 Good afternoon and welcome to this closing plenary of our two-day conference. We thought the best way to conclude, in addition to closing the doors so that whoever doesn't want to join in, they at least don't disturb us, so let's close the doors there. We thought the best way to try to conclude our deliberations over the last two days would be to ask a selection of participants from a wide spectrum of experiences to reflect on what we have learned from the rich discussions that we've had. And I would like to thank you very much Professor Ravi Kanpur, Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, Professor of Economics, University of Cornell University and also a wider board member. I'd like to thank very much Landina Gillama Researcher, Policy Research Development Report in Tanzania, Professor Santiago Levy, Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank. Thank you very much, Christina Kuvaya, Director Unit for Sector of Policy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Finland, also a wider board member. Smirti Sharma, Researcher at New Delhi School of Economics and Professor Ernest Ayti, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana and Chair of the Wider Board. Now the sequence is very simple, that's just to help me remind in which order you're speaking, there's absolutely no other than that behind the order in which you're seated. But the three questions that we pose to you are the following. What is the one key message you take home for policy makers from this conference? And second, what lessons did the conference hold for the use of research in creating better development policy? And third, what idea or country experience discussed in the conference most surprised you? So a take home message for policy makers, a take home message for research and maybe something that actually surprised you or you didn't know or you felt, wow, there was something there. But these are really only just opening questions, they're just really to get our conversation going, so feel free to add in, deduct or say whatever you find you need to say. We requested you to be relatively brief, we would also like to open up for the opportunity that other people can join in to the conversation, so it would be good to be relatively brief, it's fine to make some succinct statements and then we will open up. So Ravi, would you go first? Thank you, so I think we really should allow members of the audience to speak, so I'll be very, very brief. The key message for policy makers that I was struck by, because there are many, it really came to me when Seppo Honkpoia was speaking about financial deregulation in Nordic countries, be very, very careful about financial deregulation. I know with the crisis, whenever these crises hit, we are very careful and then five years after those we start becoming less careful and I think that's extremely important. And the second question that follows on from that is if we're being told to be very careful about financial deregulation, then what about other types of deregulation? Should we go jump headlong into labor deregulation straight away in a big bang way? What does financial deregulation have to teach us about that? So that's the first one. Use of research in creating better than policy, I think we should really be asking Santiago Levy who has used research, so I won't say very much about that, except to say that in my experience it's pretty much random, okay? In my experience of advising policy makers and so on, you have to be at the right place at the right time and have that right one pager ready and that's when it works. So it's the hidden miss of it which has struck me in my time as policy advisor. What idea or country experience surprised you most? I hope you'll forgive me for giving some of my own research, but it wasn't presented by me but by Haroon Borat. Some work that we've been doing on minimum wage and employment effects on minimum wage in South Africa, for agriculture we find very big effects and for seven other sectors other than agriculture we find very low effects. And so when we present these to policy makers, as Haroon said, they love one result but they don't love the other results. So talk about country specificity, this is sector specificity, the same intervention using the same econometric methods, etc. We get zero effects in a series of six sectors and very big effects in agriculture. Why? Okay, thank you, Ravi. Landina? Thank you, Finn. The key message that I got from the conference actually is making policies is not very tough. The biggest challenge that we all have is how we implement and this came from the presentation by Lan Prichard and within that, the messages that also came through where we should try as much as possible not to go for shortcuts, not mimic anything that we are doing. Just because we see an institution elsewhere, we got a lot of examples here, it will be difficult to replicate what is happening without considering the different steps that you have to undergo and there shouldn't be any shortcuts. Lessons for use of research. So for me, the biggest part was I've been in policy research institute for a while and I said, okay, maybe we also have to change our name because already we have to show that we are working towards implementation. And the surprise that I got, I will join Ravi in there and for me it was the Nordic countries, the crisis. I was like, whoa, I didn't know he was that close. Yes, I was very young, but 1988 didn't sound very far to me. But then here we are now, we're already talking about 2007 and the things we're just repeating. So we need to learn from history. I thought that's what I picked up. Thanks. Thank you, Brandina. So, Santiago, Ravi already kicked a rather major ball to you. Thank you. So on the first question of sort of the key policy message, a little bit along Brandina's line, the notion that importing policy will not do, I think, is really a central policy message that I would bring to policy makers. You know, general recipes don't work. You really have to look at the institutions of the country. You have to look at the legal framework on the country. Both as Kaushik was saying yesterday morning along sort of the formal institutions and the de facto or social norms. You have to understand why what worked in another country may or may not work in your country. And certainly there's some useful lessons from other countries in terms of how agents reacted to different incentives. But agents in your country might react to the same incentives in a different way because institutions or the local customs or the local norms are different. So merging those two things I think is sort of an art. And that's why I think development is so difficult. So that's the first question. On the second one, I think sort of Raby said it's sort of random. If there is a policy maker who wants to listen and there's a policy maker who wants to be guided by empirical evidence and not with a precondition of you that he already has. And he's just looking for somebody to justify what he wants to do as opposed to somebody who's truly asking, look, I don't really know how to deal with this problem. Can I get some policy advice? There I think what we need to do I think as researchers is be a little bit more precise with the language. The same words means so very many different things to different people. If you use the word industrial policy, that means different things for different people. So it's gonna be a lot more precise. And then they generate reactions, good or bad, one way or the other. The same thing with social safety nets, the same thing with informality. These are words that we use continuously. And even though they're the same sequence of letters, the person listening on the other side, as you use these words, is having a different image of what you're saying. So much more precision in the language. And lastly, what surprised me the most on the same light. I learned a lot about South Africa both from the presentation by Francis and from the presentation by Haroon. I didn't realize that the problems were so deep, so complex, so much more difficult than the other systems. It opened my eyes, how extremely difficult a history they have. It was an eye-opener for me. Thank you, San Thiago. Christina? Thank you very much, Finn. First and foremost, what to take home as a key message for policymakers and actually that addresses myself to a certain extent. Maybe I want to just be more precise, a policymaker in a donor organization. I think that there were two issues that I think many of the presentations addressed and these were accountability and national ownership. What I gathered as a key