Education

This morning, Pakistani Taliban militants armed with guns and explosives stormed a school in Peshawar. After an eight-hour battle with security forces, over 140 students and teachers were dead. This terrorist attack is the largest Pakistan has seen since 2007—when 134 people were killed at a rally for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. However, it is also part of a larger trend of Taliban attacks on Pakistani schools, school children, and teachers. As CFR Senior Fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes, terrorist attacks on schools in Pakistan and elsewhere are neither isolated nor new. In 2012, Human Rights Watch recorded nearly one hundred attacks on Pakistani schools in just a ten month period, and the United Nations reported over 150 incidents of partial or complete destruction of a school in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province or Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2011. As instability and violence ravage Pakistan, education for both boys and girls is under threat. Today’s attack on children who dare to set foot in a school makes Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s call to action more important than ever. Condemning the violence this morning, Ms. Yousafzai also reiterated her determination, saying, “I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters—but we will never be defeated.”

This morning, Pakistani Taliban militants armed with guns and explosives stormed a school in Peshawar. After an eight-hour battle with security forces, over 140 students and teachers were dead. This terrorist attack is the largest Pakistan has seen since 2007—when 134 people were killed at a rally for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. However, it is also part of a larger trend of Taliban attacks on Pakistani schools, school children, and teachers. As CFR Senior Fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes, terrorist attacks on schools in Pakistan and elsewhere are neither isolated nor new. In 2012, Human Rights Watch recorded nearly one hundred attacks on Pakistani schools in just a ten month period, and the United Nations reported over 150 incidents of partial or complete destruction of a school in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province or Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2011. As instability and violence ravage Pakistan, education for both boys and girls is under threat. Today’s attack on children who dare to set foot in a school makes Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s call to action more important than ever. Condemning the violence this morning, Ms. Yousafzai also reiterated her determination, saying, “I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters—but we will never be defeated.”

This week the Institute for International Education (IIE) released the latest survey data on foreign students, study abroad, and U.S. higher education. The survey, Open Doors, comes out annually and draws on data collected from around three thousand U.S. colleges and universities. Indian students are a strong presence on U.S. campuses, contributing an estimated $3.3 billion to the U.S. economy as IIE reports, using U.S. Department of Commerce data. This year, the number of Indian students in the United States surpassed the 100,000 mark, ticking up to 102,673, keeping India the number two country of origin for foreign students in the United States. As the Open Doors fact sheet on India shows, India was the number one place of origin for foreign students in the United States for eight years, from the 2001-02 survey year through 2008-09. In 2009-10, however, China surpassed India as a place of origin, with more than 127,000 students in the United States that year compared with India’s nearly 105,000. The number of students from India then began to dip slightly, dropping to below 100,000 by 2012-13, although it was still the number two place of origin. By comparison, students from China have been rapidly increasing in numbers such that for the 2013-14 year just released, there were close to 275,000 Chinese students in the United States. Source: Institute of International Education. (2008-2014). "Top 25 Places of Origin of International Students, 2008/09-2013/14." Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iie.org/opendoors An overwhelming number of Indian students in the United States are at the graduate level, 59.5 percent. Just 12.3 percent of the Indian students here are undergrads, and 27 percent are pursuing optional practical training (a year of work preceding or following degree completion). This profile differs substantially from the breakdown of Chinese students in the United States, of whom 40 percent are undergrads, 42 percent are graduate level, and 12.2 percent are carrying out optional practical training. More interestingly, 78.6 percent of the Indian students in the United States are in the “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields. The only country sending a higher proportion of its students in the STEM fields is Iran, with 79.6 percent. I was surprised that the number of Indian students in business is just 11.7 percent. Every other field of study tracked by Open Doors clocks in at 3 percent or less for Indian students: the social sciences, just 2.7 percent; fine arts, 1.4 percent; humanities, a mere 0.5 percent, as was education. This means the average Indian student in the United States is highly likely to be in a STEM graduate degree program. Source: Institute of International Education. (2014). "Fields of Study of Students from Selected Places of Origin, 2013/14." Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iie.org/opendoors Open Doors also releases data on the top destinations for U.S. students studying abroad. I’ve had a personal interest in India’s rank on this list for some years now—my own participation in a semester abroad program in India back in 1990 changed my life. The list of the leading destinations for study abroad programs (2012-13) contains few surprises. The United Kingdom is hands-down the most sought-after destination, comprising 12.5 percent of the total, or more than 36,000 students. Italy comes in a close second, then Spain, France, and China as number five. As a graphic on the Open Doors website shows, the UK, Italy, and Spain together host 32 percent of all Americans studying abroad. Source: Institute of International Education. (2014). "Top 25 Destinations of U.S. Study Abroad Students, 2011/12 -2012/13." Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.iie.org/opendoors India comes in at number thirteen. The number of Americans heading to India has certainly increased; back in 1996-97, for example, just 601 American students went to India. According to the Open Doors data, the number of U.S. study abroad students in India was 4,377 for 2012-13. India as a study destination has been on a slow upward trend, with a big 44 percent jump in 2009-10 from 2,690 to 3,884 students. In subsequent years the growth has been much smaller, and last year the numbers actually dipped a bit. I had the opportunity to speak with the president of IIE, Dr. Allan E. Goodman, about India and study abroad. He noted that it indeed is suprising that more Americans don’t study in India, particularly since the prevalence of English as the language of higher education in India would seem to help, and Americans studying international relations should be “equally as interested in India as they are in China.” Dr. Goodman said IIE has been trying to get U.S. students to go to India but has not made progress, perhaps because India is not as well set-up to receive international visitors, but is also more ambivalent about whether foreign providers should have a role in higher education in India. It’s positive to see the upward trend of Americans studying in India, but these numbers are still meager compared with the number of Americans heading to China—more than 14,000 last year—let alone Europe. Even Costa Rica ranks higher, with nearly 8,500 American students. Still some work to do. Top photo credit: Second EducationUSA Fair, Kolkata 2014. Photo by Biswarup Ganguly licensed under CC BY 3.0. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa  

Earlier this month, the Espinosa Yglesias Research Centre (CEEY) launched the English version of its most recent report on social mobility in Mexico. Creating a measure that combines 2011 household assets and occupational status, they find both good and bad news for aspiring Mexicans. For those in the middle, chances of moving up (or down) are somewhat encouraging, as only a quarter will end up in the same economic group as their parents. But on the richer and poorer ends, the chances of intergenerational change are much lower—only one out of every two individuals will lead an economically different life. Espinosa Yglesias Research Centre, “Report on Social Mobility in Mexico: Imagine Your Future,” 2014. Educational mobility is more positive. In fact, Mexico is quite close to the United States, Switzerland, and Ireland in the likelihood that children will go further in school than their parents. Here, Mexico bests Latin American peers such as Colombia, Chile, and Brazil. Espinosa Yglesias Research Centre, “Report on Social Mobility in Mexico: Imagine Your Future,” 2014. The survey also finds significant gender disparities. Overall, women are more mobile than men. But this movement in part reflects workforce discrimination, as women born wealthy are more likely than men to lose their socioeconomic position, hitting the proverbial glass ceiling. Women who begin life at the lowest income levels are less likely to move up compared to their male counterparts. The study shows that educational mobility has increased more quickly than economic mobility. This suggests that the quality of education lags, especially for those starting at an economic disadvantage. Schooling has yet to become the “great equalizer,” as the chances of completing an undergraduate degree are much higher for private school students. Expectations also matter, not unlike the story in the United States, where qualified lower income students often don’t apply, much less finish, degrees at competitive colleges and universities. What can Mexico—and by extension other countries—do? More equitable and effective public education is an important start. Affirmative action and other policies for women, minorities, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged would help as well. More generally, a broader social safety net could counterbalance the intergenerational effects of poverty. The survey shows Mexico has indeed made some progress, but also illuminates how far it has to go.

