 All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CSIS. I'm Jennifer Cook. I direct the Africa program here, and I want to welcome you to today's session on assessing state fragility in Africa. We're very pleased today to feature two new reports on the subject. The first is by the Africa Department of the International Monetary Fund, Building Resilience in Fragile States in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the other is the final report of a project here at CSIS that the Africa program has led with support from the Danish government on rethinking fragility going beyond the state. I think you've received copies of both on your way in. If not, let us know and we'll get you a copy. Just before we begin, I'm supposed to make an announcement about safety in the case of any kind of emergency. We have a designated safety officer, and that is Ben Jubner in the back. I don't foresee any emergency, but if any problems follow Ben's instructions. And then the second thing is that this is the IMF Africa team. And so any questions pertaining to other crises in other parts of the world having to do with the IMF will leave for a future session. So these guys know Africa, not Greece. So let me just begin. Listen, the concept of Fragile States has gotten is at the center of a growing body of literature and analysis. A lot of thinking, a lot of resources and a lot of assistance efforts have been directed at understanding what exactly state fragility is, what do we mean by the term, what makes a state fragile, and then of course how best to assist countries to exit fragility or at least to move towards a situation of greater resilience. It's not totally clear that we have a handle or even a consensus around what we mean by state fragility, but it's still a very, it's a valuable exercise, I think, and one that warrants, I think, continued analysis and long-term study. And I think one of the things that the IMF report does is look back and see what evolution has been in a number of African states and what made some states more successful perhaps than others. So I'm going to turn, without much further ado, to the IMF team. I'm going to turn first to David Robinson, Deputy Director of the Africa Program at the IMF. You have their bios with you, so I won't go into great detail, but he's going to briefly introduce the report, the genesis, and the objectives of the report. I'll then turn to Enrique Gelbart, who is advisor, to the African Department at the IMF and Mission Chief for Botswana, a long experience at the fund, and then to Corrine de Le Chat, who is Deputy Division Chief in the Africa Department, Mission Director to Liberia, she's been in Panama, Haiti, and in West Africa following the Ebola outbreak. So this is a very experienced team on the issue, offering, I think, the IMF's vision of kind of what makes fragility and how the IMF and where the IMF is positioned to assist countries to emerge from fragility. I will say a few words about the CSIS report following that, and then I'm going to turn to Bob Lamb, who's a non-resident fellow here at CSIS, but is a research professor at the US Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute. He's looking at hybrid governance in fragile states and conflict environments. He's a long time expert on fragile states. He's worked at the Pentagon previously at CSIS, and he's going to be kind of a respondent on the two reports and add some thoughts of his own. He always has plenty of those. And then we'll open up for question and answer. So welcome to you all, and David, if you want to say a few words about the report, and then we'll turn to the substance. Okay, thank you, and good morning, everyone, and it's good to see such an audience for a topic that's very dear to, I think, my team's heart. In terms of if I can, the motivation for the paper. I have been struck for the past several years that whenever I go to a conference on Africa, there is a generally positive mood. The Africa Rising story, we're looking at growth takeoffs, we're looking at improvements in social development indicators, business climates, a positive message. We can disagree on that, we can debate that, that's a different event. But then when I go to a conference on fragility, it's always very depressing. There's a talk about lack of progress, talk about reversals, things going wrong. And I was really struck in my mind, it's like, is there really such a disconnect? Is it really the case that we have a subset of countries that have been completely bypassed by this positive story? And hence, I set the team to work. And as the very large team, not all of them are here today. And I think we really tried to address in this report a long series of issues. Where is it that we have seen progress? Where is it we haven't seen progress? For those countries where we're not seeing progress, what was it that was holding it back? What was the constraint? And obviously, every country is different. And so the report very carefully has both a component that looks across country work, that looks at the aggregates that does the empirics, the econometrics, but also a section which tries to dig a little bit into the country studies and individual country experiences. And I think it's important. Let me explain why I see, and some maybe perhaps one of the starting points for me, is that there really are a lot of reasons to be concerned about fragile states and a real set of issues that come up that we really need to study in detail. You know, we all know, I mean, however we define fragility, we're looking at some components of lack of political cohesion, lack of social vision, unequal distribution of income, weak institutions. When you start looking at the economics, growth is much lower than other low income countries. Poverty rates are significantly higher. As an economist, I notice inflation. Inflation is higher. It's more volatile that affects everybody. When I look at domestic revenue mobilization, one of the key elements for discussion, and as we move to sustainable development goals, the median tax-to-GDP ratio in a fragile state is 11% of GDP. In a low income country, the median low income country, it's 17% of GDP. That difference is huge in terms of the ability to provide basic public services, investment, education, health. And so, but are these an important group? Yes, I mean, on the definition we use, we currently have I think around 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa that we would classify as fragile, but that comprises 265 million people. This is an important body of the population, an important part of the continent. And so, it is an area where we are interested in, and it's an area where we are constantly thinking. And I think it's also important that we don't just label a group as fragile. We have to think in our minds that this is a dynamic group. There are countries that become fragile, some that leave fragility, some that move back and forth between, and some that seem to be locked in fragility. All kinds of issues out there going forward that could change those dynamics, issues such as security, Boko Haram, for example, is on many of our country's minds. The dip in commodity prices, we had several years of very relatively high commodity prices, now we're looking at several years of much lower commodity prices. How will that affect some of the countries that seem to have made progress? Longer term trends, demographics, population growth rates in many of our countries are very high and accelerating. How do we create the jobs so that those new people into the labor market can become employed? And also climate change affects differentially many of these countries, many of them are vulnerable, already food vulnerable. What will be the implications? Many of those obviously are topics in themselves, that could be taken up at future events