Joseph Wong

Biography

Joseph Wong is the University of Toronto’s Vice-President, International. He is also the Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and a Professor of Political Science. He was the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School from 2005 to 2014, and held the Canada Research Chair in health, democracy and development for a full two terms, 2006 to 2016. Wong is the author of many academic articles and several books, including Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics In Taiwan and South Korea and Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State, both published by Cornell University Press. He is the co-editor, with Edward Friedman, of Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, published by Routledge, and Wong co-edited with Dilip Soman and Janice Stein Innovating for the Global South with the University of Toronto Press. Wong’s articles have appeared in journals such as Annual Review of Political Science, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Society, Governance, among many others. Professor Wong has been a visiting scholar at institutions in the US, Taiwan, Korea, and the UK; has worked extensively with the World Bank and the UN; and has advised governments on matters of public policy in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Wong’s current research focuses on poverty and innovation. Professor Wong is the founder of the Reach Alliance at the University of Toronto (http://reachalliance.org/). He is also collaborating with Professor Dan Slater (Michigan) on a book about Asia’s development and democracy, currently under contract with Princeton University Press. Professor Wong is also writing a book for the Cambridge University Press on the political economy of the welfare state in East Asia. Professor Wong teaches courses in the department of Political Science, the Munk One program and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Wong was educated at McGill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Selected Publications

“Combating Covid-19 in Democratic Taiwan and South Korea,” Current History (September, 2020)

“Authoritarian-Led Democratization” (with Rachel Riedl, Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt), Annual Review of Political Science (Vol 23, 2020)

“Costing Universal Health Coverage” (with Kimberly Skead), Bulletin of the World Health Organization (Vol. 97, 2019)

“Achieving Universal Health Coverage,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization (Vol. 93, 2015)

“Replicating Parts, Not the Whole, in Scaling” (with Stanley Zlotkin), Stanford Social Innovation Review (Fall, 2014)

“The Strength to Concede: Ruling Parties and Democratization in Developmental Asia” (with Dan Slater), Perspectives on Politics (Vol 11, No. 3, 2013)