 Hello again, everyone. I ask you to be seated, please. Si vous pouviez vous asseoir, please. I'm waiting for Thierry to give the go. Thierry, no, he's not listening. OK, so let's start, if you don't mind. We're going to talk about international trade and investments, and I think there's no, it's a fascinating time to talk about these issues. Free trade, as you know, is a polarizing issue more than ever in many countries. For many people, trade is not synonymous of prosperity. And we talked about that earlier this morning a little bit when we talked about the election of President Trump, when we talked about Brexit, when we talked about populism. I saw this statistic from the international labour organization saying that last year 30% of workers, which means around 170 million, were employed by exporting firms in 32 countries. But this number is less than before the financial crisis. So that's interesting to note. So we're going to talk about President Trump, of course, about protectionism, about China, maybe also about emerging markets. After all, we're here in a country for which international trade is really key. It's very important for Morocco to be involved in international trade, and it's very important for the development of this country. I would like to start with, if the presentation is working, which I hope, I would like to start with you, Marcus, your Executive Vice President of the Paterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. It's a very well-known think tank in Washington, and I give you the floor. Marcus. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here this afternoon. I'm going to speak from the podium. I find that I tend to be more energetic if I'm standing than if I'm sitting. What I'm going to do is talk about Trump Administration International Economic Policy. And I think the value added that I hope to deliver is some discussion of the specifics of process protection that's underway. And then I will make an argument about why the next couple of years may be particularly dangerous due to the interaction of Trump Administration macro and trade policy. But first, I want to make a really simple point, which it is an explicitly protectionist policy. Last night, I went back and re-read his inaugural address, and it contains the following passage. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. Now, that statement is a continuation of campaign themes. There was a focus on trade deficits, including bilateral deficits. And then there were two other themes that provide from a Trump standpoint both an explanation for the trade deficit and a location for the solutions. One was the issue of currency manipulation. The other was so-called disastrous trade agreements. There has been continuity post inauguration. He has undertaken some executive actions that have tightened up government procurement, made it harder to get visas to come to the United States. And there has been an aggressive use of contingent or process protection, which I'll go into detail about in a moment. Finally, as we've heard from other speakers, there has been the withdrawal from the TPP and the renegotiations under threat of abrogation of chorus and NAFTA. Okay, what about that new protection? The United States, like other countries, have laws on anti-dumping and countervailing duties, but the Trump administration has been distinguished by two characteristics. One is the use of rather obscure parts of U.S. trade law, including the global safeguards, which doesn't even require injury to domestic industry, and the use of Section 232 national security protection. Moreover, the second characteristic is the Trump administration has been unusually prone to self-initiate cases. And that matters because historically, if the government self-initiates the case, rather than waiting for a domestic firm to complain, there is the higher likelihood of protection actually being implied. So if you simply take the cases from the first 100 days of the Trump administration and assume, and this is an assumption, that protection is actually applied, as you can see in the upper panel, the share of U.S. imports under protection doubles. And you see in the lower panel, it breaks down that by country. South Korea would be the worst affected. The problem for a country like South Korea is while some of these policies are aimed at China, South Korea produces products such as solar panels and steel and washing machines that get caught up. South Korea is essentially collateral damage. The single biggest change in protection would be Canada because of the perennial software lumber case. And as somebody mentioned yesterday, the real problem with this is that, given the United States prominence in the system, the likelihood that there will be emulation by other countries. The Trump administration, as we've heard, is also scrapping trade agreements. We are renegotiating NAFTA. Dick Cooper pointed out yesterday that some of that is a constructive agenda, updating. But what Dick didn't mention were the bad ideas that we heard some about this morning. A five-year sunset provision which basically undercuts the idea of having a trade agreement because it means that companies cannot invest with any certainty about the rules of the game would be. Tighten rules of origin, particularly in automobiles. The rules of origin that the United States is proposing on automobiles are designed to disrupt the existing supply chains. The North American auto market is highly integrated. If these rules go through, it will mean real inefficiency is introduced into that North American market. The long-term effect will be the movement of production from North America into China. And as we heard earlier this morning, these sort of strange arguments about trade balances. If the renegotiation fails and NAFTA is abrogated, the snapback for Canada is to the U.S.