I am Jou Fei Huang, a Taiwanese researcher, currently serving as a post-doctoral researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
My primary focus revolves around understanding the impact of institutional factors on the provision of various types of public goods. My dissertation, titled "A Typology of Collaborative Public Goods," delves into this area of study. While existing research has explored how individual public goods, such as telephones, internet access, and road networks, can reduce the cost of collective action, empower individual advocates, and facilitate coordination among them, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how leaders, who may recognize these effects, adjust their allocation of resources towards these public goods. Therefore, I propose a novel typology of public goods that not only considers their role in fostering collaboration but also seeks to identify how these characteristics influence the decision-making processes of leaders in different political regimes as they allocate their limited budgetary resources. One particular category of collaborative public goods that piques my interest is road infrastructure. When we examine post-1980s China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany, we encounter intriguing cases where these nations invested significantly in providing such collaborative public goods, potentially empowering the general public in collective actions. In collaboration with Thung‐Hong Lin, we argue that autocratic regimes often extend road networks primarily to bolster their political control and facilitate military deployments, often without giving adequate consideration to the accessibility of these roads for the majority of the population. Nevertheless, accurately measuring road accessibility in specific regions presents a challenge. Therefore, we have chosen an alternative metric: road transportation CO2 emissions. Outside of academia, I am passionate about human rights issues and have participated in human rights advocacy. I previously served as a Board member in Amnesty International Taiwan from 2016 to 2018. In addition, I love mountain climbing and swimming, and I enjoy growing my own green onions. joufeihu[a]buffalo.edu Please check my CV to see other ongoing research projects.
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