This morning’s awarding of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize to Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, along with children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi of India, comes at an important moment. Ms. Yousafzai, who at seventeen years old is the youngest recipient of the award, was shot in the head by the Taliban two years ago for campaigning in support of girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.  Since then she has become a global symbol of her struggle, and she has established a fund that promotes girls’ education—and indeed education for all—across the world. Ms. Yousafzai’s receipt of this honor epitomizes the growing international recognition that girls’ education has far-reaching implications for development. In addition, tomorrow’s International Day of the Girl will be celebrated with the lighting of the Empire State Building, further symbolizing the increase in attention paid to challenges facing girls. Research demonstrates that investment in girls’ education leads to greater prosperity, security, and stability. In countries such as Afghanistan, where female enrollment in publicly supported schools has gone from nearly zero to forty percent since 2001, girls’ education has been a critical economic development tool. In Pakistan, girls face staggering challenges in their access to education. Despite increases in the primary school net enrollment ratio, with 63 percent of school age children attending school in 2012, there are only eight girls to every ten boys in a class. In the Punjab, Kyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan provinces, over 50 percent of impoverished girls have never been to school. Yet public spending on education in Pakistan is falling, from 2.6 percent of gross national product (GNP) in 1999 to only 2.4 percent in 2012. Despite the clear benefits of girls’ education—not only for the girls themselves, but also in terms of broader development outcomes—some groups oppose girls’ access to schools. Besides Taliban restrictions on girls’ education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in this past year, the extremist group Boko Horom abducted schoolgirls in large numbers in Nigeria, and ISIS is reportedly imposing restrictions on girls’ education in Iraq. Ms. Yousafzai’s struggle, and her recent success, sets an example for the world to bring the issue of girls’ education to the forefront of the foreign policy and development discussion. Educating and empowering girls not only invests in their future, but also in furthering the broader aims of building prosperity and stability.

This morning’s awarding of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize to Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, along with children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi of India, comes at an important moment. Ms. Yousafzai, who at seventeen years old is the youngest recipient of the award, was shot in the head by the Taliban two years ago for campaigning in support of girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.  Since then she has become a global symbol of her struggle, and she has established a fund that promotes girls’ education—and indeed education for all—across the world. Ms. Yousafzai’s receipt of this honor epitomizes the growing international recognition that girls’ education has far-reaching implications for development. In addition, tomorrow’s International Day of the Girl will be celebrated with the lighting of the Empire State Building, further symbolizing the increase in attention paid to challenges facing girls. Research demonstrates that investment in girls’ education leads to greater prosperity, security, and stability. In countries such as Afghanistan, where female enrollment in publicly supported schools has gone from nearly zero to forty percent since 2001, girls’ education has been a critical economic development tool. In Pakistan, girls face staggering challenges in their access to education. Despite increases in the primary school net enrollment ratio, with 63 percent of school age children attending school in 2012, there are only eight girls to every ten boys in a class. In the Punjab, Kyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan provinces, over 50 percent of impoverished girls have never been to school. Yet public spending on education in Pakistan is falling, from 2.6 percent of gross national product (GNP) in 1999 to only 2.4 percent in 2012. Despite the clear benefits of girls’ education—not only for the girls themselves, but also in terms of broader development outcomes—some groups oppose girls’ access to schools. Besides Taliban restrictions on girls’ education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in this past year, the extremist group Boko Horom abducted schoolgirls in large numbers in Nigeria, and ISIS is reportedly imposing restrictions on girls’ education in Iraq. Ms. Yousafzai’s struggle, and her recent success, sets an example for the world to bring the issue of girls’ education to the forefront of the foreign policy and development discussion. Educating and empowering girls not only invests in their future, but also in furthering the broader aims of building prosperity and stability.

This is a guest post by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, a journalist and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. With an already shaky economy, Zimbabwe’s new education minister Lazarus Dokora’s decision to make a series of drastic “reforms” is shortsighted and potentially destabilizing. Without a strong education system, the country may lack cohesion and the tools to propel economic growth, both of which Zimbabwe sorely needs now. Zimbabwe’s education system was once the most developed in Africa, with an adult literacy rate near 90 percent, but today the system is in shambles. The nation’s hyperinflationary era, which came to a head in 2008, when a hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars bought three eggs, forced businesses and schools to close. Now Dokora’s pecuniary decrees are further damaging the fragile system. He wants to jail poor parents who fail to pay school fees and cut teacher wages and incentives, already hovering near subsistence. Just a decade earlier, Zimbabwe’s schooling was nearly universal, with over half the population completing secondary education. But, Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis devastated education. Now teacher salaries are low, working conditions poor and quality has suffered, a reality starkly reflected in June’s double-digit drop in student pass rates for Ordinary ‘O’ Level school examinations to 38 percent from last year. School materials are in short supply. Textbooks, financed by taxing parents, have dropped to a record low. UNICEF estimates that there are fifteen children for each textbook in primary schools. Many secondary schools have no math textbooks. Education Minister Dokora, who came to power after last year’s widely disputed elections, wants to improve the fragile system but his “solutions” may only unsettle it. Dokora wants to raise money from deadbeat parents. He told journalists recently: “On the issue of defaulting parents...schools must take recourse through presenting a list of parents owing money in levies to traditional leaders, who should then summon the parents to court…there shall be no exceptions. Levies must be paid.” But how will poor parents pay? The United Nations estimates unemployment at 70 percent. The economy is half the size it was in 2000, and economic growth is projected to slow to 3 percent after averaging 10 percent between 2009 and 2012. Dokora’s plan for reducing expenses is equally risky: teachers are to lose three months of wages, hard to imagine given that salaries average $500 a month and an average family requires $560 a month for basic commodities. Dokora’s decree bans teachers from giving extra lessons when school is out, refuses holiday and vacation pay, and stops incentive payments that encourage teachers to stay in the profession. His reasoning: A need to cushion hard-pressed parents. The teacher’s union says the minister is out to destroy education, but perhaps the real question is whether Dokora’s policies may destroy the peace? Education is a security issue. By putting parents and teachers in a fix, Dokora risks forcing families to either withdraw their children from school or lose their meager property, possessions, or their liberty. Faced with such stark choices, most will simply take their children out of school, a bad outcome for Zimbabwe’s future peace and prosperity.