-Canada FDA. And you can imagine the U.S. and Canada basically working out a new deal that modernizes that agreement. But for Mexico, the threat is much more existential. There would be real impact in terms of production in Mexico. And strangely from a Trump standpoint, the likelihood would be a depreciation of the peso and an increase in the bilateral trade imbalance, not a reduction. The Korea Free Trade Agreement was slated for abrogation. Fortunately, Kim Jong-un stepped in and with the sixth nuclear test took that off the agenda. But it's been simply pushed to the back burner and there is still the possibility of abrogating chorus. Now in anticipation of the election last year, I did some modeling along with some colleagues at the Peterson Institute to look at what the impact would be on the United States, modeling trade wars with China and Mexico. And what you can see from that map is that the effects are significant and they are not uniform across the states. Capital goods industries would be the worst hit both because of the decline in domestic investments associated with the trade war as well as a reduction of exports of those goods. But what's really interesting is there are large employment losses and non-tradables and because of the pattern of hiring in those sectors, what we find is that the most of the U.S. casualties in a trade war would be among the most vulnerable people in society. The effects of a trade war in the United States would be regressive. Washington, poor Washington is the worst affected state. But we also looked at some scenarios that looked at asymmetrical forms of retaliation. Things like China stopping buying aircraft or having an embargo on soybeans or instructing state-owned enterprises not to buy U.S. business services. We've also looked at what might happen in some cases if chorus were abrogated. That would include the loss of preferences in the beef market to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, which we expect would mean the elimination of U.S. beef exports at least in the short run as well as also loss of business services to EU competitors. The case of aircraft, aircraft production is highly localized, certain geographical areas are hit hard. In the case of business services, the areas that are hit under either of these actions basically constitute a map of the high-tech urban areas of the United States. But from a political economy standpoint, possibly the most interesting part is the two agricultural cases. You can see on the map there is a patch of green that runs from Mississippi through Arkansas, Tennessee and into Missouri. That's the impact of a soybean embargo by China. The reason it's very interesting is twofold. First of all, if say you're in Seattle and you lose your job, you're losing your job, which is not good, but you're losing it in the context of a large urban labor market with public transportation. If you lose your job in one of those contiguous rural counties, you are in real trouble. And the job losses plus indirect in some of these counties, one county was as high as 25%. There were about a dozen counties where it exceeded 10%. Likewise, in the beef case, you can see those yellow dots. They are in these sort of plain states. The reason why this is interesting is that those areas are represented by Republicans. And if the Trump administration is to be constrained politically, it is likely to become through agricultural interests in the United States. The real threat, though, is the interaction of the macro policy and the trade policy. The United States, for a variety of reasons, is likely to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy. That's going to lead to a growth spurt, widening budget and trade deficits, appreciating exchange rate. And then you face the prospect of the Trump administration reaching for protection, trying to square the circle with that increasing trade deficit. And what we could get is a very nasty version of the first Reagan administration. An administration that, in the infamous words of then Secretary of Treasury James Baker, imposed more protection than any US presidential administration since Herbert Hoover. This is a period of time well known for voluntary export restraints. The current USTR, Ambassador Lighthizer, was actually one of the negotiators and is well versed with this kind of action. There is one huge difference, though. In the context of the Cold War, and normally I have to say most of you don't remember that, but in the context of the Cold War, actually this audience, you do remember it. You are all senior officials at the time. In the context of the Cold War, we were the ultimate, United States was the ultimate political and guarantor of Japan. And however grudgingly, at the end of the day, the Japanese were going to go along with American demands in the trade policy area. Needless to say, the relationship between the United States and China today could not be more different. So just to recapitulate, oh, I just lost it, this is a new policy. This is a break with the past. It is explicitly protectionist. It is in the works. So some of these decisions for legal reasons have not yet been made, but they are in train. And the conflict between trade and macro policies are going to make it worse to the detriment of the United States and all of its trade partners. Thank you. Thank you, Marcus. Maybe we'll discuss later on the very points to know whether this new policy, as you said, is here to stay or if there are prospects for change. Let me turn to you, Minister Bach. You were Minister of Trade for South Korea between 2011 and 2012, at a time when I think your country was negotiating a trade deal with China. And now you are the head of a major think tank in Seoul involved in trade and economy, legal, global. Minister. Okay, thank you very much. Based on my area of interest, I would like to briefly discuss the current state of the global trade governance. As all of you know, the Doha round has been drifting for 16 years, and yet we do not know when and how it can be concluded. This kind of impasse had never happened before since the start of the multilateral trading system of the WTO get in 1948. The 11th WTO Ministerial Conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina next month. To prepare this MC-11, an informal mini-ministerial meeting was held here in Marrakech early last month. However, ministers found that there are still sharp differences on major issues among the groups of countries depending upon their own country's interest. As the multilateral trading system of the WTO was struggling with the Doha round, many countries actually have attempted to liberalize their economy by seeking bilateral as well as regional FTAs. And most recently, a new