if Jennifer invites us back. But I do want to ask Jennifer, I've noticed that it has been an uptick in the amount of research discussion on fragile states and I know many in the room are contributing to that. But I think it's important that it's not just, you know, it's not the think tanks, it's not just the multilateral and bilateral, also the countries themselves in the context of the G7 plus, a group of 20 fragile states have gotten together to start thinking about these issues and start trying to define their agenda as they see it and how they want the world to interact with them. And that's a really important development and we were happy, very happy that in April we were able to have a discussion with them on the early draft of our paper and provide some of their insights. Very quickly on the fund side, there is obviously an active discussion, not just in the African department, but more generally on how we can best facilitate lasting progress in the fragile states. Back in 2011, we approved a slightly revised approach, emphasizing issues such as greater flexibility, greater emphasis on building local capacity and how that might be done, but also a special lending facility, the rapid credit facility for the technical work that is designed to provide financial resources without all the conditions, paperwork associated with a regular fund program. And this is something that we have used to be able to go in quickly in countries such as Chad, Central African Republic, Madagascar, as a way of putting in a basic structure and also a signal to others that might be interested in working with the country. We also managed to introduce a new instrument for debt relief to poor countries affected by a pandemic, which was used in the case of Ebola shock quite recently. And we've also stepped up capacity building efforts in countries such as South Sudan and Somalia with very specific programs. But obviously this is very much an ongoing progress. And we really need to keep thinking, both as the countries themselves evolve, the challenges they face, it's really want to make sure that the interventions that we make, the discussions we have with the authorities highlight the right things, other things we are missing. Are we missing opportunities that could introduce lasting change? Are we overemphasizing some things? And really, this is how I see the discussion today or what I would like to take from the discussion today. It's an ongoing process. Help us refine our thinking. This is a nice paper, but I don't want it to be just a paper that sits on shelves. I really do see this as having that can foster the conversation. And with that, let me turn to Enrique to start with you. Thank you, David. So let me walk through a summary of the paper. As David mentioned, the paper tries to answer the following questions. What can we say about changes in fragility in Sub-Saharan African countries in the past 25 years? Which countries have built resilience? Which countries did not and why? These require adopting a definition of fragility and then tracking progress over time and across groups of countries with focus on conflict, institutions, and economic performance. We then look at some basic statistics and did some econometrics together with a deeper analysis of seven-country case studies. The earlier analytical work on fragility had focused on the determinants of conflict and on conflict as the prominent feature of fragility. However, a more recent approach sees fragility as a multi-dimensional issue with focus on other aspects that are not directly related or even associated with conflict and can be retraced to weaknesses in lack of legitimacy of government institutions, an undeveloped unstable economic environment, and lack of inclusion and a divisive political context. These weaknesses are often mutually reinforcing and manifest themselves in a vicious circle of instability or conflict, weak enforcement of contracts, governance problems, and capacity constraints. For instance, governance problems in these countries often lead to lack of legitimacy and instability, hamper the provision of public services, encourage the pursuit of narrow interests, in turn lack of legitimacy and access to poor access to services and non-inclusive institutions also tend to foster bad governance. This also explains why fragility is so persistent. So a buildup of resilience can be thought as a rather non-linear transition from weak governance and institutions in the extreme involving state failure and conflict to a situation in which countries can deliver public services to their citizens against a backdrop of security and stability. In classifying countries, we follow the World Bank approach which is based on the country policy and institutional assessment index or CPIA and security conditions. Under this approach, a country is deemed fragile if the CPIA is less than 3.2 and there is a peacekeeping or peacebuilding UN original mission. The approach we use is similar to the World Bank approach except that we use a three-year average of the CPIA to characterize fragile situations and we look at 26 countries, all of them were low income. As for the results, we found that seven countries seem to have moved over this period out of the zone of rigidity. These were Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. However, we also see 19 countries are still fragile and of these four had some improvements over time but that was not enough and six countries actually regressed. We also look at resource intensity. This is important because of the commodity boom since 2000 provided substantial resources that could have been used to build resilience in these countries. Under these lands, only two of the seven countries that built resilience were resource rich while in the group of countries still fragile, eight out of 19 are resource rich. This raises questions as to the extent to which natural resource abundance actually helped these countries build resilience. If we look at how long it took for the seven countries that exited the zone of rigidity to do so, we see that it was about 10 years so the process is not short. With the turnaround in policies of reform, especially during the first five years, the chart shows the mean of the CPIA for the seven countries that cross the threshold. Based on the above, we focused the empirical analysis and the case studies on five factors associated with resilience, security and politics, institutional improvements, economic performance, fiscal space and budget institutions, and social indicators. In the empirical work, we highlighted associations and correlations between different elements of resilience and look at persistence that is the extent to which fragility in a given period is correlated with fragility in the past. On conflict and politics, we found an overall decline in the severity and incidence of conflicts and more political stability. Well, in the 90s, about 10 of the 26 countries experienced conflict in any given year. After 2000, only seven countries experienced conflict in any given year. The incidence of severe conflicts with more than 1,000 deaths per year also declined. These declines were more prominent in countries that became resilient and in resource-rich ones. Similar progress was observed in terms of political stability. Between the mid-1990s and 2012, the World Bank index of political stability improved by 14 percent among countries that became resilient and by 42 percent among resource rich ones. However, the index declined by 47 percent among countries that were not resource rich. Despite this relative improvement in political stability and security, countries obviously not immune to risk or reversals, as shown by the emergence of threats in a number of countries such as Mali, Central African Republic, Nigeria, South Sudan. Regarding institutional