message was that transformation, inclusion, and sustainability can take place in a meaningful way. If they are based on a shared understanding on where we are going. And if there are clear accountability mechanisms on the steps that have been taken or are to be taken. The shared understanding is created by national ownership. And when I mean national ownership, I don't mean only the state institutions, but the different stakeholders and the dialogue and the negotiation that has to take place to enable genuine national ownership on the transformations. Now the use of research. Here I would have a very generic observation which little bit goes along the lines of Santiago, but again from the perspective of the donor organization. I would say that the key lesson or the message that I am taking home is actually the use of evidence and analysis in decision making. And why I am saying this in the donor community, there is currently a huge pressure to show results to taxpayers. And there is a certain risk for us to go for easy fixes and quick results. And I think that the deliberations of this conference have emphasized that the evidence and the interpretation of the evidence is the key when we want to aim for meaningful results. So this is something that I take from there. And then finally, the idea or the country experience that sort of surprised and enlightened me, obviously, I'm not an economist, so there were 10 different ideas. I do agree with Santiago that as a country experience, South Africa and really the complexity and the depth of the challenges was something that was very enlightening to me. I also enjoyed immensely the discussions on the transitional nature of employment and the preconditions for that and the fact that unemployment as such is not enough. I mean, there's much more into it. And then finally, maybe the third one was in the very beginning of the conference when Basu was discussing the interplay of laws and social norms. I found that very sort of intriguing. And I think that there were many additions during the conference into his presentation that emphasized the power relations, the social space. And there were even some references to the spatial organization of our societies and how that interplays with the economic dynamics. Okay. Thank you, Kristina. Smethi. Thanks to Finan and Tony for inviting me to be a part of this conference. You know, it's not every day that PhD students like myself get to be a part of a conference like this, discussing these big development ideas and being on panels with such esteemed researchers. So I'm really grateful to be here. So I think with all the sessions I attended, there were these key takeaway lessons for a country like India that I felt like I could go back and tell that to policymakers. But, of course, a few handful of lessons that I would take back that resonate with my own research interests would be, firstly, there was some mention in Martin Ramaz's talk about skills being a problem. So while jobless growth is a problem that's plaguing a lot of economies, another sort of second-order problem that needs to also be given considerable attention is that of skill shortages with employers in a lot of developing countries now saying that young graduates who are entering the labour force are not equipped with the necessary skills, whether it's technical or interpersonal. And particularly for a country like India where a huge proportion of the population is now entering into the working age group, these are issues that are going to require attention. And I thought that that's something that going forward would be a really interesting area to look at. The other thought that I had was that often the issues of structural transformation and social inclusion are at odds with each other and we find various examples of this. So, for instance, in the 1980s when Bangladesh experienced trade liberalisation and there was a major expansion in the ready-made government sector which now contributes heavily to their exports and employment and GDP. Women got included in the labour force and they constitute more than 80% of the workforce in that sector. But the point is at what cost and has it led to an empowerment of the female status in general in terms of their wages or just voice or the working conditions that they face. So I feel that that's an important, again, policy question going forward that how do you resolve this tension and how do you achieve more broad-based social transformation that can also be inclusive of all groups in society. In terms of issues that surprised me the most, again, the South African case was really interesting for me like Christina and Santiago mentioned. I was aware of some of the racial literature coming out of South Africa but not in terms of the landscape when it comes to labour markets. And the sustainability literature, something that's really new to me and that's something that I'm looking to learn more about. Thank you. Okay, thanks, Meti. And Ernest, will you conclude this one? Yeah, thank you very much. I think the biggest message that I'll be taking is the fact that institutional reform is a lot more difficult to pursue than simply doing policy reform. And the main reason being that with the policy reforms, you require strong institutions to be able to pursue this properly. So we've seen many policy reforms that have not been properly implemented. That came out quite clearly in Lamp Richard's last talk. So the challenge is how to pursue reform with the view to developing the strong institutions that can actually implement policy. Many developing countries talk about doing institutional reforms but never really get to grips with it because it is a multifaceted thing that requires a lot of thinking through. Which takes me to the question of research. What kind of research ideas are coming out of this conference? The most important thing is why are institutions so different from place to place? We've heard everybody talk about the need to ensure that local solutions are obtained for local problems. To do this effectively, it means you must understand the local conditions. Why governments in Africa in many developing countries cannot spend enough on doing their research that will bring about these local solutions to the local problems. So my take on this is African countries, African governments, developing country governments need to invest more in their local research in order to find the local solutions that will be applicable to the local problems. What ideas surprise me most? Well, there are so many different ideas coming out of this. As everybody has also said, the development challenges that you will find in Ghana are not much different from what you find in South Africa or in Mali or in Bangladesh. These are fairly similar development challenges. No water, poor irrigation, et cetera, et cetera. And yet the solutions are so different from place to place. So we heard about the South African labor situation, which everybody has talked about. It's a fairly common situation in that part of the world, but also fairly common across the region. But everybody knows that the way to solve the South African problem is vastly different from the way you can solve the labor problems of Ghana. So these are things that may not be surprising. They become surprising when you begin to think about how to solve the problems. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ernest. The idea now is that anybody who wants to kick in, react, suggest that anybody feel provoked, you want to concur. So who wants to go first? Don't be shy. Yes, okay. We go to Tanzania. The panel has done a great job. That's why we are quiet. Not because it's Friday afternoon or something like that. Yes. But two things which I would like to add. I very much support the colleagues who emphasized it at the point about specificity by country. What I learned in that regard is the importance of specificity in terms of localities within our nation states. When we discuss policy prescriptions, policy reforms, most of us actually end up at the national level. But we have shown that within one nation state there is such a variation in local steps which can be taken to achieve results. And I think that to me is an important lesson that within the country, local authorities, local provinces have a lot to do to achieve results. A second point which I would like to emphasize is that which I got from the discussions, a number of interventions in policy action do not necessarily need budget, money. They need understanding and doing business differently because often when proposals are made the question which comes is budgetary implications, where is the money? So