trend of forming a mega-RTAs with multiple participants has emerged such as TPP, RCEP, and TTIP. However, as you know, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement will not be implemented. You know the reason why. Furthermore, the negotiations of other mega-RTAs seem to be also prolonged. In addition, President Trump, you just heard from Marcus Norland, America's first trade policy is making the global trading environment more uncertain and more unpredictable. Against this backdrop, some international organizations and the leaders forum have worked to improve the global trade governance. In particular, the G20, the premier leaders forum for international economic cooperation, has made various efforts to restore the credibility of the global trading system. As we remember, at the 2015 Turkey G20 Summit, leaders asked trade ministers to meet on a regular basis. Following this request, G20 trade ministers met in Shanghai in July 2016 and welcomed the establishment of the G20 Trade Investment Working Group. However, during this year's German presidency of the G20, trade ministers did not meet and no substantial agreement on the improvement of the world trading system was even included in the G20 Summit declaration. Meanwhile, at the German G20 Summit, leaders discussed the importance of fair trade and level playing field and recognized the role of trade defense instruments, just like anti-dumping or countervailing duties. It should be noted that G20 leaders at this time had more interest in fair trade than free trade. I would now like to make some suggestions in my own personal thinking on global trading system. First of all, the WTO members should seriously discuss how to save the multilateral trade negotiations. To save the Doha round, serious discussions should be made at the upcoming MC-11 to revise the agenda which was written 16 years ago. Second, along with the multilateral negotiations, WTO members must consider taking different approaches to address further liberalization and new commercial rules. Given the nature of the decision-making mechanism of the WTO, we may need to seek for plurilateral agreements for certain issues among like-minded participants such as government procurement agreement. Of course, if other countries who later satisfy certain requirements, they are allowed to join the agreement. Furthermore, if these agreements extend the benefits to all other non-participating members of WTO on an IMFN basis, this agreement would become multilateral, like the information technology agreement. Third, we know that WTO's dispute settlement function has been respected despite the failure of the Doha round. However, recently, WTO has unable to fill vacant members at the WTO affiliate body. This really hurts the credibility of the WTO's dispute settlement system. We do hope this problem to be resolved as soon as possible. Fourth, I would like also emphasize that MC-11 must produce a successful outcome with another small package. Fifth, I would recommend that WTO members agree that investigation and imposition of trade defense measures should be consistent with WTO rules and purposes. In this context, it would be extremely important that trade remedy systems are operated in a fairer, more transparent way. Sixth, I would like to note that there seem to be a growing consensus about the need to make all the citizens share the opportunities and benefits of trade liberalization. Regarding this issue, there are two important areas to focus on. First, we have to look at this issue from the consumer's point of view. In many countries, consumers often do not feel the benefits of trade liberalization. One of the main problems in this case is that distribution process of delivering imported goods from the border to the final consumers is extremely complicated, making the final price of the imported goods much higher than the initial input price. From the consumer's point of view, expensive imported goods are not attractive and therefore they cannot see the real benefits of trade liberalization. Major reform should be made in the distribution process of imported goods. Second, we have to reconsider the way to assist industries, firms and laborers which are having difficult times from liberalization. We now need more inclusive policy schemes to assist losers from globalization and trade. As these two issues, I would like to recommend WTO, along with other appropriate international organizations, study and suggest concrete policy recommendations with best practices. Last but not least, I would like to suggest that WTO members utilize their existing and future bilateral FTAs to further liberalize trade and reflect new commercial issues in the agreement. In other words, if the WTO members decide to have new FTAs or revised existing ones, they should make the FTAs as modern as possible by including newly emerging trade rules, such as competition policy, e-commerce, trade remedies, state-owned enterprises and investment facilitation to name a few. I'll stop here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So interesting suggestions on how to improve the global trade system. And as we said, it's a hard challenge given the fact that we need to find a consensus on these issues. Probably you have also interesting suggestions to make. Francis Gurie, you're as the head of the World Organization on International Property. Thank you very much, Nicodin. Good morning to every actually good afternoon, but it still feels like the morning. It's a pleasure to be here and I thank Thierry de Montbrillard for the invitation. Future of trade. It's a very large subject, of course. So I would like to make comments on three areas or three forces that I think will shape the future of trade. Of course, there's a certainty in what I will say which should not be there at all. The first area is it rejoins really what was said in the last panel on artificial intelligence and in particular by Masoud Ahmed. And that is that I think that advanced manufacturing technologies are going to radically alter the nature of trade relations in the future. I'll take what he said and put it in a trade context. I think if you go back to the Uruguay round, and that is the multilateral framework that we have at the moment, and one way of looking at that round is that the basic