improvements, countries that have become resilient made uniform progress along all four major CPA clusters, economic management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and public sector management. The results were, however, mixed for the fragile group of countries. Those rich in natural resources made progress on average, but there were wide differences across countries. Only four of them recorded gains across all dimensions of institutional strength, while the rest had very weak performance. Lastly, countries that remained fragile and are not rich in natural resources did not make significant progress in any area. Regarding economic performance, countries that became resilient and resource-rich ones were clearly the best performers. They had impressive gains in income per capita, lower inflation, improved fiscal positions, better access to credit and higher investment. What was behind these results? For resilient countries, the gains were driven by good policies and moves to strengthen institutions. While for resource-rich countries, the gains were mainly driven by improvements in their export receipts. In fact, several resource rich countries experienced no major improvements in key economic institutions or in the business environment. It is also not worthy that, while countries that remain fragile or regressed experience the highest volatility in economic growth, resilient countries experience more and longer periods of growth acceleration and almost no growth deceleration. The latter is measured as a three-year average of GDP growth being rated at both the overall GDP growth for the country and its growth over the last three years. Lastly, on social outcomes, resilient countries that started with high infant mortality rates and lower school enrollment have now surpassed the other two groups. Successes reducing poverty seem to be less conclusive, however, with reductions across averages in country groups, but with overall poverty rates still remaining over 50 percent in most countries. Let me now turn to Corrine. Thank you. So I'll pick up where Enrique left off. So after the presentation of the Silas Facts, we also ran regressions. We ran many, many of them in fact, and I'm not going to go into all the details. I'm just going to give you a flavor of what we found, focusing specifically on the work on the fiscal institutions and policies, which I think stood out in terms of results. But overall, when we looked at regressions, trying to explain exiting fragility and becoming resilient, and I'll tell you in a minute how we defined that, or when we look at growth outcomes, I mean, these are basically the main factors that stood out. I mean, political stability, accountability, sound macroeconomic policies, fiscal policies and institutions, but also regulatory quality and government effectiveness and private investment in terms of trade. So we looked in all those exploratory regressions we ran, one thing that stood out is the strength and the consistency of the results on fiscal variables. Consistently, higher tax revenue was associated with building resilience and progress. Lower recurrent spending was also associated with building resilience and higher investment spending associated with resilience, higher education and health spending and lower military spending. So these are probably things to expect, but we were surprised to find it come out so strongly in the regressions. So we use both panel logits and NGMM settings. The panel logit is helping us to test the significance and the strength of the factors associated with building resilience, and the estimated coefficients can be nicely interpreted as contributions to the probability of becoming resilient. And then the general method of moment allows us to try and control for entogeneity. As Andrique mentioned, all the factors contributing to fragility are very closely interrelated. So first looking at why is it important this finding about fiscal institution and fiscal space? Why is it interesting that this matters in building resilience? I think we think it matters not just because we're economists, but because we see if you think about institution in a broad political science sense as things that are very set, predetermined, and evolve very slowly over time, economic institutions and fiscal institutions in particular can be built over a much shorter period of time. This is something we can do something about. So we thought that was helpful in that sense. So fragile countries maybe are not doomed if there's something good we can do to contribute. If you look at the slide, so that shows an index of the quality of budget institution for the 26 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that were considered fragile in the 1990s. And then we clearly see that the countries that became resilient had much stronger budget institutions. This is a broad index that was computed across all the stages of the budget process. So it's very comprehensive. It looks like the negotiation, the legislative approval stage, and then the implementation. And there's also been a number of studies that have shown that countries with better fiscal institutions also have better fiscal outcomes. So the next thing we did was look at fiscal space. And fiscal space is defined as a strong financial position of the government, favorable dead dynamics, higher revenue raising capacity, and expenditure flexibility. And here we see that the green, the resilient countries had overall stronger performance in terms of managing to get more fiscal space. And importantly, to spend more in domestic public investment. Let me give you a flavor of some of the estimation results. So as I said, we ran many regression. You have tables in the paper with the more detailed results and the coefficients. This is from the panel logit. So what we did there, we constructed a panel data set with the 26 countries with annual observations between 1990 and 2013. The dependent variable we constructed is an indicator variable that based on the CPIA, it takes the value of one in the CPIA is 3.2 above and there's no major conflict. So that allows to see for each country periods of fragility, periods of resilience, progress, et cetera. And then the panel logit, as I said, allows us to interpret the coefficient as contributions to the probability of the variable being one or becoming resilient. The first thing we found was, so in that setting, we enter as one of the variables, the lag dependent variable. So indicator variable in the last period. And we found that to be very, very highly persistent. So similarly to fragility, once you become resilient, probability that you're going to be resilient in the next year is very high. The other results, as I said, so the first three variables, budget institution, regulatory quality and government effectiveness, these are proxies for the quality of budget institutions. And overall, the way to interpret those bars, they represent the marginal contribution of each variable evaluated at the mean to the probability of becoming resilient. So if you look at the middle bar, see the one standard deviation improvement, for example, in regulatory quality leads to about 30% increase in the probability of becoming resilient. The other factors that stood out, as I mentioned, is tax to GDP ratio. And also interestingly, the tax revenue as a share of total revenue. So this is an interesting point, which speaks to the importance of having a stake, the citizens having a stake in what the state does. If you pay your taxes, you have an interest in how the money will be spent. So a broader tax base has been very robustly found associated with building resilience. On the negative side, you see the first bars in the bottom panel shows that is it an interaction between the index of the quality of budget institutions and resource rich countries. So we find