I think the lesson which comes out is so much more can be done by understanding the situation and interventions do not necessarily have to require money. Okay. Thanks a lot. Okay. Let me go on this side. Please say who you are. Yeah. My name is Olawaleo Gunkola from Nigeria. The message I can take home is we are dealing with a complex issue. One of you take institution or institutional reform and therefore we need to balance many interests in terms of stakeholders. We need to go back to history if possible and we need to also be sensitive to the norms of the society we are dealing with. So it's no longer economics, a little bit of history, a little bit of sociology, a little bit of psychology. It's the only way that we can achieve effective reform that will lead to transformation. Thank you. Okay. Thanks a lot. That was on specificity. That was on the interdisciplinarity. We need to draw on all disciplines. There's one down. Let's start up here in the front. Let's start up here with Justin and we move. I think that in terms of takeover for me, the most important one is Celestine's presentation. Certainly we all know it will be good for our country to have good governance, good infrastructure, good education, transparency, all those things. We have been obligated for a long time. But if you look at historically, most of the developing countries, they started to take up at a certain point of time and they did not have any of that. So it's a challenging issue to us because if you want to help a developing country and to improve all of the dimension, it may take decades without any result. But we see some countries they were able to take off. And on the condition, they have a very poor infrastructure, poor institution, poor governance. So I think that is one area. Certainly I don't have an answer. How do you help a poor in a country with those kinds of bad conditions to take off? But, fundamentally, if we cannot do that, it's very hard for us to really help the country to improve. Okay, point taken. Hi, Han from UNU. I'd like to point out a possibility for future research. And that is the ASEAN integration in 2015. I think there is a lot of goodwill for this regional integration. But there really isn't enough evidence from research to inform the policy makers in this regard. ASEAN was formed in 1967. I think Vietnam joined in 1995. The newest member is Myanmar. They talked about the ASEAN Economic Region for 2020 and they brought it forward to 2015, which is next year. There's a lot of goodwill. There's a lot of paper sign. And if you talk to the younger ministers, they say, but in those papers are a lot of exceptions. And we really need more evidence on how to make this work. So maybe one possibility is thinking about the Nordic countries who are more integrated have lessons for the ASEAN countries. Are there lessons that ASEAN can learn from the Nordic countries? So that's my research bait. Hopefully somebody will take it out. Thank you. Okay, Professor Honkapeier, what's your reaction? Are the Nordics integrated? Yeah, the Nordics... There is something called the Nordic Council and there are some formal structures. I would say it's more cooperation than integration. Early on, of course, the common labor market was introduced already in the 1950s and so forth. But otherwise, there is not that much formal. And of course, with the exception of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden are part of the European Union, which then dictates a lot of the overall policy framework and environment in this. But one important thing is to meet often. The politicians meet regularly, talk to each other, the research meet regularly. And this has been going on for decades. I mean, the Nordic welfare model, it's difficult to date it exactly, but one could probably date them before World War II. In the 1920s and 1930s, suddenly Sweden had that model, the beginnings of the model already then. And then it was a systematic development, also learning from each other's experiences there. And luckily, you know, what Justin was saying about the good governance and good institutions, that was pretty much in place in the Nordic countries. They were democracies early on. Women voting rights, for example, became very early on so forth. So many of these good governance elements were there. And then it's a matter of learning and it's also a matter of adapting to new circumstances. One thing which I didn't talk, since I was asked to talk about the financial aspect, the 1990s crisis, also was an overall economic crisis. It also meant that you had to reform the Nordic welfare model. You know, adjusted it important ways. And there has to be, you know, these are small countries, open countries, which prosper on the basis of foreign trade. International activities, participating in that, being competitive there, is the precondition for the success. And then in some sense, one way to think about the welfare model is to say that that provides the insurance. You know, we know that competition has always losers as well, and the social welfare model is the insurance that all of the people in the society will be treated in a reasonably good manner. So that I think is important. It's not necessarily formal contracts and so forth, but the willingness to adapt, willingness to change, willingness to look at each other, try to find the good practices, but not follow them just automatically, adapt them to the specific circumstances of each of the countries. Thank you very much, Sepo. I think there was a hand up here. Yeah, okay, we'll take the first row and then go to the second row. The most interesting idea that I got from the conference is this concept of latent comparative advantage. It taught me that even though, right now, say, we are exporting, we have a comparative advantage in raw materials like coffee, tea. We do not have to do that throughout. We have great options there which we can explore and be able to export high-value product. So I found that quite encouraging. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much, Moabu. Then just behind you. My name is Joseph Tufo from Ghana. One of the things taking home is about the issues that were presented yesterday morning, particularly in the context of the use of data-based policy and not data-waved policy. I think it was raised yesterday morning, which I think is key in the context of developing countries proposing or developing policies. It shouldn't be based on arbitrary issues but data on historical issues as with somebody raised out there that we should learn from history. And I think that is one of the key things that would help in proposing policy, public policy for developing countries. The other aspect that I think bothers on all the research output that we've been talking about and doing in our various institutes and universities is about the integration issues in terms of oftentimes we find the researchers or the academics doing their research and then the output is not integrated well into public policy once we have the politicians or the technocrats on one side and then the researchers doing their own things. They have fine results from data they collect and analyze. But integration is what I see as a problem that I think we should begin to think about how to integrate the results into public policy or bringing the two sides together. Okay, thank you. Harun, can I put you on the spot and ask? I mean, I'm sometimes joking when I say the high level panel report, does it call for a revolution? And then sort of people scratch their head a little bit and then they think, is there a revolution call in there? And there's actually at least one revolution call. There's a call for a data revolution. Could you say a couple of words about, what went into that? What were the discussions around that topic? I don't want to thank you for putting me on the spot because I'm thinking about my flight and getting out of here. So the data revolution idea was a big one, but I think perhaps just to, and maybe I can put Ernest and Ravi on the spot, is that it has probably the strongest resonance for me on the African continent. So Ravi mentioned our minimum wage study. And so just by way of an example, and we, with Lee Shee, who I think is somewhere in the audience, are planning a global workshop on minimum wages and its impact. And we've got, I don't know, half a dozen countries from different regions, not just continents, but we only have one country for Africa and that's South Africa. So we can't find a single minimum wage study for any other African country besides South Africa. I think there's an old one by Michael Walton for Zimbabwe. And one of the key reasons