Early this summer, a group of congresswomen returned from a visit to Afghanistan. Their takeaway: “Women are now participants—and in many cases, leaders—in a society that once systematically subjugated them.” Indeed, women in Afghanistan have made great strides in recent years, but many challenges remain—especially in the face of imminent U.S. withdrawal from the country. A recent World Bank report, titled “Women’s Role in Afghanistan’s Future: Taking Stock of Achievements and Continued Challenges,” explores the advancement of women’s rights in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban in 2001. A follow-up to this 2005 World Bank Report, the publication evaluates women’s development and participation across four sectors of society—health, education, work and employment, and legal rights and voice. It also provides recommendations for the country to continue its focus on gender as part of a national development strategy. The report highlights key advancements for women across all four sectors, particularly applauding the progress that has been made in the realms of health and education. Since 2005, Afghanistan has seen a boost in both maternal health and infant survival ratios. My colleague Isobel Coleman and I detailed some of these advancements in our 2011 working paper. The maternal death rate is now 327 per 100,000 live births, down from an estimated 1,600 per 100,000 live births. Similarly, the infant death rate decreased from 115 fatalities per 1,000 live births to 74 per 1,000 live births. In addition, the percentage of women aged fourteen to forty-nine who use contraception has increased since 2005, rising from only 5 percent to 21.2 percent. Afghanistan has nearly doubled the number of health facilities capable of providing adequate reproductive care from 1,214 to 2,047 and has vastly expanded its network of qualified female health professionals. With regard to education, the report cautiously lauds the increase in the number of girls attending all levels of school as well as the expansion of the government’s network of schools. The proportion of female primary school students is now at 40 percent, up from 34 percent in 2005, and women now account for 35 percent of secondary school students. The proportion of female university students has remained static since 2005 at 19 percent. However, the actual number of both male and female university students in Afghanistan has been increasing annually. Alongside the progress, however, there is significant room for further gains: all of these figures remain low by international standards. Malnutrition, domestic violence, forced marriage, child marriage, illegal abortion, and mental health issues remain widespread. In addition, the Afghan educational system continues to suffer from a lack of female teachers, inadequate sanitation facilities, and critical security threats, including poisoning incidents and other attacks on girls’ schools. To further advance the health and education of women in Afghanistan, the report recommends increasing investment in human resources, including mental health professionals. Women’s employment status and legal rights have seen much more limited advancement since 2005. As noted in the report, women continue to be primarily employed in informal, home-based work and are significantly under-represented in the private workforce. When women do work outside the home, it is mainly in low-income jobs such as tailoring, cooking, and domestic services. Only 3.5 percent of urban women—and even fewer in rural areas—are employed by the government, and just 21 percent of the entire female urban workforce is employed. Women also remain under-represented as professionals in the legal system, comprising less than 10 percent of judges, attorneys, and prosecutors. This serves as a barrier to women’s access to justice and decreases the number of women who report gender-based violence. While women have significantly increased their numbers in the political process, with greater female voter turn-out and more female candidates running in elections, female candidates continue to experience harassment, intimidation, and security threats. They also have fewer resources to spend on polling observers, making them disproportionately affected by voter fraud. The report suggests that legal reform continue in Afghanistan in order to expand the rights of women and that greater investment be put towards female professionals in all fields, especially in the private and legal sectors. To protect and advance women’s rights, development, and participation in society post-2014, the World Bank recommends that Afghanistan focus on: A political settlement that includes women to achieve stability Security developments to advance women’s safety in public places, including schools and the workplace Increasing the number of female workers across all sectors and geographies, including the most under-served areas Engaging religious leaders on key issues pertaining to women’s participation in society These recommendations have the potential to work in tandem with the policy suggestions laid out by CFR Fellow Catherine Powell in her most recent working paper. While the World Bank’s recommendations are addressed to the Afghan government, Powell directs her recommendations to the U.S. government, particularly following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2016. The structures Powell recommends creating within the U.S. government, such as a National Security Council–led interagency working group, would support the economic, development, and political stability goals outlined by the World Bank. Afghan women are contributors to their societies.  And with further investment and support from their own government and the international community, they will continue to play a role in building a more stable, secure future for their country. It is in the international community’s best interests that their efforts succeed. For more information on women in Afghanistan, please see CFR Fellow Catherine Powell’s recent working paper, “Women and Girls in the Afghanistan Transition.”