deal underneath it was that the developed countries would give more increased access to their markets with the consequence that jobs in low technology, labour-intensive industries, would be off-shored. And in return for that, the developing countries would protect the conceptual input to production, namely intellectual property. And that I think shepherded, it was not the only reason, but it shepherded this enormous growth in global value chains that we've seen, particularly in the 90s and the 2000s. And if you look at those global value chains, arguably the greatest value lies in the pre-manufacturing and the post-manufacturing that is in the design and conception and research and development, and in the marketing, branding, and distribution, and not in the manufacture. Now with advanced manufacturing technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, sensors, and additive manufacturing, I think that we're seeing the possibility of the recapturing of manufacturing by industrialised countries. The example was given of Adidas, where Adidas will have the capacity to be able to manufacture instead of using factories in Indonesia or Vietnam or the Philippines. That, I think, that possibility, technological possibility is joined by a political will, which we are seeing expressed, either to recapture manufacturing, and I don't think, I'm not talking here about the Trump administration, because I think the Trump administration is more old economy and not new economy, and when he talks about recapturing manufacturing, I think he's talking about traditional manufacturing and not new manufacturing. But we see a very, I think, deliberate view that actually one of the reasons for recapturing manufacturing is because innovation follows manufacturing, and that is a good reason to preserve manufacturing capacity. I think we see that also in the case of China, very much, with its strategy on artificial intelligence, its strategy on manufacturing. In this case, it's not recapturing manufacturing, but preserving manufacturing. And this, of course, is going to have a radical effect, I think, on the nature of trade relations in the future, and I'm not sure it's being addressed. It, of course, means that there will be increased in pressure on intellectual property. That pressure was already there for the pre-manufacturing and the post-manufacturing, because you're talking about patents and designs and branding, but it will also carry over, I think, into manufacturing in the future, and this will be a major political issue. The second force that I would refer to really is the whole digital economy of which the digitization of production, of which I just spoke, is only one part, but the whole digital economy, and in particular data. Now, it was said in the last session that algorithms are really the most important thing, and that they are certainly important, but I think algorithms are nothing without data. And data is, I would say, suggest the oil of the new economy. There is increasing value in data, both in the conception stage, in new business models for distribution, right across the production process. And it's created the beer moths with which we're all familiar, Google, Facebook, eBay, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and so forth. And I think if you look around the world now, you see that governments are struggling to know how to deal with both data and the enormous enterprises that are built on the basis of data. There is a confluence of policy approaches that come into question. You have privacy, security, data location, taxation, competition, ownership, let's not forget, and trade all as perspectives. And I think one of the characteristics of the data economy is that it doesn't respect, of course, the architecture that has been put in place for trade relations in the past. And I don't see this really being addressed. I know that WTO is addressing e-commerce, but I think if I may say it's a larger issue, and we are all struggling with policy approaches to data, that really requires, I think, a fundamental rethinking of the system. And I fear that we no longer or we do not have at the moment the capacity to undertake that fundamental rethinking. And we don't have that capacity because, first of all, it concerns competitive relations, which are becoming more and more difficult. Secondly, internationally, the asymmetries in technological capacity are simply enormous, and that creates a difficulty in being able to address questions. And thirdly, and I think perhaps most importantly, the speed of the development of technology these days is such that it far outstrips our institutional capacity to respond. And this is true at the national level, and it's even more true when you come to the international level. So then let me just make my final point, which is that I think there will also be in the future a new model of trade relations, or it's actually in the present, that is being pioneered by China. So we've spoken a lot in the course of the conference about the vacuum that is being left by the policies of the current Trump administration, and that vacuum is creating an opportunity for many countries, and in particular China, to move into the space. But I don't think that, if I may say, that China will move into the space in the same way, or with the same model of trade relations. And in this respect, I would invite you to consider, for example, the difference between the Transpacific Partnership as one model and the Belt and Road Initiative as another model. Very shortly, I think, the difference in the model is infrastructure as against accords or agreements. And I think it's broader than change. Trade, it applies also to development. So if you like in caricature, the old model is here are the rules comply, and the new model is here is the road trade. And I think this is going to have major institutional or consequences for the institutional architecture. I would not wish to be thought to be suggesting by that that China is not a fully engaged member of the current multilateral system. It is absolutely fully engaged, but the model for the future may be slightly different. Thank you. Thank you very much, Francis. So we talked about trade at macro level, and let me turn to the voice of business coming from Germany, the world's biggest exporter with China. And so with you, Stefan, your representative of the German Business Association, Bidi. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here and to speak on an issue which is of utmost importance for German industry. You probably know, as you already referred to, that exports make about 46% of our GDP. You probably don't know that imports make for another 38%. So we are left with a foreign trade world of well beyond 80%. Just to compare, in the case of France, it's 45%. In the case of US, it's 25% as far as I remember. So we are very open, very globalized, but also very exposed. I think this will get underlined also by investments. We have more than 36,000 companies having invested more than 1 trillion euro abroad. So as I said, very much globalized, but very much exposed as well. So we follow the tendencies, the protectionist tendencies with very great concern. And to begin on that, we rightly are these days preempted with the protectionist rhetoric and the measures taken by Trump, but he's not the only one who resorts to protectionism. Since 2008, when the G20 countries committed themselves to keep their markets open, we could count for more than 2,500 trade restrictive measures. Some of them have been taken back, but still many of them are in place. So you look to China, where we, I think, are still exposed to major hurdles to market access. We have a strong pressure on localizing production in Brazil and Russia and many other places. We have, of course, Brexit in the European Union, where the British government interpreted it in a way that they have to leave the single market. And, of course, we have also very strong resistance against the trade, transatlantic trade and investment partnership in Germany. Very strong demonstrations against that. So I think we have to look at the reasons for that and see how we can deal with this. And I think they are, from my point of view, two very obvious reasons. One was already addressed in the session yesterday by Uri Dadus, as far as I remember, saying that, of course, we had a decline of social inequality globally, but we had an increase of social inequality in major economies. And those people who feel left behind or think that jobs get lost to emerging economies want the jobs to get back. I think we can argue here for a while whether the job losses are due to technological change or to globalization, but at the end, from my point of view, here it's clearly the responsibility of national governments to deal with these problems and to create social safety nets, to support those who lost their jobs in retraining and lifelong learning, but also to invest in innovation and research. The second reason, clearly, for protectionism, rising protectionism, I think is the sentiment of governments and societies that they lose control over unleashed global market forces. This was certainly reinforced by the financial market crisis. It was interpreted by these kind of unleashed capital markets, which caused the problem. And so the question is how to regain it. And it is Danny Roderick who phrased this globalization dilemma, which says that you can't have hyperglobalization, as he called it, democratic politics and national sovereignty at the same time. Either you can always combine two of them. Quite obviously, most of the governments opted for the option to reinforce national sovereignty over globalization. I think this is very understandable. First, it addresses populist sentiments you have. Secondly, you have well-established instruments and policies to do so. And of course, it strengthens national governments, in some cases, authoritarian rule. So I think it's understandable that they did so. The problem is that, from my point of view, this option is not really able to cope with the global challenges we have. So we have to resort, from my point of view, to global governance, even if it means to weaken national sovereignty. And this is, from my point of view and from the point of view of micro-duration, the clear track we have to take. So we have, of course, strengthened supranational cooperation governance in the European Union. And I hope that when we hopefully will have a government in Germany in some weeks that we can restart it together with France to really reform the European Union and to strengthen it, supranational governance there. But also we have to reinforce WTO. This might sound a little bit naïve as the Trump administration seems to opt for a timeout in global governance. But if that's so, then we have to talk to other partners and test their willingness to develop, to bring forward global governance. Might it be China, might it be Japan, India, African, Latin American countries, I think we have to do this effort and really to reinvest in global governance. Moreover, we have also to do some homework. I think we need, especially in the European Union, a new consensus on trade policy. We have, in the past years, I think overloaded our trade policy. Trade agreements have become more and more kind of basic creatures with other governments where we not only discuss trade, but also investment of course, but labour standards, social standards, environment standards. So these are now really treat this hardly to negotiate and to manage it at the end. And we have to rethink this and we have to involve of course society, citizens on doing. So we as BDI started recently to do a series of town hall meetings on the future of trade policy. We will have some workshops with the critics of TTIP and trade policy to try to find a new consensus on this. The same I think is necessary for investment protection. We had a strong resistance in Europe against investment protection, but also many governments are about cancelling investment protection treaties because they find them unfair. So also we need to do more on this to find a new consensus on that. I think I'll stop here and leave it to the discussion to get a little bit deeper on some of the other issues. Thank you. Excellent. So now Yi Xiaojun, you represent the authority here, but it's also an authority that is under threat. And it must be sometimes difficult to lead this organization. How can you respond to all the criticism that we've heard about World Trade and WTO more specifically? Well, thank you very much, Nicholas. I'm happy to