is that it's very difficult to get decent labor force survey data, income and expenditure survey data, census data for the continent. And I think that started the discussion in the high level panel report that the continent where you arguably find the disproportionate share of the poverty and inequality challenges is the continent with the poorest availability of data. I asked Koshik at dinner about this and he said, yes, it's on the agenda, but the resource line is fairly thin. And I think that's part of the problem. I think there's a bigger issue which we didn't deal with in the high level panel report around capacity building and statistical officers and so on, so it's not just the provision of data but actually how you go about doing that. Okay, thank you very much Haroon. I'm going to come back here. I saw Gary, you had a hand up. I can't just resist going to you now because... Okay, thank you. Well, I had two takeaways, one of which was an affirmation and one of which was a surprise. The affirmation was I've come to believe that about 80%, 90% of the issues that arise across the different countries, across the different continents are the same issues. And it's the remaining 10 or 20% that require local specificity. There are a few outliers. South Africa really is an outlier in that respect and I've learned a lot from going and working there. So that's one thing. The part that comes as a surprise to me was that in the jobs session we had yesterday, I've let off my talk by saying I define economic development to be an improvement in people's material standards of living and then I started talking about how labor market incomes could be a focal point for that. The part that surprised me was the number of people who came up to me afterwards and said, thank you for defining what economic development is because I agree with that definition and I haven't heard it. So I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for confirming that. Okay, thank you very much, Gary. Lishi, I can't. I mean, there's a little bit of a light up here so sometimes it's a difficulty. You want to add something? That's not Lishi, but anyway. Where are you? Thank you so much. No, I've noted that. Go ahead, please. In one of the parallel sessions in the morning today, Francis Lund was talking about how RCTs conducted in Mexico with regard to the progress study was used as an evidence to convince the policy makers in South Africa to implement certain features of the scheme related to the child grant scheme. This conference has really brought about the lessons and what are the problems in designing and implementing development policies, especially as a PhD researcher, it is heartening and very motivating to know that such evidence is being used by the policy makers and despite the negative comments on the field of economics and economics in such. Thank you. Thank you very much. We will now move back here. I will come over this side as well again but up here in the second row there was somebody who wanted to join in. Thank you. I actually learned a lot from all the sessions in the last two days. I'd just like to flag one point which was actually started off by Kaushik in relation to when we discussed corruption and especially the work of Harun and Ravi on institutionalized corruption and subsequently what was followed by Sam's addition to political corruption. My feeling is the social norm argument makes tremendous, looks very powerful because the risk of getting caught is zero from what the evidence we got from South Africa. With that in mind I think the afternoon we had Lancers' presentation which I thought was really excellent in how possibly we can go about addressing these kinds of corruption which I think are far more important than say someone breaking traffic rules. I think there you had an example where he articulated by mentioning participants in those organizations. If you have all these good guys demonstrating some sort of good behavior then maybe that will have an impact. The sort say Harun and Ravi came out on South Africa. Thank you. Okay, thanks. I'd like just for one minute just to ask whether anybody from the panel wants to kick in at this point? No, sure. No, I'll carry on. It's just if one of you were sort of ready to jump in now then. Okay, Roger? My take home is that the conference doesn't stop when you go home because there'll be all sorts of interesting things on the website. Well, you take that home. Indeed. The thing I was most surprised by was the work by Hindyn and others on light manufacturing and I want to know from the panel members is the news that light manufacturing really is good as Hindyn and his colleagues argue particularly with respect to Africa because I think it's a very, very interesting piece of work and I read it on the plane. I couldn't even get to sleep because I was so excited by something from the World Bank. Okay. Is Heng in the audience? Nope. Okay. I will get over there. So I think Jenny you were there. I am moving this way. Thank you. I just wanted to mention something that I didn't know even though I work in the area and I think Doug Arendt from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory pointed out that this year we're passing an important Rubicon in that the new generation capacity of electricity more renewable power is installed this year than fossil fuels plus nuclear. So there's more gigawatts of renewables principally solar and wind going installed now than gas, coal and nuclear. Interesting. Yeah. Thank you very much. My take home message here is that it is very important that developing countries build very strong institutions and this is important because if we have strong institutions then we will be able to institutionalize decision or policy making processes but the big question here is how do we get to build institutions in developing countries when people who benefit when weak institutions are benefitting people who are supposed to change or build these institutions. For example, you have a situation where gold mining in most African countries attract only 3% value of reality to most of the countries where the gold is located. So how do you tend to build institutions in the country where there is corruption and people benefit from weak institutions? Okay. Thank you, Wisdom. I think Hai was here. Thank you, Finn. I'm Hai from Saigon, Vietnam and actually I just had the opportunity today to participate in the workshop but actually I already took home a number of plans and especially at least for example I participate in two section like the institutional reform for green financing for example so I also understand that this is still challenging when we apply green financing even though in Vietnam we have already the green wealth strategy and also the institutional reform and especially the implementation is also more difficult than the policy itself and I also agree with Christina as well as also the Ravi on the same that way it's not always we just mimic or others countries but I would like to and you also emphasize the local condition and also local institution the difference in the local institution but what I have a little bit different idea is that we are here maybe we should learn I would like to focus more on the lesson learned from the similarities rather than the differences and so in that sense I think even with the local condition we emphasize somehow I would like to emphasize a little bit more on the common lesson the common lesson that we can learn from each other or even Vietnam we also eager to learn the lesson from others and I think this is very important and that's why we share the experiences I just want to say that actually I myself for my understanding I have learned a lot because under the certain similarity condition so we might apply somehow even the experiences from Nordic countries as well as from other developing countries are very useful and the second thing I wonder just a little bit about the trade-off between the evidence-based research and the actual policy-making process I fully agree with Krishna that we need to have evidence-based research supporting for the policy-making process but I still wonder the trade-off between these two because sometimes the policy-making process they need to have very quick decision to make and integrate well between the research that takes some time to complete to the policy-making process and just the last point I think of course we have number of research, the further research that's continued but from my view might be one of the issue is that the condition for the institutional reforms and the effects of the institutional reform on the other social issues like