This is a guest post by Becky Allen, the women and foreign policy intern at CFR, and Jenna Karp, the global health governance intern at CFR. More people today have access to a mobile phone than a toothbrush: Of the six billion people in the world, 4.8 billion own a mobile phone, compared to the only 4.2 billion who own a toothbrush. In the developing world, mobile technology plays an increasing role with each coming year. According to a 2013 UN report, the number of mobile broadband connections was estimated to reach 2.1 billion worldwide by 2015, with some developing nations surpassing Western countries. As the mobile tech industry proliferates, corporations and policymakers are turning their attention to cell phones as a new asset for advertising and information transfer in the developing world. The devices have already been used successfully for agriculture, education, and banking. Now, mobile phone providers are working with two new partners—mothers and the health industry—to develop the field that has come to be known as mHealth (mobile health). Failure to address maternal and reproductive health challenges has dominated the global heath arena over the past decade. The statistics tell the story: 800 women die dailydue to preventable causes associated with pregnancy and childbirth, of which 99 percent occur in rural and impoverished areas. These figures leave the world far from achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters before 2015. South Asia, in particular, where rural health systems fall far behind their urban counterparts, struggles to overcome high maternal death rates. Nearly one-third of all maternal deaths occur in South Asia, creating an unsafe and challenging environment for newborns. What makes the South Asia case unique is its proven commitment to improving maternal and reproductive health using this new mobile technology. The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) was founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Mother’s Day 2011, with the goal of using mobile phones to improve maternal and reproductive health.  MAMA successfully launched Aponjon in December 2012, a national mobile phone service in Bangladesh. Aponjon, meaning “trusted friend” in Bengali, began as a one-year pilot program to provide new and expectant mothers with vital information via mobile phones. It now delivers messages via SMS or voice two times per week, offering advice on topics including nutrition, medical checkups, and warning signs that something may be wrong. Aponjon even has a service specifically aimed at husbands and male family members to reinforce their support in advancing maternal health. Aponjon now serves nearly 600,000 mothers and families and has trained over 3,000 community agents to promote awareness for the initiative. The program is carried out in conjunction with a local social enterprise, Dnet, and the government of Bangladesh Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. MAMA has recently turned its attention toward India. Through a cross-sector initiative, the organization plans to launch a partnership across six states to reach both local health care workers and mothers. The initiative will leverage India’s 900 million mobile subscribers, supplying critical health information to the nation with the world’s largest total number of maternal deaths. MAMA intends to inaugurate a pilot program in Mumbai later this year. IntraHealth International, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit that promotes healthcare solutions in the developing world, is also using advanced software to address maternal health in India through the Manthan Project. In 2012, the Manthan Project began testing a mobile phone application called mSakhi, a tool designed to provide ongoing support to local health care workers. Meaning “mobile friend” in Hindi, mSakhi provides 65 health messages pertaining to prenatal care, postpartum mother and newborn care, immunization, family planning, and nutrition. The app employs a combination of text messages, audio clips, and illustrations to deliver its messages. These developments in the field of mHealth are worth applause. However, the tech industry isn’t stopping here. New projects are already moving beyond messaging in the effort to advance maternal and reproductive health. Just this year, the 3G Mobile Ultrasound Patrol was implemented to avoid dangerous at-home births through early detection and treatment of major causes of maternal mortality. The technology is simple; portable ultrasound units are paired with 3G-enabled smartphones or “phablets” and remote 3G access to create low-cost imaging diagnostics. The images can uncover abnormal placenta challenges and some fetal complications. Medical professionals can use the devices in remote locations, shortening the time a patient must wait for a medical opinion from two weeks to 24 hours. The project’s trial study revealed that participating physicians reported an increase in the number of deliveries in health facilities, meaning a decrease in risky at-home births. While the Ultrasound project has only been implemented in Morocco, it represents an exciting breakthrough in the mHealth world; one that will hopefully find its way to Asia, where the maternal health Millennium Development Goal continues to fall short. If governments, healthcare workers, and tech companies continue to develop and sharpen mHealth initiatives, the next generation of mothers—and consequently their children—will have a greater chance of prolonged life.

