Osaka, 24 May 2021
For the past twelve years, my professional and academic efforts have focused on the pursuit of knowledge and improvement of public policies and public integrity.
I started my career, fresh out of college, as an intern at the Secretariat of Public Management of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of Peru, where I joined the taskforce in charge of developing corruption prevention policies of mandatory application at the national level.
Drawing from those early experiences, I dedicated my Master’s in International Area Studies and Doctorate in International Public Policies to the research of social and political patterns that sustain corruption in developing countries. I first addressed the characteristics and operationalization of corruption tolerance among citizens, redefining traditional indicators and providing models drawn from social psychology and political behavior. Wanting to expand my grasp on the processes that sustain corruption in a political system, I then turned to examine the impact of corruption and anti-corruption over national politics, offering a comprehensive explanation and description of their mechanisms and testing the empirical validity of that framework.
Expanding my connections with international academic organizations, my position as coordinator of the Trans-Pacific Human Capital Development Program of the University of Tsukuba put me in constant communication with leading universities in Latin America. The program, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT), had the purpose of fostering human capital to contribute to the shared international goals of sustainable development and resolution of global issues.
Later, from 2018 to 2021, the focus of my work at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University involved data generation and theoretical and computer modeling of corruption and moral values in Asia-Pacific and Latin America. During this time I also co-created the ACE Digital Library, an open-source database and tool to facilitate the mapping of scientific literature related to corruption, hosted by the international NGO Global Integrity.
Currently, I hold the position of Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the School of Human Sciences of Osaka University. The subjects I teach include Globalization Studies, Political Economy, Introduction to Global Studies, and Statistics for Social Research.
Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez, Ph.D.