employment and labour market as well as the other issues of the country. Thank you. You said that there's often a long time between the evidence and the policies being made and I was kind of pondering because here was about 15 years ago and it's only about the last year that I've sort of started realizing that yes the policies makers actually do listen they don't necessarily tell you so Santiago when do we actually know that the policy makers actually do listen I can see you Ravi afterwards It's kind of an iterative process I mean one is continuously interacting with them you know when they listen they turn out to do what you told them to do but I mean it's kind of a subjective judgment you know these finance ministers and presidents at least in my experience in Latin America they're continuously talking to people in the multilateral institutions they're continuously talking among themselves they're continuously talking to people in their own academia and their own thing they're listening all the time what is the process by which they selectively select this piece of evidence and they dismiss this piece of evidence is very subjective it's kind of a bit of a mess in there the collegiality does help however to sort of sort out the really really bad ideas and maybe helps to highlight the really really good ideas and then it leaves kind of a gray area in the middle but this is a learning process that is continuous and iterative which opens interesting possibilities for researchers because continuously you know you can put out your ideas and your findings and you get a hearing so I think what's probably important is to create that ecology where the research is done and there's a mindset to translate that into the actual impact I think as I said is pretty random and so on and if it's a mistake the policymaker will blame you but if it's a success they'll probably take credit for themselves and so on I just give you a little anecdote on this we actually had a Jan Svénard and I organized a meeting in Columbia in relation to the next WDR on behavioural and so on and some of my Cornell colleagues were there who were actually world leaders in behavioural research David Just was there in particular and they'd done stuff on sort of obesity and these large containers in which drinks are sold and so on and so forth so on the basis of that Mayor Bloomberg of New York introduced a new regulation about the size of these things and he very generously quoted their research saying see Cornell researchers but they had also done research on how you don't put out these sorts of policies and he of course followed exactly that route and basically it's now been killed it was basically killed so in the press conference when he was saying look these guys have done his research it's fantastic that's why I did it but look they've also shown this research there's not how you do this oh those guys from Cornell they're idiots so it depends this relationship between policymaking and research is a very very tricky one can I make one more so it goes back to Sam's point that some types of policy Sam Wang's point sometimes the policy don't need money they just need to be done but actually they may not need financial capital but they always need political capital because there'll be winners and there'll be losers from any particular change that one does and in fact to address that one may need financial capital in effect to compensate the losers one can do it directly or indirectly so let me give an example where I think researchers have been doing work but somehow it's not having an impact on policy and that's on food and fuel subsidies very important in North Africa very important in many other countries as well so there's a particular dance that we've gotten into we do, we have user household surveys we do incidence analysis and we show that this or that subsidy is very poorly targeted and then we go to the policy makers and there's a huge fiscal, of course there's a huge fiscal exposure so we say well if you remove this there will not be that big an impact on poverty you all know that okay every single report comes out of the bank or the fund is of that type executive summary without even looking at the detail of the stuff and the policy makers say are you crazy if I do this thing there will be people out in the streets and I'm going to be out there's no way that I can do this and then the next study again says do poverty incidents etc so how could we push that forward well one way in which using this very same methods that we currently use which is to try out packages of interventions which is removing this subsidy plus this type of and those have to be actual instruments not some generalized idealized transfer which will in fact compensate exactly the ones etc so it's an incidence analysis with two variations one is packages of implementable instruments not the single food subsidy removal combined with some idealized transfer which will take care of this so that's one thing and secondly looking at the incidents not just on the poor but on politically salient sociopolitically salient groups those two combinations and I put it to you that we don't have that type of analysis and we could do that sort of analysis relatively easily but that will require an interaction between the researcher and the policy maker where the researcher finds out what are the implementable combinations of policy instruments and secondly what are the politically sociopolitically salient groups in that particular local situation because without that combination because really what's going on in the policy maker's mind certainly the politician's mind is he's doing those calculations at the back of his mind so I think perhaps that's one area where we've gotten into a very stale dance I think where we just produce the same old incidence analysis the policy maker said are you crazy I can't do this and then we go back ten years later we do the same analysis so perhaps a slight move in that direction might help at least that's what I've been that's what I've been pushing for I mean I just cannot say that there's actually a book coming out OUP later on this year edited by P.Pinster Bandersen where we have actually asked why did policy makers act the way they did in the food and price crisis so I mean it doesn't go all the way that you are asking Ravi but it at least goes part of the way in trying to figure out what were the rationales for what they were doing in that very important crisis that took place around 2008 in terms of the food prices so at least some of that so let that be a small advertisement Kristina you just maybe very briefly there has been very eloquent responses to the relationship between evidence and policy making maybe just maybe from the side of the donor organizations it's very much true that policy making is very much about timing and we wouldn't have time to sit down for a few years and wait for the researchers to come up with answers and proposals I think that there are two ways to look at it first I think that the donors have to invest into a constant evidence gathering it means interacting with researchers being involved in different processes so that as an organization as an institution you collect a body of evidence which is basis for the certain basic choices that you make in your policies then I think that the second one which is extremely important is actually we have had comments on the implementation and the challenges of implementation I think that we have to invest in monitoring and evaluating what we actually do and what we actually achieve and this goes back to the accountability challenge that I think is very topical to the national national institutions as well as to the donor institutions and I think that this is a key for us to become learning organizations to allow independent evaluators sectoral experts to come and actually evaluate what we are achieving and take lessons from there so I think you have this long term gathering the body of evidence and then you have the investments in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation and ensuring that your system actually learns from that. Okay thanks Christina okay we go to South Africa Francie and thank you for not protesting wildly early on when we called you Francis Francie here in the front here in the front I was, thank you very much for that. I was part in 1993 of the very helpful World Bank survey on poverty reduction in living standards, one of those things and when we were analyzing the results and this is after just going through the miracle of the relatively peaceful transition in South Africa one of the chief people in the World Bank they're