 Please introduce yourself and then your question. Thank you. I'm Kurt Jensen from the Danish Foreign Ministry. And my question is primarily to the first presenter, not only because you did mention Denmark a couple of times, but also because I work in the Foreign Office with the International Development Corporation, and we want to change the world. And if you turn around, the banner behind you is also about development. So I was taken by the title of your presentation, but I don't think you quite gave honour to the title in your presentation because I'm not an economist, I have to say. The picture or the measurement of inequality that you work with in your approach, in your analysis, I'm just wondering how you as an economist, because the end results that you're measuring, the quantitative data that you presented, there's a reason why this is so. And there's a context around why these levels of inequality are there in the first place. And we heard from the keynote presenter this morning that you can have a government and then you can have reforms and then the picture changes. And you did make a reference to say you didn't want to go into the country level because of ethical reasons. I would argue it has nothing to do with ethics, it has to do with politics. I come from a country where we have one government after the other and the inequality levels are very much dependent on which government we have in power. So it's not a taboo way anyway, this is what it's all about. It's a battlefield. So I would end my question by throwing the ethics back to you as an economist that don't you have responsibility to somehow say, okay, this is a picture. We see that you have painted in your research. But how does that help policymaking? How can we use such information in policymaking, which is what we sometimes do in governments? How can it be helpful for us to, whether we want to have more or less inequality because that's a battlefield also. Some argue that a little bit of inequality is good and some argue the opposite. Thank you. Thank you. I think we had a question there in the middle. The gentleman in the middle, the gray jacket. Sorry, with the gray jacket here. Thank you very much. My name is Muhammad. I'm from University of Helsinki. originally I'm from Sudan. Of course my question goes for the data from Sudan. I would comment that the data which you have presented, my question relates to the two speakers in the middle who present the, and then also on the polarization. I think the middle class which you have shown in the data of 2009, that completely disappeared from Sudan because the vulnerable group joined the poor and the middle goes to the vulnerable. And the last group, which you said is like 10%, I think that has decreased, that is the richest, has decreased quite much from the 10% to 4%. And much of the Sudanese now, like over 70%, like now becoming like poor, about 26%, like vulnerable. And 4% only the richest. And the richest goes from, drop from 10% because of kind of struggle between the, within the ruling party who are not becoming the capitalist. Those are not from the wealthiest part of the society, but they are politicians themselves. So the only 4% of the population are the politicians share the whole wealth of the country. That goes also to the data collection concerning the government statistics and this household surveys. My worry and concern about if you rely on the household surveys conducted by the government, that is a false and vague thing also because we should have to rely on an independent institution that who conducted this household survey. It's not only the household survey that matters rather than government statistics, but who conducted the household survey also matters because the government, if they conducted even the household survey, they know how to twist it and they use it for their own statistics. The question is always those critics raised for the government, but the answer is always that it's like it's globalization. This is an impact of globalization. So my question relates to you both to comment on that and to the last speaker on the connection and divide between the impact of globalization and local policies on inequality. Thank you very much. Thank you. So we have just a few more minutes and we have time for maybe one more quick question and if there's anybody who has a question specifically on the last paper that would be, I'll give you priority. No? Okay, let's ask one question in the front here from Miguel. Thanks Rachel. My name is Miguel Nino from Union Weather. I have two questions. I don't know for the last presentation, but for Alice and Halliden, for Alice, you know, the estimate that you present is based on Milanovic and deletes data, right? But we know that these data sources are based on household surveys, which usually exclude the top or the very end of the income distribution, right? So my question is how would your results would be biased without these critical data sources that you don't have there? One question I have is also on your threshold that you presented, which is beyond the normative considerations, which are equally important, I wasn't sure your technical arguments behind what you said, right? And then on the second presentation is I wasn't sure what was your methodology. So what is new and different from what we know from previous studies? So that's basically my question. Great. Thank you. So I know there are a lot of other questions, but I'm going to stop here so that we can give our presenters a little bit of time to respond. And then I'd invite you to talk to the presenters over lunch and then ask them some of your remaining questions. But for the final presentation, I thought this was a really interesting presentation. All of the papers were really interesting and I'd urge you to download and read them if you haven't done so yet. But I thought the first question would actually be interesting for the final presenter to address as well. I was struck by your final comment about the relationship between polarization and conflict. And I wonder if there's something in your analysis that could be used by policymakers to speak to these issues, the relationship between polarization and conflict. So I know everybody wants to get to lunch and I don't want to cut short the presenters, but I'll ask each of the one author from each paper to speak for one to two minutes briefly and then if you'd like to continue discussions over lunch, please do so, please come up. Okay, so let's go in order of presentations. Thank you for the very good questions. I think there might have been a misunderstanding. It's not that I don't want to go into the ethical discussion. I very much do. But I think there are differences or there might be differences for inequality preference at local level so I cannot discuss these different preferences in a global set for each country. I very much agree with you that the importance should lie in what we can do about actual policy to change inequality. And actually the paper is an attempt to address