join this panel to discuss the future of World Trade and the global trading system. And many of you may have not noticed that last Monday this week, it's the 30th of October, marked 70th anniversary of GATT, which is the predecessor of WTO and origins of the multilateral trading system. And we believe that WTO and its predecessor, the GATT, hugely contributed to global prosperity in the past decades. And between 1950 and 2016, global GDP increased 10-fold, while the global trade increased 39-fold. I think it's largely due to the increasing economic openness fostered by multilateral trading system. So I would like to make three points. First, now many people feel as if the global trading system is now on the verge of collapse. But actually, I think the multilateral trading system remains strong and solid. We all saw the value of this system during the financial crisis. And in the 1930s, the financial crisis, I mean, the protection of the measures wiped out two-thirds of the world trade. But in the crisis of 2008, we didn't see such escalation. Because our member governments knew that they were all bound by the multilateral rules. They knew where their boundaries were. So I truly believe that the multilateral trading system represents the best world efforts to keep protectionism and economic tensions at bay. And my second point is we must be aware that many people feel disconnected from the economic progress. And attitudes toward trade and globalization have hardened recently. And in some countries, trade is often singled out as a destructive force in labor market. Well, trade does have effect. The technology and the technological progress is actually the major force driving changes and disruption. And it's true everywhere in any economy. Automation, digitization, new managerial techniques hugely reduced demand for labor in employment. So we can see that in reality, according to our survey, more than 80% of job losses are due to productivity gains, due to technological progress, not to cheaper labor, cheaper imports. But again, trade is often pointed as a culprit here. But in fact, as mentioned, technology and trade are essential for economic progress. We cannot reject those forces. Instead, we had better embrace and adapt. So I think the current trend of turning against the trade will not solve any problem. Instead, raising barriers to trade will only make the situation even worse. They will not bring the jobs back. So the better response to these challenges is to have more active domestic policies to support workers and equip them with the skills to compete in the modern market place. So let me move to my third point. It's also the topic of the today. I think the key question before us today is about the future of WTO. I truly believe that none of the global trade challenges can be easier solved outside of multilateral trading system. In fact, the opposite is the case. For example, you can hardly imagine that you can manage an increasing borderless digital economy or respond to the globalization of the Internet through bilateral agreements. It is also impossible for countries to limit their agriculture or fishery subsidies via regional arrangements. I'm not trying to say that bilateral or regional approaches are not important. They absolutely are. But what I'm trying to say is they are on their own, they cannot be sufficient. They can only supplement multilateral trading system and they can act as building blocks for the global system. But the multilateral approach is essential and indispensable. Nevertheless, I believe that the WTO can and should do more to evolve and to improve. I mean, before us, there are a lot of long-standing issues as Minister Bart mentioned. When you were the minister, you discussed those issues like agriculture subsidies, fishery subsidies, domestic regulations of services sectors, and so on. Those issues are still standing there to be resolved. But meanwhile, we also see that there is increasing interest among some members to discuss those forward-looking issues like e-commerce and investment facilitation. However, we have to recognize that there is no easy or obvious solution on any of those fronts because if we want to find a solution, we need to get consensus. That is to say, we need to bring all the WTO members on board. It's very challenging and very difficult. Ultimately, the future of WTO is in the hands of its members. We are a member-driven organization. So it is there, I mean, our members shared responsibility to bolster global economic cooperation and to leave a strong and well-functioning multilateral trading system for future generations. Let me stop here. Just a quick follow-up. Are you suggesting that this is an issue of governance at the WTO? I mean, the governance, I think the economic governance is a global issue in a lot of international organizations. In IMF, World Bank, WTO, and we have to face that challenges. But the current problem is we lack of the leadership in WTO. So that's why I said we hope all members share collective responsibility to promote multilateral trading system and to keep it strong. Okay. We're going to open the discussion to the floor. Yes, sir. And madam after. Thank you. My name is Douglas Paul. I'm from Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C. In recent months in various forums, U.S. trade representative Lighthizer has said that from his experience, the WTO was never outfitted with the tools to manage a mercantilist approach to the economy that China now brings. And that China does this in such a sweeping, challenging scale that the U.S. should work to fundamentally readdress the principles on which the WTO is founded. I'd be interested in your reaction to that characterization. Well, I don't think the U.S. is going to leave the multilateral system because the system itself was created by the U.S. seven decades ago, and it worked in the U.S. national interest in the past. But I understand that the U.S. or the current administration wants to improve it and make it working more efficiently and for their interests. But it's up to our members to make decisions how they reform the system. And as for China, I think it's important to personally, I think it's important to engage China and work within the system, instead of confrontation outside of the global system. It's