sitting around the table looking at all the findings and he said wow, history matters and it was really difficult and I want to say here that there's been so much learning just so very much learning and thank you very much but I think that if you and you Wada is to say that it is more multidisciplinary as a non-economic social scientist it's very hard to hear people say which was said two or three times society matters and norms matter if you brought up as a non-economic social scientist that's where you start the embeddedness of social relationships and then how the market and the polity affects that so it's actually it's just wanted to put on the table, totally opportunistic in terms of that's not the take-home message, those will take some more time to process, thank you Finn. Thank you, some of us are slow but we eventually get there up here in the front up here in the front I want to say we're not about the product but the process of this conference development economics and economic development are very big topics, very complex and I think that as we have become mainstream as a profession we also have been subjected to the rigors of publication it takes a lot of time to develop a good paper and as a consequence we tend to be locked into kind of narrow small issues and this coexistence that we suddenly find in conferences like this one is very important it forces us to sort of elevate the game to go into the big issues as we talked about for the book the other day so I'd like to kind of say that the wider U and U has a very important role here which is to serve as a place where the community can meet can join with an interdisciplinary perspective to face to policy makers and the users of the products of research which in turn allows us to kind of feed back on to our own research agenda redefine what our priorities are going to be and all come back enriched of the experience so I want to thank wider for the experience thank you very much think development, think wider thank you I got something very interesting a quote from Lan this afternoon that says in order to have effective policy communication then you need to whisper in the ear of the powerful so I'm looking for a volunteer to help to whisper to the Bretton Woods institutions that there's nothing like a rational man who can use the price signals to promote inclusion and sustainability outside the institutional context thank you thank you there was some other hand over there I just cannot remember where it was okay I was probably wrong nobody here okay Sam what I have heard from colleagues I think the what we have learnt is that we researchers also have a lot to learn we should not always think that we are right those who are not listening to us there's something wrong with them we have to push harder and harder I think we should sit back and say maybe we have to reflect harder on the quality of what we have done in particular whether we have taken into account other aspects in society whether you have understood who the losers and gainers are in society and taking that into account as we make policy recommendations and to relate to that that would expose some of the situations where some policy makers resist in their own interest and they say no no it's because these people will lose when a study is exposed that actually the losers are some of them our experience is actually silence, it silences or softens their resistance once it's clear that actually these people is a section of these resistors so I think when being more careful in our own research understanding the implications of why certain groups of policy makers may resist and preempting that I think it's an important way of assuring that our results can actually be taken okay thank you Sam for stressing that learning is a two-way street it's not a one-way street listening is involved okay, Wabu? thank you very much I think what is missing is a clearinghouse for research papers that can be implemented with the aim of improving people's lives because it's very difficult to write a paper that is a practical application and many of the papers if they are implemented can have the disastrous consequences so I believe that there should be some more mechanism of clearinghouse for choosing implement our papers, thank you okay Hong, you had some? I'm Hong from CIM to reflect to the today's conference I would like first to thank for giving us as CIM a chance to have the conference in collaboration with UN to wider over the last two days second, during the last two days from my personal impression I found that all the topics we discussed during the last two days were very, very interesting and perhaps it was very useful for the researchers like us as the policy think tanks researchers and we think that to influence to our kind of the government policy makers we need to have some time to digest what we learned from the last two days and we think that what we learn doesn't mean that is very can be applied in Vietnamese context because there are other factors which can influence to the policy making process for example including the political context and also kind of the interests of the policy makers so anyway I found the last two days conference were very, very interesting and I believe that other Vietnamese participants also have the same feeling and I hope that in the future we would have more chances to have such kind of conference to be organized in Vietnam so that more Vietnamese people can be able to learn from other countries experience on not only the institutional reforms or the issue of the economic development but also other aspects as well, thank you Thank you very much one hand over here OK, we go there Katie and one thing that I would like to highlight which I think it seems to disappear in the discussion especially when Kaushikos talk of social norms is to what extent then social norms can be driven by information and I can give a very concrete example here for example if we think of Arab Springs how it actually moved across the Africa, Egypt Tunisia, Algeria it was quite very fast and very dramatic and partly it was because of the ICT so while we are trying to conjecture how we can sort of include social norms into the development agenda I think it would be also important to take into account that social norm changed dramatically especially in the globalized in the digitalized world now and so in that way where we could see a lot of transformation not necessarily reflecting what the society is going through but it could be the reflection of what is going through in other countries what is the role of media in this case so I think that is a very for me personal that was a very intellectually stimulating idea while I tend to agree that social norms could indeed be important for shaping policies but I wouldn't take it as a rule of thumb but I would be more careful in terms of what other dimensions in the society that could also impinge on these social norms that we are looking into thank you. Okay, thanks a lot I will now take a very quick round I'll start over here and then move very quickly that way I saw Celeste and Tony anybody else over there? Okay, Celeste and first then Tony Thank you, I'm Celeste from the World Bank thank you to Wider for this wonderful conference and the two days of discussions I've learned a lot and taken a lot of notes so let me perhaps just speak quickly on something which I believe may be still missing listening for two days to the conversations I sometimes had the feeling that we researchers are the good guys and we are discussing institutions and very often referring to policy makers and politicians as the bad guys the people who are not doing what they are supposed to do I don't know to what extent that's true because I tend to believe that most political leaders most political makers want to do the right thing of course there are some crazy outliers out there but I would say that 98% of them really want to do the right thing now I think that we researchers are failing to find the right way, the right incentives to make sure that they got the right ideas I've heard a couple of times things like well you may have good plans good policies and bad implementation I tend to believe that that's not feasible a good plan, a good policy should include the possibility of implementation if you have a good idea which is not implemented I think it's not a good idea because it's the piece which is missing and I think that's the mistake that we tend to make so to sum up I think that our research should be more geared towards things which are feasible implementable taking more concretely the perspective of the politician their utility functions their