Lyn M Holley

Dept of Gerontology, CPACS

4th Sino-US International Conference on Public Administration

Information and insights gained at this conference will enrich a new course, Comparative Gerontology that will provide UNO students their first opportunity in the context of an upper division/graduate level course to compare and contrast how different cultures around the world approach the challenges of providing support needed by elders. The new course is the counterpart of my current upper division/graduate level course, Programs and Services for the Elderly. The current and the new course both focus on the public context of policy and programs framing elder care, and on the management of these programs which in large part determines the quality of elder care. This international conference focused on managing government performance, and provided a rare opportunity to interface directly with Chinese scholars and practitioners of Public Administration.

This was an outstanding conference - organized and managed as well as any I've ever attended - the content was "edgy" and mostly excellent - there were many comfortable opportunities to share information and exchange views with established and emergent "great minds" in Public Administration - East and West. Understanding gained through participation in the conference will help me challenge students to think critically about US approaches such as Social Security and Medicare, and through comparison with other cultures, identify the values expressed, assumptions made, and empirical evidence for these approaches.

Papers presented at the conference covered a broad range of topics from econometric deconstruction of health care costs over time to my paper on community and university partnerships. Link to conference program which includes titles of papers (and in many cases full text of papers) along with contact information for authors is: http://spaa.newark.rutgers.edu/sino-us_index.html...Enjoy!

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