my personal view. Well, regarding the multilateral trading system, the Deputy Director General already mentioned that decision-making process at the WTO requires consensus. But it has been working quite all right until a certain time period. Now, given the power shift in the world economy, the two, you know, many, many different emerging countries are confronting with the United States and the EU. That means you never have any consensus on any difficult issues. That's the kind of thing we got stuck with. If you go to IMF and World Bank, there's a board system. They have a weighted voting so that they can have some kind of solution. But at the WTO, one country, one board requires consensus. That means we must admit it'll be awfully, awfully difficult to make any kind of sensitive decision. This is how we prolong for 16 years to conclude even Doha round. We never had that kind of occasion before on the GET system. So that's the problem we have to solve. Yes? Only briefly. I think what we really have to get used to is that we live in a world of global governance which is mainly shaped by United States with some assistance of the European Union. And now we have new forces who claim that they also would like to shape global governance to a certain degree. So I think if we want to maintain global governance structures, we somehow have to react on that. We have to, as you said, engage in a discussion on how to change it, how to reform it. And we as Americans and European Union, I think, need a consensus on how far we are willing to go and where the limits are of the adjustments we are willing to make with regard to mercantilistic efforts, with regard to the role of state-owned enterprises, with regard to government subsidies. So I still hope that there's some willingness on the Trump administration to have this dialogue between Washington and Brussels because if we do it on our own, then we have end up in real trouble. And so I would really very much argue for finding a new consensus on this, how to deal with China. The lady in the front, yes, and then... Well, thank you. As you have said, we are ambassador at large of His Majesty, Mohammed VI. My question goes to Stefan Mayer. You have suggested as potential answers to the rising protectionism to improve governance, both supranational government in Europe and, of course, to Eileen WTO address its woes. My question is how you do that at a moment where Europe is totally reluctant to any strengthening of its supranational, you have even said the word, you know, move. And second, do you think that what we call the couple Franco-Allemands is strong enough to address this issue? And second, what would be the chances to get there? Knowing that the populist are basically against any kind of reinforcing in Europe. The other question is related, of course, to WTO and which is much more recent than the historic international organization, but which is totally... Are we condemned to paralysis? What you, as deputy director general, are proposing? So are we going to be prisoner of this consensus impossible to reach forever? And as far as the reforms of the international organization, the economic organizations, we do know it's been on the agenda for quite a long time. But everybody's aware of the discrepancy and anachronism between their functioning and the requirements of the changing and evolving. So what are the suggestions except of saying that we are in a sort of quagmire and that we have to get Trump's administration and the EU and the major throwing? Of course, knowing that the voiceless, who is the third world and even the emerging countries have no say in this respect. So what are potential avenues to get out of this toe-toe blockade? Excellent point. I might be more positive on the European Union than the majority of the people here in the hall. I think that we have really a great chance next year to restart it. We saw the victory of a French president who clearly had an anti-publicist agenda countering the main demands and he won the elections. And of course, we have now in Germany a right wing party in parliament but still a very broad consensus about the major parties about the pro-European policy. And as far as I see, we have the chance beginning of next year to revive the European Union, to restart the discussion on how we would like to shape it. And Brexit might help to a certain degree because many member states of the European Union are about to learn what it means to leave the European Union and not to have it. But this won't be sufficient as I said. I think it's very important to strengthen supranational efforts within the European Union but also to enforce the dialogue with other partners. And here we still leave it mainly to the member states to do so and we have also strengthened the European Union to do so. And not only, of course, to talk to our classical traditional partner but also to look beyond and see who else might have an interest in strengthening global governance and who might have proposals we can agree to or we at least have to discuss. So I'm a little bit more positive than your questions tempted. Can I just add something? Both of the questions have a kind of commonality of what do we do in a period of lack of leadership. I think that given the problems the WTO has moving forward and the difficulties that the United States and China have in the economic relationship I think there's a case for the U.S. and China to basically take it outside the WTO and settle these issues bilaterally. For example, we have in the WTO right now the issue of China market economy status. I personally think it's overestimated because of the nature of protection in the United States whether you grant China MES or not is not going to have dramatic impact on market access but it's an issue. I think you could see a situation where the United States and China just say, look, we're major powers, we're going to settle this. And you could have in the case of MES, for example, you would grant MES in sectors where China looks like it's really marketized and you wouldn't grant it in sectors where state-owned enterprises have a dominant position and you can kind of go through and in return you know you would have the United States granting some constraints on the application of anti-dumping and countervailing