constraints the political calendar that they face the constraint that they face and if we do that then we'll be thinking more about quick wins things that give them possibilities to do even more otherwise we will keep sitting in our laboratories running regressions and finding positive coefficients and say these are the right things to do and this is where we complain that politicians are the bad guys and they're not listening to us okay, thanks a lot we need to work with politicians of course and they are not stupid such as the peasants out here on the way to the airport they're not stupid either they try to figure out how to survive how to live absolutely taken Tony the question of the millennium development goals 14 years ago in some ways the one of the issues we face now is what comes the next 15 or so years and one thing that I take away from this conference is the importance of jobs and job creation I think that very much needs to go forward as an issue and when I'm asked what I learned in Vietnam and this is only my second visit to Vietnam I've only been to Hanoi but nevertheless I'm an economist so I will immediately extrapolate from my vast wisdom is the importance of job creation and the success of Vietnam not only in creating jobs in the manufacturing sector but also improving rural employment and increasing improving employment in the disadvantaged and the more remote regions of the country through infrastructure investment that's another side of Vietnam which is very much connected to job creation I think that story of successful development in the world needs to go forward and to be taken up more broadly over the next two decades thank you thanks Tony anybody here here one here yeah witness okay thank you my name is witness from ARC so I think these two days have been very stimulating and very interesting and so I just want to sort of add my voice to the discussion around the political economy of police making so I think one of the couple of things that one would have to take into account so obviously if you look at our many sort of research outputs and our addiction to all sort of contrasting positions that some research on related topics would sort of give the kind of recommendations I think you can begin to understand why of course we should not really expect that all the recommendations that we make as researchers should find their way into policy and I do agree with what Muab was talking about in terms of some sort of clearing the way I would see it is that actually if in our government departments they are sufficiently capacitated to actually look at the research out there who understand what those sort of civil servants do understand the political constraints that they are put there the policy makers space and then they can then play around with the research and try to figure out what is implementable because I think it would be very difficult for I mean I'm just trying to think through how feasible is it that we can always research as you have it some time with policy makers to really understand the constraints they face and things like that so I think it would be a challenge because if you have some platform where within the policy making space there are people who can actually understand the research and then configure it or put it in such a way that the policy maker understands and then they take into account the constraints that are encountered by policy makers I think that would be a way for it thank you very much Omar Thanks very much I very much as a non-economist enjoyed the presentations that most of them have not in fact included lots of numbers but lots of ideas have been able to follow them one of the explicit central themes of the conference has been about change and not just any kind of change but change in a particular direction at least we hope positive change, reform and serious reform, institutional reform and structural transformation so what's at stake is considerable and what struck me for many of the presentations is that the process of change is an explicitly and intrinsically political one and one of the areas perhaps for future research and this is I guess a plug for political scientists such as myself is to in fact involve more political scientists in understanding these processes of change the incentives and the disincentives the prevailing norms and the countervailing norms and the types of relations that might be interested to look at here are not just those between policy makers and researchers but also within policy makers themselves between regimes and civil society between countries for example so please invite me again I'd like to come along political scientists have a lot to say here as well thank you. Absolutely Umar you have a lot to say anybody else in the audience okay and now turn to the panel you don't have to say anything but I'll start with Ravi and then we just move for those of you who may have one or two words, Ravi? Yeah so two things on which I'm still not sure one is for policy reform whether one should go big bang whether one should go gradually it's not obviously on a case-by-case basis we can discuss it but I don't know what the principles are which will determine whether one should go this way or that way and so on okay financial deregulation as Sepo said we should take it gradually and so on but I often hear the statement you know strike while the iron is hot okay this is the window if you don't do it now you will etc how do we weigh up those two things I mean as researchers how do we think about those things I'm afraid I don't have a really a good way of handling that and I don't the second thing that I don't really have I'm afraid is the social norms so we talk about it we mention it I suppose we can recognize it when we see it but as an analytical construct that will help us through the design of this versus that again on a case-by-case basis we can do all sorts of things take constraints into account and so on I myself find it to be quite a slippery slippery thing and a bit like informality when you say social norms the mind picture comes in the mind of the person whatever mind picture it is it's a different one for different people and as analysts I think we have to be very careful of that so that's my second something and finally I'll say in response to Celestyn that one of the things that I say to my students is actually to account these political economy constraints will actually lead to really neat research that you can get published in high quality journals churning out yet another standard model will get you published in a standard journal but really taking these into the constraints into account could actually give you a neat really neat model which should get you published in a top class journal so that's the response that I give to my students okay Ravi, thanks Blondina, yeah okay fine, Santiago I guess this is just a point that I try to make for people who do research and I don't think of myself as a researcher but for the people who actually do research there's been a huge growth in literature on evaluating individual programs and we've learned a lot about individual programs but I think now we need to take a quantum leap and begin to think about methodologies that allow to evaluate how very many programs interact with each other and to evaluate sort of strategies as opposed to individual programs because they might be working in different directions and when you put everything together it doesn't gel it doesn't gel well so that I think is sort of in its infancy because of the sort of things that Alan was saying that the journals like a very small question very well done, very well polished with a very unambiguous answer the tendencies for research to go that way but from the policy perspective the question is how does this fit in the context of everything else and you want to have a sense of the various programs interacting with each other and the answer to the individual pieces is useful but it's not enough and moving in that direction I think is kind of a challenge Thank you very much, Santiago anybody else moving, Christine, okay Ernest, you Thank you very much The question that Celestin posed has forced me to more or less reflect on the many other things that happen around me as an African researcher and indeed he's right that we don't pay enough attention to the politicians needs or objective function but I think there's also the reverse in the sense that there's a certain established distrust between researchers and politicians and the distrust is even more pronounced between African researchers and African governments and we've got to find a way of dealing with it I come from a