that in general resource rich countries have less favorable results in terms of quality of institutions and tax, tax intake actually doesn't show on this one. Also negative contribution of military spending, as I said, and recurring spending. So overall, the results confirm that fiscal institution and fiscal space are important. And to give a bit more granularity to the empirical results and put them in context, we also look at country case studies. So we look at seven countries with widely different experience in terms of fragility and resilience. So we have Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, and also we did Ethiopia, Mali, and Sierra Leone. So in the case studies, we look very systematically at the key factors associated with building resilience, namely stabilization. So those are the bold characters on the left. Stabilization, policy space, composition, spending, international support, and private sector. And then we look, did we see progress, did we not see progress, and why? As I said, the case study approach gives us more granularity around factors that are difficult to measure empirically, such as political leadership or donor coordination. Overall, we found that the two countries that managed to become resilient by our definition, Mozambique and Rwanda, did better on pretty much all of the dimensions. The three that are not shown, Ethiopia did reasonably well, but they followed a very specific, they followed their own development path with a much bigger role for the public sector than the private sector compared to the other countries. Mali regressed towards the end of the period, and that shows the risk of reversals in infragile countries. Sierra Leone also was making progress from a very low base, but they've been very severely hit both by the Ebola shock and the price shock to iron ore. And in fact, they went from growth rates around 15% before the crisis to now an estimated probable contraction of 20%, showing you the huge volatility that they're experiencing. So that's just an example of one of the dimensions we looked at. It's a political stability index and then rule of law. Those are the measures from the World Bank. And we see clearly that the two successful countries, the blue and the green, which is Mozambique and Rwanda, were more successful than, say, DRC or Central African Republic in in building up and maintaining political stability and the rule of law. So again, the case studies are in conclusion that the main factor were political inclusion, rule of law, fiscal management, review, mobilization. The importance of the fiscal institutions and fiscal space came out also quite nicely in the case studies. And then the part of about donor support and debt relief were also helpful. But they were helpful only to the extent that the resources were used to increase priority spending, meaning spending on priority social sectors. I mean, again, if you think about fragility, it's very important for the state to be able to deliver basic services, collect some taxes, deliver basic services to the population. That seems to be the core of what a state has to deliver to be able to build on that and be successful. So I think our takeaways from the whole paper, we think that the cross-country empirical analysis and the case studies give overall a very similar message. Of course, the details and the sequencing of the reforms will be highly country-specific. But we find that these three sets of common factors were at play for the seven countries that were successful. I mean, first, security, political inclusion and leadership. Successful countries have pursued an approach that led to security based on inclusive politics. And by inclusive politics, meaning the ability to reach a political settlement that effectively addressed the roots of the conflict or the political instability. They also seem to have had a leadership capable of driving a focused set of policies and reforms that promoted good governance and accountability. The second set of factor is on the side of policies, so strong policies, particularly on the macro side, be able to maintain low inflation, again, deliver basic services, increase investment to build infrastructure, et cetera. So those were also instrumental. And then finally, the role of the international community is very important that the international community be in fragile states for the long haul. I mean, a stop and go approach does not work. So a steady engagement is important. A well coordinated engagement is important. There's often many fragility and crisis attract many players and many NGOs and for sometimes not always for the right reasons. And everybody's trying to do something, and it's important that something be well coordinated with the priorities of the state. So obviously, this is not a recipe. None of this was easy. Only seven countries out of the 26 made it. And if you look at that early chart that Enrique presented, it's not like the sword after reaching the fragility threshold. I mean, they're really hovering very close to it. So it's not like it's a stellar performance either. It is a long and difficult path. And as we say, they can be and they have been reversals. So it's important to keep that in mind. I mean, we're not trying to deliver, again, lessons that can universally be applied. But also another takeaway we had from the closer look we took at the resource rich countries, the fragile resource rich countries, the importance for them to establish frameworks for transparent management of natural resources. But also the important to build strong institutions around them to manage that volatility that's inherent with natural resource revenue. And also the importance of not neglecting to develop a strong domestic database also to help address that volatility. So I'm going to stop here and we'll be happy to take questions in the discussion part. Thank you. Thanks so much to all of you. I'm going to take a few moments to talk about the CSIS report because I think in some ways it's a bit the flip side of this. And one thing we struggle with is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Does a capable state that can collect taxes and deliver services, can a state build legitimacy that way? Or is it kind of a legitimate state that can then do those things? And I think that's one of the conundrums that we grappled with. A strong theme of our report, which was based on discussions around four countries, three in Sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia, Mali, South Sudan, and then Myanmar, our Southeast Asia program did the piece on Myanmar. We wanted to look at these states each in their own context and then see kind of what emerged in terms of lessons for fragility. And addressing state fragility. And one of the things that came out was really the need to look beyond the state. And this is covered in the IMF report. Of course, it's not really in the IMF's remit. But I think one of the strong themes was that it's not only a matter of a weak state mechanisms, but it's a very fragmented social fabric. And I think a state delivering services, even in an equitable way, can only go so far, particularly a state that's very weak with few resources at its command, to mending that. So part of the theme of our report is how do you look beyond the state in addressing fragility? So a couple of priorities, I think, that emerged. One is the idea, and of course the IMF works with central governments, but our recommendation is to diversify partners. A better balance needs to be struck between central authorities and more local authorities, whether they're municipal, whether they're regional or state, or even non-governmental organizations. The focus on the central government, often the central government is captured by a particular faction of society, and directing resources to that faction plays