 Thank you, Patricia. Good to see all of you. As Patricia said, I'm now at NORAD. I used to be a conflict researcher for many years. It was actually a little bit nice to see, even though I jumped the academic ship a couple of years ago. My previous career lives on in some of the citations on some of the slides. Gone but not forgotten or whatever. Anyway, it was a privilege to sit here and listen to these three presentations. Extremely important topics, extremely timely topics. I'm not going to try to summarize it or anything. I think I'll leave you with a set of comments, slash questions that I think might be useful taking this forward. Some of it related to policy, some of it more related to the research side. But I think I want to actually start by emphasizing the point that Anna also brought up. And that's this shift that we're seeing in basically where in the world you find the extreme poor. So Anna used the figure 59% of extreme poor might live in conflict and fragile settings in 2030. I've actually seen a World Bank estimate that might be updated as close to two-thirds of all extremely poor who live in conflict and fragile settings in 2030. And I think it's important that we realize how big of a change that is for the development community. So if you go back to 2020% of all extreme poor lived in conflict settings, that means that 80% of the extreme poor lived in poor but otherwise stable countries. These are the countries basically that development agencies have the most expertise working in. Those are the Indonesia's, the Ghana's, the Tanzania's, the India's of the world going forward when your primary mission is to reduce poverty. The types of countries that you're working in is going to shift and the types of contexts that you're working in is going to shift. And this research on this topic basically is going to be absolutely crucial for that. So the word or the term, the jargon for this in development circles is nexus. You have this nexus between development, humanitarian work and peace and reconciliation. I'm not a superfan of that term, but anyway that's the term that is used. What it basically means is that we don't live in a world anymore where you have a set of countries where you have long-term development activity, basically what used to be the UNDP countries, and a set of countries where you do peace and reconciliation, which used to be the Department of Political Affairs countries, and the humanitarian relief refugee countries, which used to be the UNHTR countries. Now increasingly those countries are all the same and that means that we actually have to think quite differently about how we handle all of these nexus type questions. And then a lot of the nexus discussion still is centered around how do you integrate and basically force long-term development actors and humanitarian development actors to work more effectively and efficiently alongside each other. What that discussion and that debate misses out on and what I think many of these papers highlight very eloquently is the third corner of this triangle and that is the peace and reconciliation part of it. How do we do peace building? How does the conflict process, the conflict dynamics influence long-term development? That's areas where I think I can say with some authority that the research has come much further than where we see the policy thinking on these topics have gotten. And I think it's, you know, so there's some obvious things here to flesh out. So one thing is, you know, how does the post-conflict setting influence by the conflict dynamics, by all of the stuff that happens during conflict, including how non-state actors behave, how taxation takes place, legitimacy, etc. All of that is obviously going to influence the implementation of a peace accord and all of the stuff that happens in a post-conflict setting. Again, I think it's pretty fair to say that we know very little about how the implementation phase of a peace accord, a peace process, actually influences, mediates, or whatever these processes. And I think these papers take us in a very fruitful direction in fleshing out some of that. I think connected to that, it's something that was, to some extent, between the lines here, but it's the question of how the conflict in itself creates new winners and losers. Very broadly speaking. In a pre-conflict society, you had a set of political elites, you had a set of, quote-unquote, winners and losers. The conflict in itself is going to reconfigure that. And when you come out of the conflict, who's on top and who's on the bottom of society, very often has changed. And that is also going to influence the post-conflict settings going to be influenced to a large extent by the types of activities that this project is basically delving into. And to understand that further, delve further into that, elaborate on that, has obvious policy implications. What I would wish for, what I would want to see more of from a policy perspective, for all of you, to flesh out some of these mechanisms much more. Because it's the mechanisms very often where I can actually do something. So to understand those, understand how they behave, how they affect or whatever, how a mechanism works, I think would be extremely useful. And then, especially in Santiago's presentation, we also had the climate dimension come in really, really nicely slash depressingly. I have this favorite map of mine where you've had, I think it's the University of Notre Dame that has this index of climate vulnerability. So there's basically a map showing the climate vulnerable countries. Surprise, surprise. It's not the same countries as the countries creating the climate change. It's the exact opposite of those countries. And then I come from who did it, but someone simply took that index and overlaid