country where we've been actively engaging economic reforms for more than a decade and I find it very sad and painful that many of the errors in management that we sought to correct 25 years ago are being repeated today where there's a lot more knowledge and a lot more information about economic policy than there was 25 years ago and yet when I listen to the finance minister he uses the kind of language that suggests he knows everything that I know so he's learned the language that pleases Donetsk and so he's able to do things that 25 years ago no finance minister would have gotten away with and yet nobody talks because the environment is different basically the incentive for good behavior as a policy maker has changed a lot of has changed in the last 25 years in the region how do we create an environment in which policy makers feel a need to listen to researchers how do we create an environment in which researchers feel obliged to do relevant work relevant work that cannot be dismissed it's easy for an African government official to dismiss the work of local researchers they would take on board a bit grudgingly the research work of outsiders because most of it is tied to donor funds so if somebody tied to USAID as a consultant that's work it's much more likely that the minister of finance will read it and would probably call some discussion of it not even if the same work is being done by local so there are things that we can do in our countries there are things that we can do to inspire confidence on both sides and there are things that we can do to remove the distrust so long as it remains there nobody is going to take the research seriously enough and nobody is also going to pursue policy making in a very serious manner even if the evidence is there thank you thank you chair we've come almost to the end of our conference UNU Wider has for almost 30 years been hosted by the government of Finland so I'm pleased to be able to introduce to you His Excellency Kimoleta Vietta Ambassador of Finland to Vietnam he's kindly agreed to contribute a few words before I will have just a few concluding remarks Ambassador please Distinguished Dr. David Malone Under Secretary General of the United Nations and Rector of the United Nations University Professor Ernst Ariete Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana Chair of Wider Board Professor Nguyen Dinh Kung President of the Central Institute of Economic Management of Vietnam Professor Finn Tharp Director of World Institute of Development Economics Research of the United Nations University ladies and gentlemen I believe this conference has truly shown the value of international collaboration we have listened to so many different country experiences from Asia to Africa to Latin America and also to experiences from my own region the Nordic countries of Denmark and Finland for example these experiences show that there is not one model of successful development success has many fathers and mothers countries can achieve economic transformation inclusive development and environmentally sustainable societies using a wide variety of institutions and policies the international community is helping including through foreign aid but success is led by the countries themselves their people and their governments this fact is also at the heart of Finnish Development Corporation ANOI has been a very appropriate setting for this conference Vietnam has achieved strong growth during the last decades it has diversified its the economy creating a strong manufacturing base and it has invested in agriculture and its productivity it has reached it has achieved one of the biggest reductions of poverty in history yet as new challenges are emerging structural reforms are urgently needed like Vietnam has done already also many other countries are now moving along the route from low to middle income status the progress of Africa is especially welcome it has been very good to see so many African colleagues at this conference from their insights and experiences yet our work is never done the threat of climate change could undermine development progress in the Nordic region we have a special concern for environmental sustainability therefore it's being good to see so much discussion of the climate change and environment challenges at this conference in clean energy for example and how we can integrate the ability to support transformation and inclusion inclusion which is not just about reducing absolute poverty but reducing inequality has been a constant theme over the two days and we cannot achieve true inclusion until we also achieve gender equality UNWIDE has for many years exercised leadership on the issue of inequality well before it became fashionable this is one reason why UNWIDE is in the top ten of international developed think tanks for four years running this conference demonstrates again UNWIDE's strength in bringing together researchers and policymakers from across the world to share experiences of what works and what can be done better as Fin mentioned Finland has been proud to host UNWIDE its Helsinki home for nearly 30 years with a 30th anniversary to be celebrated next year in 2015 we are strong believers in the values of the United Nations and as an institution of the United Nations University UNWIDE exemplifies success in mobilizing research and dialogue to bring fresh ideas to the policy table we all learn from each other so thank you to CM thank you to UNWIDE and thank you to all of you for coming to Hanoi and making this conference a success thank you very much Ambassador I have a few sort of very practical things and it's a kind of an anti-climax but I have two people Pablo Selaia and Abel Kinyon could you please before you run away contact the conference office I have no idea what it may be you might want to do it it might be a ticket that's not there then I'd like to say that you might have been speculating about this thing here what is this all about this is our attempt at trying to make sure that you remember the website the conference event website where you can actually find all of the presentations and all of the power points that have been made available the link is on this thing here and it's actually quite convenient to carry around all of this will be available after the conference if it hasn't been put there already and to stay in contact to hear more about the wider research and various opportunities including PhD internships visiting scholar program and conferences do sign up to the wider angle we are trying to make that an active, dynamic and interesting place to go and for those of you who have gone to the website over the past sort of about a month or so let me just say one thing you would have seen that we've been trying to have a facelift I mean we sort of had the same face for a while and now we thought it was time so if any one of you have gone there and you've been frustrated because one or another link did not work the last few weeks it's just part of the facelift it is now working the next conference is on inequality yes, inequality wider is actually the home of the world income inequality database and the world income inequality database has just been updated under the leadership of a Finn who is in the audience we have managed to actually update it such that you will find the database all the way up to 2012 take a look the data is there and I dare not mention a name that's mentioned everywhere these days so I will leave that but just say that in September you will find on the website if you monitor what's going on you will actually find a lot of discussion a lot of the base among the professional community focused on inequality and then in November there will be in the wider annual lecture on structural transformation will be given by Professor Peter Timmer in New York you may want to follow that because it will be broadcasted what's left for me now is to say Sinh Kaman to our Vietnamese partner in organizing this conference Dr. Kung Madam Hong Sang all of the CIM staff who have been here Lien all of you and also to the wider support staff Anna Lumi, Thuli, Annette, Paul, Dominique Brooke, Kennedy Lepo, Marianne, James, Lorraine and I apologize if there's one that I missed thank you very much and I would also like to say thank you to those who are taking all these pictures who made sure that the lights were working at least most of the time and thank you very much for organizing all of this helping us make this possible and then finally thank you very much keynotes thank you very much speakers thank you very much panelists thank you very much to all of you and safe travel get home okay and we will be in touch thank you