against the incentives of others to join in the reconstruction effort. So how do you balance that? You have to build obviously capable central state structures. But how do you incentivize regional or state or municipal players to join in that, and how do you help build their capacity to deliver services to their kind of catchment areas? I think of this in Mali in particular, it's going to be critically important that government structures in northern Mali can be accountable, be capable, transparent, and so forth. And so how you do that, it's not going to happen by fixes in Bamako ultimately. The second point is for the external community to really better understand and take into account the informal structures of authority and interaction that happen in the countries that they work. I think a couple of counter examples to the cases here in the IMF, and I always think of these cases, are Zimbabwe and Cote d'Ivoire, which in fact on a number of governance indices, education system, wealth, economic growth, health services, were very capable states. How did we fail to see in Cote d'Ivoire how weak ultimately the nation state was, or in Zimbabwe? How did we fail to see in Mali what was happening? Mali was held up as one of the West Africa's successful democracies. What we didn't see was the hollowing out of institutions and the underlying interactions between north and south, between ethnic groups, between political leaders, and kind of clients in the northern regions that ultimately led to a very rapid unraveling. And the IMF report actually has introduced me to a phrase isomorphic mimicry, which I thought was very clever. This is state institutions that look like functioning state institutions, but actually are not, and are dysfunctional, counterproductive, and kind of hollow shells of institutions. And I think that too is a risk of focusing all of our energies on the central state and on state institutions, is that we may be just creating kind of shell institutions that say the right things, but in fact have very little connection deeper down. So understanding the kind of these informal interactions, the political economy dynamics that happen underneath, understanding informal markets and informal connections between communities, that has to be mapped out, I think, consistently, not just in the period of crisis, consistently, you know, in our case by perhaps U.S. embassies, but in conjunction with a much wider swath of analysis of in-country contacts rather than we were talking, you know, kind of the cocktail circuit of people you talked to about what's happening in the country, in the capital. So you need a much better mapping of that consistently. The third is, and again, these themes are touched on in the IMF report, kind of the lack of vision and inclusiveness. How do you build social cohesion, which really, I think, is more than anything at the root of state fragility in many ways. It's oftentimes what keeps the government weak and what structures political incentives so that the government stays weak and it stays dysfunctional. So how do you build some sense of common vision, some sense, if not of common identity, at least of interdependence among groups within the country, and some vision of what their government should look like? This is not something that lends itself easily to donor interventions. It has to be kind of an organic process that grows kind of from within, but there may be ways that the government, the national government, and external donors can kind of facilitate that. This could be, again, building linkages of interdependence. Can you structure, can you invest in infrastructure or market linkages among communities, not just development in isolated pockets, but linking those together? Symbols are extremely important in this, although we kind of tend to laugh at the massive stamps that African governments used to have in the 1960s, the kind of the nation building efforts in that regard. But cultural symbols are incredibly significant, a sense of history in a place like Mali. Sports figures during the crisis in Cote d'Ivoire, everybody stopped fighting when the soccer team was playing in the National Cup. Cultural figures, musicians, and so forth, connecting civil society and issue-based groups across the country, kind of providing platforms so that that can be extremely important. And working with groups that kind of transcend ethnic or regional or sectarian differences, the business community is a big one, and again looking for ways to link regions together. A fourth point is to take risks. We tend to throw big money at things we think will kind of work over time, perhaps taking a more venture capital type approach where you invest in multiple things and see kind of what gets traction, what's successful, and then build on that success down the line. So creating an incentive for progress, rather than a guarantee of continued funds. And then a fifth point is, and this is mentioned in the IMF report as well, the need for sequencing of reforms and assistance. The most usual pattern is in a moment of crisis, a huge flood of donors comes in with big projects, each with different agendas, lots of resources, and this is at a moment when the state is at its weakest, its absorptive capacity is at its lowest. You've got a very fluid political situation, so a vast infusion of assistance into one entity distorts all kinds of incentives for others to join or for actual delivery on commitments by that state. I think of Somalia, and this goes to our first point too. If the transitional federal government knows that it's the only game in town and it's got this massive influx of money, the incentives for others to join or for the central government to kind of share that wealth is much lower. So the recommendation here is start small and diverse and a bit risk-taking, and then build up as you see what gains traction, rather than over time remain kind of imperative to kind of remain a long-term reliable funding source rewarding success and encouraging success, rather than the opposite, which is to come in big and then trail off over time and you then revert to status quo. The idea that this is a very long-term difficult process, it's going to have lots of setbacks. The IMF is a valiant attempt for metrics on progress, but it's not always kind of a cut and dried thing, which doesn't sell well with donors and legislatures who are looking for short-term benchmarks and indices. This brings us to the point that the donor community needs to be pretty clear about what its priorities are, and if it's maybe kind of paraphrasing some of Bob's work, we have to look at the political economy of the donor community as well, which is not generally interested in this long-term reliable kind of slog that is long-term state building or peace building. The continued failure of fragile state interventions says something too about how willing the international community is to change, to adapt, and to think of new ways to engage. So with that, I will turn it over to Bob. Bob, thank you, and then we'll open up for questions and answers. Thanks very much. Thanks, Jennifer. So I'm really happy to see that both of these papers both have findings and recommendations that are focused on issues of politics, on political settlements, and the importance of starting with the fundamental problems of social cohesion in fragile states. I've read far too many papers on fragile states in which the background section is awesome. It does a great job of the literature review and really understanding that governance is a complex, hybrid, informal set of processes, and the social cohesion is one of the most problematic contributors to the pathologies present in fragile states, and so on and so forth. And then you get to the recommendation section and it's all state building, state building, state building, national