duties. The real risk is if China pushes a case like this through the WTO that the United States will not comply and in the end the Trump administration could simply pull the U.S. out. I don't think that's likely, I want to be very clear I'm not predicting this, but I would also simply observe that under current law the President of the United States could pull the U.S. out of the WTO without any congressional oversight. So I think given the sort of dysfunction in the WTO it is a very risky game for China to really press these cases with the United States. I think it would be better, frankly, given the condition of the WTO to settle it amongst ourselves. Francis, you wanted to add something. So in relation to the ambassador's last question I think this is an extraordinarily important issue, it's a major, major issue. The whole multilateral system architecture is frozen and this is across all organizations, it's not just the WTO and cannot find the way to move forward and I think that we really have to address this because at the same time never have problems been more global in nature and therefore more in need of multilateral solutions. So three suggestions, small suggestions are first maybe we have to accept a multispeed system. Okay, so that's a heresy in traditional terms. We've moved the whole international community forward over the past 60, 70 years together so that everyone is comfortable. Maybe we have to accept now that you can have a multispeed system and that means that you would permit plurilateralism within multilateralism. So if some groups of member states want to go forward to do something then I think that should be permitted provided it doesn't unduly damage the interests of the others. Now that's again a major change to the system and then thirdly I think that we are seeing a change in the nature of international cooperation. For 100 years or more the instrument of cooperation was the treaty and in today's networked world platforms can be as important as treaties and it's much easier to get a cooperation underway with a platform. Those who want to join it, join it. And so I think we should perhaps think in these terms as well what really paralyzes the system is trying to reach a multilateral treaty agreement. Sir. Thank you very much. My name is Tatsano in the Jones Day of Tokyo. So my question is based on my previous experience as a negotiator in Ugra around, I think the biggest success in Ugra around is the establishment of dispute settlement or any kind of the treaty or contract or agreement final enforcement should be done by some kind of dispute settlement mechanism itself. Now there's two issues. One thing is about the dispute settlement issue of the WTO and also another geopolitizing thing is as Mr. Mayer said that ISDS agreement or the mechanism these two should be this one of what is some kind of final result to solve a certain kind of question. The protectionism itself is not just against liberalization or something like that. Important thing is we need to have such kind of legal infrastructure. It seems to me right now there's according to well reading some kind of newspaper that the upper left body of dispute settlement mechanism is in WTO. It's really jeopardized by not having all the nominees in the WTO upper right body. I think you have the seven members or some and already three is completed absent and it's maybe next year that would be just only three in the out of seven the members of the upper right body. You see if I'm correct. And that completely paralyze the such dispute settlement mechanism one thing and about ISDS in the TPP we try to have ISDS but to my knowledge TPP 11 some of the countries is try to just delete the such ISDS issue. And the same thing in NAFTA. One of the ISDS another one is arbitration mechanism of the anti-dumping and countervailing duty issue which is both this quite important the chapter in NAFTA but that is completely challenged. And so the many of the what to say now the FTAs or the some of the bilateral the investment agreement and so on the ISDS cannot be the really centerpiece of the treaty now. How do you think about that? Is it from the business side from Maya? And as I found Mr. E. What's going on is on WTO in that kind of issue. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes. I think we made a decision in Europe right now to separate investment protection from trade policy. The future trade agreements we will have will be mainly on trade and we will deal with investment protection separately. On the other hand I think we have also a really major issue of innovation our CETA treaty. Our agreement with Canada where we created a kind of international investment courts dealing with ISDS and we learned that this is more acceptable to our critical public to have that. Not to leave it to really private structures but to have the states have a strong say in and how to set up this court. And this is certainly an innovation we proposed to the United States in the context of TTIP and which we will certainly also propose to Japan in our future trade agreement with Japan and all the others we will negotiate. We think this is a major issue of innovation we have. Yes, you wanted to add one quick one? Yeah, I mean about ISDS it's not the same for all kind of ISDS because Korea, US, FTA included ISDS but we attach a lot of conditions so private companies cannot sue the government for certain areas especially social policies like environment and labor policies so attaching that kind of conditions ISDS could be a good foundation to protect investors but if you just simply you know include ISDS maybe domestic constituencies are not supporting that kind of inclusion. Okay, you wanted to add one last words, Mr. Yi. Yes, very short. First of all I would encourage our members to resolve the crisis on everybody member issue. I think it's in all of their interest. And secondly I think the multilateral dispute settlement mechanism is working much more efficiently than RTAs because we checked all the dispute settlement mechanism or provisions in RTAs were very rarely used but if you check WTO record in the past 21 years we handled more than 500 disputes very efficiently. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Thank you for attending and thank you for your great questions.