it with conflict and fragility. Not to say, right, that there's necessarily a causal effect between them, a different kind of discussion. But just to say that geographically, the overlap is immense. And it goes back to this point that we started on with the proportion of extremely poor that's going to live in fragile and conflict settings in the years to come. These are the same settings, the same countries that are the most vulnerable to climate change. And again, then you have this very nice discussion in Santiago's papers on how conflict actually affects all of these climate issues, which makes it even more important to integrate that and to understand the mechanisms of how all of that works. So I think there's only one thing, right? Broadly speaking, generally, there's a lot of extremely fruitful and interesting research avenues here. I hope and trust that you pursue it. There's obvious policy implications. But I think there's probably one area where it would be nice to hear your reflections on how this influences stuff and where it might be interesting to see a little bit more. And that is to a varying degree, right? You focused almost exclusively, but with some exceptions, on the conflict actors and the state. The missing ingredient or the missing link in all of this right then is the civilians. Obviously, we know that how civilians behave in the conflict settings. Who do they support? Do they withdraw support? How is that influenced by taxation? That's also going to be important and interesting in all of that. I hope you integrate that going forward. It would be nice to hear some of your first impressions and reflections on that. I think I'll leave it with that. Just to wish to thank you for giving me the privilege of sitting here and listening to these fascinating talks for an hour and a half. Before we address Horvud's comments, I suggest we take two or three more comments from the audience. We have about 15 minutes left. Is that okay? Okay, questions, comments. There's one here and then one at the back. Yes, from how? From the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. This project is fabulous. I really like the overall focus on taxation and bringing in non-state actors. I think I have two points on the general framing of the project. I think you do a really nice job in looking at potential and realize tax revenues and whether it's non-state actors and state actors. I was wondering, I would push it a little bit further. For me, a crucial distinction is between a scenario where you have what you might call tax addition, where the rebel group layers additional taxes on top of what the government collects, or you have a situation of tax substitution, where basically the IRG taxes are outcrowded by the rebels tax efforts. Under what conditions do you get one or the other, and then what do they mean? What are the consequences for the duration of conflict, for the kind of post-conflict settlement you get? This is more like stream of thought suggestions. I think, yeah, I leave it at that. Thank you so much for an excellent question. Hello, thanks for great presentations and really great food of thought. My name is Pia Retinhubai. I work at Union Wider and I work in the tax benefit micro simulation area for those who have never heard of this before. Basically what we do is we go with partners in the countries like a huge calculator for the government to understand what are the taxes that a household has to pay and what are the transfers they might receive. Now we use representative service for that purpose. And when I listened now to you, my heart was breaking and I see a few Microsoft colleagues here and I heard their hands breaking like how can we think even of incorporating some of the things that you brought up because obviously this is becoming more and more central. Now this is a comment slash question to you guys because you know what the standard service have and how little they have and all these papers here had specific data collection. One thought that came to my mind though was that the standard service that we need to simulate on they have the weaknesses but something we already do in a standard way is often to say our results have caveats for example in terms of informality. We can give maybe a corridor but we can't often say exactly what the informality will do to the tax revenues on personal income tax. What is kind of the disclaimer that you guys think or would recommend that we start thinking about in terms of conflict? Like if you would introduce this or that tax what is the disclaimer I should then give the policy maker in his hands to say hey if you introduce this and that hey there's that conflict maybe only in that part of your country but what would that do to this social contract at the state level but what could also be the dangers in terms of making maybe the conflict stronger or whatever. Kind of going in terms of a little bit what Horbert said before what are the takeaways for policy and very technical in my area what should we also think about in our models maybe we can incorporate some of it but also what is when we come up with a recommendation or result in terms of policy in the end there should be really highlight caveats that we haven't thought about yet. Thank you. Thank you so much Pia. Anyone else we have time to fit in one more question? No. Okay, if not then I suggest let's go in reverse order. Anna, why don't you start and then Santiago. Okay, thank you. So actually I see, okay wait you would ask something and let me just remember oh how civilians are affected. Well so I think these two questions are related I'll come to that in a moment. I think that maybe my co-panelists have more to say the details of civilians and taxes I'll say that the work that I'm doing on Yemen