 I come from a very poor country and almost automatically one has to be interested in poverty and inequality as a professional economist. I specifically got interested in this idea of aspirations and behavioral issues for two reasons. The first one is this claim a lot of people make about Ethiopians. And that is Ethiopians are considered particularly poor Ethiopians are deemed fatalistic. The idea is that they seem to display these acceptance of their state or they do not seem to proactively attempt change to change their future. My premise however is that Ethiopians are not necessarily more fatalistic than any other group of people. So I thought there must be another explanation which appears as fatalistic but is driven by another mechanism which led me to aspirations. The second reason is the fact that a lot of development, analysis and practice focus on opportunities. The poor are not progressing because they lack opportunities. They don't have capital, they don't have education, they don't have access to markets. They don't have access to public services and similar characterizations of opportunities or limits to the opportunities they have. And these are valid reasons and they get emphasis and they deserve that emphasis. But the perspective they give in my view is partial for two reasons. First, even when there are opportunities, there is now enough evidence that they remain unexploited. Second, and perhaps more importantly, opportunities are not static. They are created. The development process is nothing else but the creation of opportunities and if one wants to summarize it. So it is important to look at the problems people, particularly the poor, face in exploiting opportunities and the process of creating opportunities and the aspiration framework allows us to address some of this. There are a number of challenges in designing such a study but I'll focus on two because they are particularly relevant to the empirical side of the problem. We can summarize them as measurement problem and the identification problem. In terms of measurement, the key challenge is that we don't observe aspirations. They are goals people set for themselves and they generally do not reveal them. We cannot observe them. There are two ways of therefore getting at aspirations. The first is to look at how people behave, their choices and try to infer from the choices they make their aspirations. This is problematic of course because then it is very difficult to explain their choice in terms of their initial aspirations because now we are using these choices as indicators or measures or revealed aspirations. So this interpretation challenge comes into play. We cannot explain choice. In fact, this is related to more generally the revealed preference approach in economics. So what is the second option? The second option is to actually ask people what their aspirations are. There are problems here too. So the first one was to try to get revealed aspirations. Now we get declared aspirations and the quality and accuracy of these declared aspirations may depend on the characteristics of the subjects themselves or the instruments used to gather this information. So both have challenges and the solution we opted for was to actually ask the people but before we do so we systematically validated the instrument we use for that purpose. So that was the first challenge. The second challenge is the identification challenge with identification problem. And the identification problem is a problem essentially because aspirations and choice are always existing together in the person. So how can we separate the two and try to use to explain one in terms of the other? And all this of course, for instance, a more aspirant person could be more successful or a more successful person could be more aspirant. So what we need to do is to introduce some change or intervention. We need to observe change and that change has to be independent of what is existing there. And what we have done is to have a series of successful, to document success stories of people that are of similar nature to our subjects. So rural residents who were successful without support from the government or from external individuals and so on prepare documentaries and use screening these documentaries as an exogenous, an independent intervention to affect the aspirations of our subjects. We also have accumulated a panel data from a resource and that also would enable separation of the past from the present and using these two attempts to solve the identification problem. Well, three basic outcomes. The first is that as expected, people's aspirations depend on their life experiences and the circumstances within which they leave. And the broader mental models, they develop on the basis of these experiences and circumstances. How they see the world, how they perceive themselves and different economic opportunities they had and exploited determine their aspirations, the nature and if you like level of their aspirations. That's the first finding. Second important finding is that the poor are less aspirant. The poor have lower aspirations which means that the incidence of poverty, the frequency and depth of poverty would among other things make people less aspiring. They have a narrower view of the world, a narrower perspective on their opportunities and their abilities. And third, the fact that a person has a lower aspiration is correlated with some of the choices he or she makes and particularly in our rural farming communities. People with lower aspirations are less likely to use modern inputs such as fertilizers and improved seeds. They are also less likely to send their kids to school. And there is some limited evidence that nutritional outcomes of their children may be negatively affected if they are low aspiring. The ultimate result, poverty, they remain poor so poverty and inequality persist. Well, a lot of growth is happening in Ethiopia for the last 10 years or so and this is bringing about losers and gainers obviously, some gain more out of that than others and a key lack of understanding or lack of knowledge at the moment is to what extent the losers are losing and what can be done about it because the different measures of inequality are increasing in levels and it is in some sense an outcome to be expected when there is rapid growth so the trick is to try to understand the channels and try to provide appropriate solutions including safety nets, retraining, education. Industry development is not my area but a general point. I think a transforming economy should have a dynamic industrial sector. One of the challenges of having this transition is how to create a significant amount of employment within industry which is getting increasingly capital intensive. We have a large and growing population, a lot of it is still in rural areas. There would be increasing productivity in such sector would lead to released labour and the industrial sector has to grow faster and absorb more. That has yet to happen and that is an important challenge which is to have a growing industrial sector which can at the same time create employment and help reduce poverty and inequality. So if you look at the numbers that grows numbers, the initial of the last say 12, 13 years initial grows came from agriculture partly in the form of recovery and the fact that it is the largest sector until very recently means that that will have a significant impact on average growth. So it drives, drives and grows. Of course there is a second element which is that it provides food and raw materials to other sectors. The linkage particularly with industry is not particularly strong, it is there but that in part reflects the limited productivity of both sectors. So in the future with more dynamic industry, more demand from agriculture will emerge and the interlinkage will strengthen. The key is that a lot of the population is still in rural areas and what happens in agriculture is not only in terms of growth but also in terms of well-being of the population is a significant component. So at the personal level, the perspective, the personal perspective I have about wider is that it is one of the few institutions which does very good research in standard topics but also at the same time allows significant flexibility in terms of entertaining innovative, novel ideas. A lot of issues that may not be discussed or researched in standard economics departments are dealt with here and coming from a poor country that's a very, very important dimension. For instance, it was one of the first places that we actually presented these aspirations at the aspiration project when we were at an ideas level. There was very little empirical support and it's one of those few, therefore, institutions which entertains these innovative ideas and the development problem is protracted and complex and we have to be able to look at all possible options. There is no one formula of dealing with or bringing about development so we need an institution like wider to help that process along.