level, focus, formal institutions usually center out top down and so on and so forth, and you just want to bang your head against the wall because the background section got it right and the recommendations got it wrong. And I think a problem that a lot of people have with fragile states is that it's not that we don't understand fragility, it's that we keep thinking about them as states. When you look at the big, wealthy, stable states, successful states that you see today, all of them formed as a result of very bloody wars, a significant degree of ethnic cleansing and genocide within the borders, fights with neighboring tribes and ethnic groups, and so on to the point where eventually there were victors that control the territory. There is some degree of political inclusion of the vanquished if they didn't completely wipe them out, which is also often the case. And so the history of state formation is fundamentally a violent history. And if you look at fragile states, it was a similar thing in sub-Saharan Africa before the colonial period. You had tribal and clan warfare all over the place. To the degree there was, there were a number of states that did form in Africa, but it was a similar process that's happened in Europe and elsewhere, very bloody. And then during the colonial period what you had were Europeans coming in and exploiting the dominant ethnic group or tribal groups, existing power structures, and creating these very exclusive political systems. So these were not designed to be inclusive places. They were not designed to be functioning states. They were designed to be sources of resource extraction for foreign powers. And so when independence happened during the middle of the 20th century in all of these places, what you ended up with were some very powerful people who did not in most, in many cases, certainly in the history of most of the fragile countries that we're talking about today, they weren't there to run the place as a state. They were there to, in most cases, extract resources and distribute them to their own clans, their own tribes, their own political allies. So this is just a long way of saying that fragile states were never designed to be states. They were designed to fail. And so one of the things that I think the international development community has been driven by in dealing with fragile states is well, if they're not fragile states, maybe we can find a way to turn them into states but without that bloody history. So state building is essentially a hypothesis that you can build a state without that kind of violent history. And I think that as a hypothesis, it's generally failed. And that's one of the reasons that the international community has such a hard time making any progress in fragile states. Let me say three things about the IMF report because I'm glad to see that it is focusing on precisely the issue of political inclusion, which is the fundamental problem in fragile states. It's not capacity. It's inclusion that's the problem. And so the three things I'll say about the IMF paper before I briefly turn to the CSIS paper, one bit on style, one bit on substance, and one bit on method. And in style, there's a way of talking about fragile states. And as I said, we talk about them as states. As a thought experiment, anytime you read about fragile states, replace the word state or fragile state or country with the phrase political elites who control the capital and run the national institutions at the expense of most others in the country. And if you do that kind of cut and paste job with any paper, any report that you read on fragile states, you'll see that a lot of the recommendations that come out are really terrible recommendations. You're building the capacity of these political elites to do better work. And so on and so forth. What you're really doing is you're you're exacerbating the political inequalities that already exist. And so there are sort of two words that crop up a lot in the IMF paper. One is able and one is state. And able is, you guys talk about it as if the issue in fragile states is that the government isn't able to provide services. It's not able to do to provide security and so on. And reading the paper, I know that you recognize that it's not really, it's just that they're not able that in a lot of cases it's that those political elites who control the state capital and run the national institutions at the expense of everyone else don't want to. And so it's not a matter of building up the legitimacy of the state to the population. It's more a matter of building up the legitimacy of the population to the state. And then the other word is state and I've already mentioned that, which brings me to the method issue that I wanted to talk about, which is treating fragile states as a coherent unit of analysis is problematic. I think you guys recognize that. I've talked to enough people who analyze data to know that you guys, I am absolutely sure, are completely aware that all the country year level data is problematic and that analyzing it as such is problematic. And anybody who's listened to me talk for more than five minutes has heard me rant about this repeatedly so I won't say any more about that. And then finally on substance is just partly to complain that the list of countries that you guys label as having become resilient haven't really become resilient. You know, they're still in the fragile states index at the alert and high alert level. But that's a bit of a quibble. I mean, if I were to relabel your three categories, I'd say the ones that are still fragile, the ones that have gotten a little bit better and the ones that have gotten a little bit more better. And I still think that those are completely fair analysis because you're right. The ones that did get a little bit more better are the ones who made an effort at political inclusion, who benefited from the economic and financial support and capacity building that's been provided and the ones that didn't improve as much haven't, either because they haven't won it too, they haven't been able to conflicts are ongoing and so on. So none of that is to detract from the paper. I mean, I think the mixed methods methodology I think is spot on. I think the conclusions that you guys drew for it are very consistent with the best research that's out there. There's a lot of really bad research in fragile states that out there, really bad research. Substitute state with political elite to control the capital, et cetera, and you'll be able to identify those. So thank you for that. This CSIS paper, I don't really have all that much to say about it because I agree with it top to bottom. I worked with them early on on the original concept note. So it's probably rather than my saying how much I appreciate that the importance of, especially the issue of diversifying your partners. Rather than talk more about that, I think I'll just turn it back over to Jennifer and we can open it up for conversation. Thanks. Thanks, Bob. I wonder, do any of you want to speak to Bob's point first before we open up to audience? Or yeah, David. Actually, if I can speak to a couple of Bob's ones, but also one I think that you made that I would like to come back on. This issue of how you affect change in a fragile entity, shall we say? One of the things that we know from all experience with development is that the change doesn't come from outside. It is not the donors. It's not the international community. It's not international think tanks. You need this concept of nation. It's whatever definition we use, a vision, a leader, but a leader that has a concept of an inclusive strategy going forward. And there I think one of the components and suddenly the way that I look at a lot of the fun interactions. When I go into a country, just a Chad or a Niger or I was in Madagascar a couple of weeks