is not on taxation right now but it's household survey data that comes from the World Food Program and looks specifically at food insecurity and food access and so my co-author who's at the World Bank and I are looking at displacement and decision making during conflict and I think that we don't have data in that data set on taxes and things but we have a lot of data a lot but limited data as you were mentioning in conflict zones but on basic services and those sort of things and so there is some I think I've been talking to him a little bit about maybe we can do something with not necessarily the taxation part but a different looking at the different territories people are under and what we know about different tax regimes that they're living under and how that relates to some of the services so I think there's some work that's under that's possible in the context of Yemen for example that looks a little bit more at household well-being These two questions and comments I think are quite related in the sense that first yes the tax addition actually I went through it quickly but the Yemen example there of the tax receipt is actually a government tax receipt that the Houthis took and put their 50% additional it's called a completion of their taxes so they take those government receipts they add 50% to it and they take that 50% and so that is definitely something we're thinking about this framework was just the beginning the idea would be to incorporate different sectors into this and to think about for a specific country you know what the revenue structure actually is for the government to the extent that we can figure that out for the non-state actors as well and then the different sources of expenditure that we again have to get a bunch of these different data and you were asking about these different data sources I think that again my colleagues will speak more to that in terms of going on the field my colleague Zach Memphilly has done a lot of field work to be able to get those sort of data and I think that you mentioned the duration of the conflict is being critically here and I think this links very well to your question about how should the state and you know how should the UN and other organizations when they're working with the state be thinking of describing things like you know this new taxes or whatever maybe to get in can buy in and I think that what's kind of critical here is not just tax policy but whatever policies there are you know as an economist thinking about the costs and benefits from the government perspective as well as from you know the civilian perspective and I think what a real shortcoming is in a lot of the economics literature that I've seen is again like things that we can't measure we try and make some assumptions and we kind of focus on the other areas and so I don't have any particular examples to give you except that in setting corruption and other sort of illegal transactions there are many indirect ways of doing survey questionnaires and you know at a broader kind of or higher level but I think that these are really linked and I guess again I want to emphasize the importance of incorporating this we have a lot of new growing microevidence and I think that what Zach and I are trying to do is first think of the conceptual framework to say what we should be looking at and then we need to think about how to get the microevidence underneath to start bolstering our body of evidence Thanks Patricia So thanks for all the reactions and questions I'm going to try to organize my ideas First like the easiest one is I think your point is very important on trying to look at like for instance geographical patterns and how these things correlate so for sure we're doing that Your second point on what about civilians I think that links to your question also about tax substitution and here I'm going to refer to this project because this project we're still like there's one piece of information that's very hard to collect which is for instance like illegal taxation or extortion, right because what we have in many parts of the country is extortion reports which as I told you are completely unreported so it's hard to get conclusions out of that in a close project we're also collecting data for instance in Medellin so it's a very like focused and like in depth kind of concentrated work that's not mostly related to conflict but more now to like criminal rule or criminal governance and this is one point I want to make I think like as the world is becoming more urban I think like rebel rule is becoming also more like kind of criminal rule because also like this like exclusively ideologically motivated conflicts are more scarce like now we see in Colombia like the FARC, I don't know a third of the FARC demobilized and the rest just remain being a criminal organization quarter of the parliamentary demobilized and the rest remain being criminal organizations that are all dedicated only to illicit rents such as cocaine production or illegal mining and many other activities and what we see also in cities is that criminal gangs engage in pretty much the same type of activities they provide services in exchange for some taxes that in some cases civilians interpret as a tax in some others as a payment for a service and in some others as just an outright extortion and I think that getting at this like the details of this is very important and we're working on this maybe we're running these services where we for instance ask about who provides some services and we see a lot of people says for this kind of things I call the police for this other type of things I call the criminal gang that controls the neighborhood or I first call the police and this is just like kind of a very stable duopoly in many neighborhoods we're