Six years ago today, sixteen infants in China’s Gansu Province were diagnosed with kidney stones. All of them had been fed milk powder that was later found to have been adulterated with a toxic industrial compound called melamine. Four months later, an estimated 300,000 babies in China were sick from the contaminated milk, and the kidney damage led to six fatalities. The Sanlu Group, one of the largest dairy producers in China, was identified as the chief culprit. But as the scandal unfolded, more Chinese dairy firms became implicated. The incident not only damaged the reputation of China’s food exports, but also dealt a devastating blow to the booming domestic dairy industry, leading to a series of mergers and consolidations. The inelastic baby formula market boosted the demand for foreign products—indeed, after 2009, more than 100 foreign brands flooded into the Chinese market. In hindsight, it is not an overstatement that the 2008 incident is one of the largest food safety scandals in PRC history. The scandal lays bare China’s failure to build an effective regulatory state in its transition to a market economy. Drawing lessons from the crisis, the government sought to strengthen its regulatory capacity in food safety control. In June 2009, China promulgated the Food Safety Law, which prohibits any use of unauthorized food additives. The law also led to the establishment of a high-profile central commission to improve inter-state coordination and enforcement of food safety regulation at the national level. In March 2013, China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) was set up as a ministry-level agency to consolidate authorities in food and drug safety. These measures, while important and necessary, have not led to significant improvement in China’s food safety. At the State Council Food Safety Commission meeting in January 2013, Premier Li admitted that while food safety has improved, “there are still a great deal of outstanding problems and potential hidden dangers; the situation remains grim.” China’s efforts to address food safety are complicated by new environmental health hazards, such as pollution of  water and soil. Rice and garden vegetables contaminated by heavy metals poses major health risks, but the cleanup is highly costly and may take decades. Consumer confidence in Chinese dairy products remains extremely weak. Official media suggests that over half of the Chinese baby formula market is dominated by foreign brands, and in some cities, the share is as high as 80 percent. In a desperate and bizarre move to beef up the domestic dairy industry, China issued a new regulation that banned the import of dairy products from unregistered overseas manufacturers. In recognition of the challenges, the government leaders over the past months have upped the ante for food safety. In March, Premier Li Keqiang used the melamine scandal to argue for “the strictest possible oversight and accountability” and “toughest possible punishment” in safeguarding food safety. Under Li’s blessings, China last week unveiled the draft amendment to the 2009 Food Safety Law. Dubbed “the strictest food safety law in history,” the new version has raised the bar of food safety management and provided more explicit requirements for government agencies to follow in the food supply chain. But how effective these efforts remains to be seen. Since the regulation of food safety incorporates several mutually reinforcing activities (production, marketing and consumption) and involves various stakeholders (e.g., manufacturers, traders, consumers, governmental actors), it is highly unlikely that pure top-down, state-centric  regulatory and legal frameworks will be sufficient to defuse China’s food safety crisis. In order to achieve robust and sustainable regulatory capacity, the government should invest in the building of a vigorous civil society and a free and socially responsible media, which would serve as sources of information and discipline in enforcing food safety laws and regulations.  It should be committed to the building of an independent court system to protect the food safety legal framework from being hijacked by self-serving bureaucrats or other vested interests.  It should also be serious about establishing a code of business ethics at corporate and individual level to keep the “capitalism without ethics” in check.  Such institutional support, as a demonstrated in my recent book, will enable China to build its regulatory state from more solid ground.