exactly that because I think the problem with measuring inequality does not lie is that we might address the wrong areas and thus have wrong policy or not sufficiently efficient policymaking. And I very much want to have a follow-up paper that specifically addresses the policy proposals and that must be much more region-specific or even country-specific because it depends very much on the context. But as a first step, I think it's very important to measure inequality and concentration at the top especially in a way that displays the actual changes so that we can address and then look at a specific policy and just change the world. This was connected to the question about the threshold that is I agree to some degree arbitrary. I think any kind of threshold that we want to fix is well maybe not arbitrary but ideologically defined. So the technical reason or the in quotation marks technicality then because it's still ideological is that if we have maximum of inequality of whatever level that is, we know that we don't want to go across that. We don't want to overstep that line. If that maximum is of volume 2 of 1 which is the world average coincidentally that gives plenty of scope to improve and half of the country's at least inequality is not as ambition as I would like it speaking about the maximum or minimum inequality some people saying that inequality should not maybe be zero or very low. I think it can be quite low. I think it could be a more ambitious target still but as a start it's probably a reasonable measure. I'll give some space to the others as well. Yeah, sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Let me address Miguel's more fundamental question to start off with. Actually it's if I had a bit more time I would go back and explain what it is that we were doing why it is that we were doing this but I'll use a very simple analogy. If you want to answer the question of how many poor people are there in the world today how do you answer that? Well, the UN the world community has agreed to use the $1.25. If you believe that the $1.25 in purchasing power parity does a good job in measuring poverty then problem solved and everybody goes back happy and we go to September saying that poverty has been reduced by I don't know is it like 50% or 60% mainly because of China and India. If you believe that the $1.25 is faulty as we do then you come up with a completely different conclusion. I did a paper with the International Poverty Centre two years ago and the results if we use another method to account for the problems with the PPPs then yes there has been progress but probably around 14%, not 60%. We are doing exactly the same by throwing out the use of PPPs to measure the middle class by going back to the national surveys and doing what our colleague in Nigeria has done to look at the survey itself and go back to the very same principles that the World Bank for example has put in order to decide on who is or is not a poor person in Egypt, Syria, Sudan and so forth by going back to the definitions of national poverty lines to define who is poor. Once you define who is a poor person and who is a vulnerable person vulnerable to fall into poverty that's easy because we already have the literature well developed on that real challenge is to come up with an equivalent definition on answering the question of who is a middle class person well that's difficult so what we decided to do is to focus on a question well who's not and that methodology I believe answers that question had more time I would have gotten into the more technical details. One final response to Sudan I agree with you the Sudanese data in particular of all of the nine countries and it comes to I mean robustness but we have to work with the data that we have and there's a lot of again in the ideal world we would have done the harmonization a lot of data harmonization like our colleague has done in the case of Nigeria but we believe that the error margin from mixing up these surveys does not really account for a huge discrepancy of the results so had I more if we had more resources to do the harmonization and we've talked a lot with the World Bank experts on that so we believe the methodologies are comparable then the discrepancies from sampling surveyed I mean sampling from discrepancies and others are not that large to account for a huge difference but definitely post 2009 the results would be different how different we don't know we did the exercise for Yemen and for Syria because we had information that would allow us to do so in the case of Sudan I agree with you it would be very different but we don't just have enough information to say by 10% 15% or otherwise thank you I'll be very quick both the question the first one on quality of the data it's my answer is basically very similar to the first one just to underline the fact that I agree with you the risk of basing the research only on government governmental data but in our case there is also the work by the World Bank the last survey we used for the analysis of polarization in Nigeria was made by the National Bureau of Statistics but in accordance with under the guidelines of the World Bank and in consideration of that we also excluded the fact that the first kind of data the one coming from the first wave that we use in our analysis the one referring to the 2003 the National longitudinal survey is I mean they are not really reliable this is also one of the reason why we decide to adopt this kind of technique of backward imputation in time and the second question on polarization and conflict you are my answer is I don't know because the fact is that there is in the literature this kind of link which could be explored between polarization and conflict for example Jose Maria Esteban Jean-Yves Duclos and so on which can be considered the fathers of the notion of polarization in the literature they also have in their articles in the title of their of their articles the word conflict and this word is always linked to polarization which is the main topic of the article but in some recent papers they wrote in particular Esteban also they complain about the fact that there is little empirical evidence on this kind of link so our next step will be to invent some kind of methodology to work on this kind of link I mean my affirmation is not really correct because there are a lot of works on the possibility to find an empirical link between these two concepts but the efforts and this is the major complain by the fathers of polarization are still limited so we will try to give a link between polarization and conflict in an original way we want the results the empirical results on the fact that consumption distribution as a proxy of income distribution in Nigeria is polarized in this case, thank you okay just a very quick final word thank you to our presenters and to the audience if you haven't done so yet please do read these papers they're very rich papers and we can only touch on issues that they discuss in the presentations so thank you, please head over to lunch