focusing on managing but we're seeing the same patterns in Rio de Janeiro for instance in Central America and some parts so I think there's a lot to study here about this interaction at the very local level that involves civilians their opinions whether they see legitimacy in any of these actors and how these actors behave in providing these services and I think that to do that and this goes back to Pia's question on I think we need to do a lot of qualitative work because and I think that in the conflict like agenda this has been done a lot but in the more criminal rule agenda this has been done fewer and I think we need to do more we need to interview more members of criminal organizations to understand their motives and I think that this is like an important like tipping point in research in economics that political science already like went through it because in economics it's kind of sometimes the incentives are not aligned so you need like clean identification and like perfect data as you were saying to publish a good paper like research in criminal organizations now is like how people was doing were doing research in IO in 1910 there was no like manufacturing survey to like run regressions right so you need to just go and get the data by yourself and it's going to be like selected samples is going to be probably just going to be measurement massive but we do need to do a lot of that and yeah and I think that links to the last point on how to incorporate like all these into these models I think we need to do more of these Thanks a lot Yes so on the role of civilians I think there's the pitfalls of the state centric approach there's also the pitfalls of the rebel centric approach and the civilians do play an extremely important role but I think some of the rebel governance literature has really paid attention to the role of civilians the work of Zakaria the work of Anna Arkhona as well but so civilian agency is extremely important in these zones and I would say even more than civilian agency per se the role of non-state civilian authorities be they customary authorities religious authorities or authorities that emerge ad hoc in these zones and often have to negotiate very complex situations between government forces rebel forces and the range of actors that are there and they are the ones doing these very complex negotiations usually managing localized peace deal or arrangements on the provision of public services and I would really say that those would be in terms of policy some of the main entry points into these zones that are very complex and where it's not just the rebels and the forces but these these types of civilian authorities in those areas that play a very important role in terms of these taxation dynamics I think geography is quite important to really simplify what you typically have geographically is larger cities where there are government forces where there are state services and all that and where the state functions has more or less normal although there are criminal groups in the larger cities I'm talking about conflict zones here then you have like the extreme opposite which is completely rebel held areas especially their strongholds for example the MILF in the Philippines called these camps which are actually military camps but also sets of villages which they run, govern and tax but a very important sport is the in between so those zones that are in between where there is both let's say state taxation and state presence but also this covert presence of these rebel groups rebel organizations or armed groups this is the case of the fishing communities that I was talking about in Zambanga Peninsula it's also the case for example that schools that we studied on another project in South Kivu which are officially under let's say state rule but at night are being taxed and harassed by the armed groups and those typically will have to pay the double tax burden and those in between zones which are often delimitated also geographically are important to take into account but also within the cities this covert criminal governance that operates and also levies a double tax and just to finish I think the disclaimer with regards to policy I think I would say would be that assumptions don't hold in these zones states legitimacy should not be taken as a given the fact that people would want to comply to taxation and comply to state rule is in contestation historically and also in present times and thus donors and people who are going to work in these zones various organizations develop conceptual apparatuses to understand them there are already tools that exist conflict assessments and these types of things but then the larger programs often rely on assumptions that don't necessarily hold so there should be different sets of assumptions that are deployed there Just to add one more thing I think also like because in some of these services that we've run we see that people tend to believe that the criminal group is actually fair relative to what the state collects and I think there's a lot to do also with designing progressive taxing systems in developing countries we see these massive heavy bureaucracies to actually create a formal business then you have to pay a lot of taxes and the alternative is someone that provides protection maybe some services maybe in a coercive way that manages you but maybe not and it's often not as expensive as the state so I think that also we need to think about how to design effective and clean taxing I come from a country that has tax reform every year and it's just like it's completely I mean it's completely not technical I think we between these people at lunch so I will then call the end of the session thank you very much and thank you for your comments hovud and thank you for everyone