This is a guest post by Robert Maxim, research associate, competitiveness and foreign policy, for the Council on Foreign Relations studies program. Any bill that receives the support of both Ted Cruz and Harry Reid is notable in its own right. When that bill takes steps to streamline the complex web of U.S. worker training programs, it is a genuine achievement for a Congress that gridlocks on even the most mundane tasks. In late June the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), the most notable reform of worker training since the Clinton Administration, passed 95-3 in the Senate. Yesterday WIOA passed 415-6 in the House. But while this bipartisan, bicameral bill implements some common-sense changes, it is only a modest update rather than the more ambitious overhaul that is needed. Worker training has been in the spotlight since a 2011 Government Accountability Office report identified forty seven separate employment and training programs across nine federal agencies, and found overlap and duplication of efforts across many of the programs. Additionally, it noted that the government was doing little to measure program effectiveness. There was no real effort to determine whether a participant getting hired or receiving a wage increase was actually attributable to the resources or training that he had received. The report has been frequently cited by policymakers, and was a talking point for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on the 2012 campaign trail. The last major update to worker training was in 1998, when the economy was booming and unemployment was around four percent and dropping. The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) implemented a work-first model—the goal was to get people into jobs quickly, and leave training to those who absolutely needed it. The 1998 law created three major programs, one for any adult who was seeking employment services or training, one for displaced workers who had lost their job through no fault of their own, and a youth program for workers under the age of 21. The programs for adults and displaced workers implemented a triage-like system, offering core and intensive services, and then training as a last resort. Core services included basic job search assistance and skill assessments. Intensive services included individual counseling and case management. In order to be eligible for training, a worker needed to complete core and intensive services without finding a new job. As a result, only ten to fifteen percent of workers in a given year received training. The 1998 law also created a system of One-Stop Career Centers, where workers could go to identify which program would be the best fit. These centers coordinated the adult, displaced worker, and youth programs, as well as many smaller programs aimed at specific groups of workers such as Native Americans or veterans. While this work-first model operated well during the strong economy of the late 1990s, it was much less effective during the late-2000s downturn. Since 2008 unemployment has skyrocketed, and while the overall unemployment rate has since begun to come down, long-term unemployment has remained near historically high levels. This has fueled discussions of a “skills gap” that could be holding back workers from open jobs, which in turn created the impetus to reform workforce development. Both houses of Congress and the president had their own vision for how to reform worker training. In March of 2013 the House of Representatives passed the Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills Act (or the SKILLS Act). This bill would have repealed twenty four federal worker training programs, including the three major programs created by the 1998 law, and replaced them with a single block grant allocated to states for workforce development. The SKILLS Act provided governors with wider discretion on how to use the block grant money. It also eliminated the “triage” model by combining core and intensive services, and providing flexibility for workers to bypass these services and enroll directly in training. After the House passed the SKILLS Act, the Senate, led by Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), made the decision to abandon their own worker training overhaul and instead amend the SKILLS Act to include Senate priorities. The compromise bill, renamed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, maintains the current adult, displaced workers, and youth programs, but eliminates fifteen smaller programs. It keeps the SKILLS Act’s streamlined path to direct enrollment in training. The bill also puts an increased emphasis on partnerships with businesses, reimbursing eligible employers for up to seventy five percent of the costs to train workers. Finally, the bill strengthens evaluation and data reporting requirements by standardizing them across programs. This new bill is a positive development, if for no other reason than it shows that Congress is still capable of compromising on important issues. When discussing it, lawmakers frequently cautioned against “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” If Congress took the same philosophy on issues like immigration or entitlement reform then the country would be on a much better track right now. Still, the bill is unlikely to do much to bring down long-term unemployment, or encourage a critical mass of companies to increase on-the-job training. Countries such as Germany and Denmark, which have very effective worker training programs, spend ten to twenty times as much as the U.S. on workforce development relative to the size of their economies. In comparison, even this encouraging step by Congress is a pretty small one.

Can the year you are born dictate how much you make or how healthy you are? In a new column for Bloomberg View, CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Peter Orszag explains how individuals who enter the workforce during times of high unemployment have lower wages and poorer health outcomes than those who began working in better economic conditions. Most notably, this pattern affects members of the same generation who were born only a few years apart. Over the course of a career, this can result in some workers earning up to $100,000 less than others of the same generation.

