argue APARC’s Asia Health Policy Program Director Karen Eggleston and Postdoctoral Fellow Radhika Jain.
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APARC South Asia research Initiative presents: Fall 2020 Colloquium Series on
India-China Strategic Competition
Washington DC time: 7:00pm-8:30pm, 9-Nov. 2020
Sydney, Australia time: 11:00am-12:30pm, 10-Nov. 2020
Expectations of India’s rise have been dented in 2020. Amid lackluster economic performance and creeping socio-political illiberalism, India also suffered a major strategic setback. Chinese forces that crossed the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh remain encamped at several tactically-valuable points, and although talks continue, India has few visible options to force a return to the status quo ante. India now sees China is more clearly adversarial terms – but does it have what it takes to compete effectively? This conversation will conclude the APARC South Asia’s fall 2020 colloquium series on the India-China strategic competition with a wider and deeper look at India’s political and military power. We will discuss India’s ability to deter and balance China, its strategies to build national power and align with new partners, and the prospects for the competition in 2021 and beyond.
Ashley Tellis29Kb
Ashley J. Tellis holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously he was commissioned into the Foreign Service and served as senior adviser to the ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. While serving as the senior adviser to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, he was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India. He also served on the National Security Council staff as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for strategic planning and Southwest Asia. Prior to his government service, Tellis was senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and professor of policy analysis at the RAND Graduate School. He is a counselor at the National Bureau of Asian Research and serves as an adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He is the author of India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001), co-author of Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (2000), and co-editor of the sixteen latest annual volumes of Strategic Asia. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.
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Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included operational deployments as well as a diplomatic posting to Washington, DC. Tarapore holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.
India-China border tensions along the disputed Line of Actual Control show no signs of letting up and the prospects of peace in the conflict between the nuclear-armed rivals are daunting. How do the Indian and Chinese militaries compare against each other?
FSI Center Fellow at APARC Oriana Skylar Mastro and our South Asia Research Scholar Arzan Tarapore join the Observer Research Foundation’s ‘Armchair Strategist’ podcast to discuss the Indian and Chinese strategic power postures, military modernization and reform by the two Asian neighbors, the ways they can marshal both military and non-military forces, and the possible outcomes of a confrontation along their Himalayan border. Listen here:
Based in Delhi, the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) is a leading South Asian nonprofit policy research institution whose work spans a wide range of topics, including national security, economic development, cyber issues and media, and climate and energy.
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Commentary
China-India: Talk is Cheap, But Never Free
Nations often hesitate to negotiate with opponents during conflict. But Oriana Skylar Mastro urges that this is precisely what India and China need to do in order to curb the potential for a protracted, costly war with devastating geopolitical implications.
India and China are Taking New Risks Along Their Border
Will diplomacy help defuse the current tensions brewing along the India-China border? Arzan Tarapore analyzes why restoring peace between the two countries may prove difficult.
U.S. Policymakers Cannot Assume the Fixity of Indian Strategic Preferences, Argues South Asia Research Scholar Arzan Tarapore
In a special report published by the National Bureau of Asian Research, Tarapore analyzes possible scenarios for India’s strategic future that expose risks and tensions in current U.S. policy.
Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore join the Observer Research Foundation’s ‘Armchair Strategist’ podcast to discuss how the Indian and Chinese militaries stack up as tensions between the two Asian neighbors continue to heat up.
Ashley Tellis29Kb