ago, the thought process I have is the political processes are ongoing. They're complicated. I can't understand them as an outsider. I don't profess to. I'm not a trained political scientist. But what is it that we can do that can support those processes and build the institutions that can address some of Bob's concern about domination of the economies by a small political elite? One of the ways you do that is strong institutions. Can we build those? Can we get those things moving? And certainly ways that we don't push things that would cause harm to the process of building that vision of the nation. Not easy conversations, sometimes not easy thought process. And sometimes things don't go the way we did in vision. I mean, I always hesitate when I see a summary statement that they know to get changed. Strong leader. It's like, yes, but you need a strong leader with a vision of an inclusive society. We've seen many strong leaders without that vision. That does not end up well for the majority of populations. And yes, part of this obviously is dealing with the subnational level getting that consensus. And we have some components of that in the fund, but obviously this is a very big process. We don't even profess to attempt to try to do everything and we shouldn't. In terms of a couple of things, this idea of more better, I like the more better. We always started with this concept of fragility being a continuum. And this is something that the G7 Plus also pushes that it's a continuum. You have to think about developments along the whole process and drawing an arbitrary cutoff point for a label doesn't really make sense. And particularly in this environment where we're seeing countries move back and forth and how long that continues. So yeah, I like the more better category now and maybe the next version will go that way. And if I can come back to one of the areas for this political elites where suddenly the fund has pushed very hard is basic transparency. A lot of what we do when you read our reports, there are data there. Ten years ago in many of these countries, there were no data anywhere. You couldn't find them. Even on national, there were no national statistical websites. The IMF reports for a while were in many cases the only source of consistent data across the economy. You would find them used in national debates, courted in the budget, you know, the IMF number. There were never the IMF numbers. They were the numbers that we had to ride having worked with the national statistical agencies but the label often became there. And certainly as we build the institutions, one of the key components has always been this building the transparency, building the explanation for education, where does the money actually go? How much it actually goes down to local levels? How much sits in administrative education? Some of that goes beyond us. Some of that we help support local NGOs do this information. I had spent many years in Tanzania and this was absolutely critical. The way you build the state, the way you get people to address revenue mobilizations to show the return on the taxes that were being paid, you show that return by demonstrating that services are coming to the local level. And the only way you can do that is by having the actual data showing that money is going to the local level. And so this information component, the transparency, was really critical at helping building that nation state. And also a difficult political element. There are many countries which resist transparency, purely because with transparency comes accountability for your relief. But it's only an area that we work with. We think it's really important and we'll continue. Yeah. If I may add a couple of points. We do make in the paper highlight the importance of leadership, good leadership and inclusion. This is and what we see is that this is central and particularly important in fragile states simply because the institutions are not fully functional. If you had fully functional institutions, you wouldn't need so much. There are things that go automatically like prudent monetary policy and so on in states that have better institutions. But this does not necessarily happen in states that are so dysfunctional. So that's why good leadership is so central. And on the role of external actors and donors in particular, it's certainly no less important but they have to be very careful about the sequencing of how they do things and how much they do. One of the things that we found is that much of the aid that donors provide tend to come in the first few years after the crisis. Yet the country is not ready or doesn't have the absorptive capacity to use that aid well in the first few years. And it's only after five years that they actually can make better use. So the timing and the volume of aid has to be adapted to that too. Okay, a couple of questions at a time if we can. We'll take one here or we take these two up front then we'll go to that side. Hello. Firstly, thank you for coming to speak to us today. My name is Mina Oberdick from Public International Law and Policy Group. So I have two unrelated questions for the representatives from the IMF. Firstly, I'm wondering how the threshold between fragility and resilience was established without getting too deep into the numbers. And secondly, I am wondering, given the IMF's rather poor track record in Sub-Saharan Africa, why should the IMF still have a continued role in solving conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa? Perhaps what lessons have been learned since the 1990s? How is the organization different? How will it approach involvement in Africa differently? Yeah, thank you. Right next door and then we'll go back. I think Mark and the lady. Hi, my name is Aya Said. I'm also from the Public International Law and Policy Group. So on one side we acknowledge that local leaders and organizations are sort of central and integral to development, to building these institutions and infrastructures that we talk about. However, on the other side we also sort of recommend that international organizations sort of need to stay in for the long haul. To what extent are these international organizations actually a burden to the local organizations that really need to do the needy-gritty work? And how do we sort of move away from that contradiction of these two policies? Thank you. Let's go to the back. We've got Mark and then a few rows forward. Thanks very much. I'm Mark Yarniel from Refugees International and mainly a question I guess for relating to the IMF study. I mean there's been a number of studies by political demographers linking youth bulges to potential instability. So I'm just curious how that fits into your calculations. Thanks very much. Thanks Mark. A few rows forward. Hi, I'm Sophie Hagerty from Global Financial Integrity. Touching on something that Ms. Dilesha and Mr. Robinson said about how tax capture and revenue mobilization are really important as far as a fragile state developing. I'm wondering what role you think capital flight and illicit financial flows like tax evasion, misinvoicing, stuff like that play in rectifying tax collection and improving these states and also who the main actors should be in what roles as far as the G7 Plus versus the people meeting in Addis for the financing for development conference. Okay, I promised Enrique that I wouldn't take more than three, so I've already... Well, I think most of those were directed at the IMF. You're welcome to... So let me start with the question on the CPIA threshold. This is subjective, but it's the one used by the World Bank. It's based on the 40th percentile of the distribution of CPIA ratings that go from zero to six. So that's the way they measure it. And so we basically took that as an event. But I think we recognize the fact that there is a continuum there. And