Digital technologies are once again transforming global value chains and, with them, the structure of the global economy. What do businesses, citizens, and policymakers need to know as they scramble to keep up? Digitally enabled supply chains initially increased efficiency and dramatically shortened lead times. Capital was mobile; labor less so. Economic activity (production, research, design, etc.) moved to any accessible country or region that had relatively inexpensive labor and human capital. With only a slight lag, complexity became manageable, and global supply chains’ linear model (something produced in country A is consumed in country B) gave way to a more complex model with more fragmented but more efficient supply networks. Meanwhile, a dramatic shift occurred on the demand side, as emerging economies grew and became middle-income countries. Developing country producers, who in an earlier era accounted for a relatively small fraction of global demand, became major consumers. Global supply networks shifted again, accommodating fragmentation and dispersion on both the supply and demand sides of their structure, a process sometimes called technologically enabled atomization: the division of supply networks into finer and finer parts, breaking the bonds of proximity and the resulting transaction-cost constraints that previously prevailed. For example, many services related to intermediate and final demand require knowledge, expertise, information, and communication for their delivery. What they do not require is geographical nearness or the physical movement of goods. They represent a large share of the global economy, and they are gravitating rapidly toward the tradable sector, with increasingly powerful digital and information technology chasing imperfectly mobile human resources and new rapidly growing markets. In the course of this transformation, millions of people joined the global economy, with wide-ranging consequences--many of which remain challenging--for poverty, prices, wages, and income distributions. Now comes a second, potentially even more powerful, wave of digital technology that is replacing labor in increasingly complex tasks. This process of labor substitution and disintermediation has been underway for some time in service sectors--think of ATMs, online banking, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, mobile payment systems, and much more. This revolution is spreading to the production of goods, where robots and 3D printing are displacing labor. It is important to understand the economics of these technologies. The vast majority of the cost comes at the start, in the design of hardware (like sensors) and, more important, in creating the software that produces the capability to carry out various tasks. Once this is achieved, the marginal cost of the hardware is relatively low (and declines as scale rises), and the marginal cost of replicating the software is essentially zero. With a huge potential global market to amortize the upfront fixed costs of design and testing, the incentives to invest are compelling. In other words, unlike the preceding wave of digital technology, which motivated firms to gain access to and deploy underutilized pools of valuable labor around the world, the driving force in this round is cost reduction via the replacement of labor. This transformation has important side effects. For physical goods, there are costs associated with logistics and lead times, owing to inventories and poor forecasts of the market. With digital capital-intensive technology, however, production will inevitably move toward the final market, wherever it is. This re-localization constitutes a major shift in the structure of global supply networks. An extreme form of this may be coming in the form of 3D printing, a technology that makes it possible to produce an astonishingly wide and growing range of products by printing them one layer at a time. Examples include buildings, athletic shoes, designer lamps, aircraft wings, and much more. As the costs of this technology decline, it is easy to imagine that production will become extremely local and customized. Moreover, production may occur in response to actual demand, not anticipated or forecast demand. In some sense, this represents the ultimate compression of supply chains, as firms produce to final demand with minimal delay. Meanwhile, the impact of robotics (another technology with digital foundations), is not confined to production. Though self-driving cars and drones are the most attention-getting examples, the impact on logistics is no less transformative. Computers and robotic cranes that schedule and move containers around and load ships now control the Port of Singapore, one of the most efficient in the world. Developing countries in the early stages of growth need to understand these trends. Labor, no matter how inexpensive, will become a less important asset for growth and employment expansion, with labor-intensive, process-oriented manufacturing becoming a less effective way for early-stage developing countries to enter the global economy. Re-localization will be seen everywhere, including lower-income countries. Production will not vanish; it will just be less labor intensive. All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion. The retail sector, too, is being transformed. Online retail and supporting logistics is expanding in a wide range of advanced and developing economies. In China, where the expansion is occurring extremely quickly, estimates suggest that only part of the expansion is at the expense of traditional retail. In fact, online retail appears to be accelerating the expansion of the overall consumer market. Knowledgeable participants expect the new retail model to be an integrated form of online and physical retail, each modified by the presence of the other. Think again of the 3D printing model, a potential form of demand-driven mass-customization, and its combination with online mobile payments systems and social media. The integration of sourcing with logistics and retail will become the third leg of the stool. The world we are entering is one in which the most powerful global flows will be ideas and digital capital, not goods, services, and traditional capital. Adapting to this will require shifts in mindsets, policies, investments (especially in human capital), and quite possibly models of employment and distribution. No one knows fully how all of this will play out. But attempting to understand where the technological forces and trends are leading us is a good place to start. This article originally appeared on project-syndicate.org.