it's very difficult to establish such a threshold. And that's something that we also know in the paper. Okay, let me... I guess that there are three issues I wanted to touch on. First, the issue of the Africa over the last 20 years with fund involvement in some cases. I think if you look at Africa 20 years ago, the constant looked very different. We have seen in most countries 10, 15, 20 years of strong growth. We have seen institutions coming together. We have seen nations coming together in many parts of the continent. We have seen a move towards an actual economy. We have seen development of better policies. We have seen opening of markets. I think the progress across the continent of the last 20 years has been very, very strong. And yes, I mean, we can always debate specifics of IMF involvement in particular cases. But I think what we have seen is that the continent has developed. And we shouldn't detract from that. The extent to which this is because of the IMF, whether support the IMF or despite the IMF, I think is an interesting conversation. Obviously from where I sit and from my role, I do see us having a very important supporting role. And I do stress that very carefully, supporting role. What we have seen throughout, I think all IMF programs, is that absent national ownership, absent a conviction and a direction of where the leadership, and hopefully society as a whole, but I say leadership carefully, wants to go, then those reforms won't work. And so what I think I've seen suddenly in my time at the fund is that there really is an emphasis on making sure that we understand where countries want to go, where the leadership wants to take them, and trying to identify a supporting role in doing that. And you see that the focus in individual countries is different. As support for the low income countries is very clearly anchored on national poverty strategies. Those are not ones that we write. Those are ones that are done by an inclusive process at the local level. Obviously we have opinions on them and we provide comments along the way. But as do other stakeholders. And so we really have tried, I think very hard and you have seen the evolution of the fund engagement that's being much more driven and much more sensitive to those national strategies. But we can debate this for a long, long time. In terms of this issue is that the conflict of an environment with limited capacity, and this is not sent with any offense to the officials who are working in these countries. You have relatively few, and many fragile states, you have relatively few trained, well trained technical staff, lots of demands, lots of requests to meet with donors. And there really is a tension, and I think you are right, there is a tension in how we can support that process of capacity building. Countries in which there is no tax authority. It makes no sense to suddenly have a government to prove a budget that says, now we are a stable country again, now there is peace. We are going to collect 15% of GDP in taxes and that's going to finance all these wonderful things in education and health. It doesn't happen. If there is no tax authority, no experienced tax authority. In an environment like that, does it make sense to put in on a temporary basis, experienced tax experts from around the world to support local capacity? In the short term, perhaps yes, and this is a request we do often get from the fragile states, one of the things they would like is more long-term people on the ground doing hands-on. Perhaps less of the people flying in for a week, providing a diagnosis, leaving a report and then leaving, but more people actually sitting in the ministries, in various commissions, agencies actually doing the handle, but obviously designed in such a way that it's a transfer of skills. Again, these are things that are easy to say in terms of identifying the right people and getting that transition moving is harder and this I think is part of what I see as the long-haul component. We do try and as I mentioned, one of the requests we always get is more long-term advisors. We have expanded to some degree the number that we have put in not to meet all the requests we have, but we also have regional technical centers that cover the entire continent of Africa and there we have these experts that can come in for a week at a time who know the countries, who know the challenges and can provide that technical backdrop. The model we have in our mind is that if, for example, the head of customs has a question of how to treat something that has come in a question he hasn't looked at seen before, he can just pick up the phone and he has someone he can talk to and get a perspective. We have expanded that coverage and that I think is there and can support. In terms of this issue on the youth bulge, hugely important question and certainly our last, I mean every six months we do a regional economic outlook on Sub-Saharan Africa. The last one we published has a chapter exactly on this issue. The demographics for Africa can either look like an incredible dividend or an incredible challenge, shall I say, waiting to happen. Populations are expanding still. I think population growth in Niger is over 3% a year these days. How to create the numbers of jobs, how to get the economies to create the number of jobs to provide meaningful opportunities for that generation as they're hitting the labor market is a huge, huge challenge. And obviously we see this in terms of migration flows to Europe. It's not right that people are on boats trying to get across to Europe. That is a statement that there's something in the economies that are going wrong. And so I mean I think part of our focus has shifted again into more, it's not just about creating growth. It's about also creating employment, creating formal sector employment, not just informal opportunities, but this is a long process. And as I say, I mean we do have a chapter in our last report which I think raises a lot of questions and suddenly a lot of issues that we need to address going on. Thanks. Corine. I'd just like to get back quickly on the lessons learned and link with something Jennifer said about her report. I mean as David mentioned, I mean I think this is one of the things the fund is trying to do better is the capacity building. And this is very hard to do. I mean again, you know, after conflict it has been often the case that there's foreign experts doing the work and very often countries request that. But you know, if you give crutches to somebody, you don't teach them how to walk on their own, they'll need the crutches forever. So it is something the fund is also trying to learn to do better I think as an institution. And the link with what Jennifer mentioned is that, you know, maybe we need also to learn to pick success stories in terms of institutions. Some institutions in fragile countries are highly dysfunctional and there's lots of corruption. And then sometimes there's nuggets, there's one that works, that has a leader that does well, the revenue authority or, you know, that unit in the budget office. You know, how do we tailor support better and support, you know, the things that work? And then how do we address things that don't work? And then finally, I think that one of the roles we play and I've tried to do myself in my own work is trying to lessen the burden on the authorities on the donor request, trying to get the donors to coordinate better. I mean, you know, having joint, if you do a mission on public financial management, do a joint mission, you know, don't have three missions from the World Bank, from the African Development Bank, from the European Commission, you know, do one. So that takes only a week of the authority's time. And in Haiti, we were actually quite successful in coordinating five or six major donors around budget support. And we had a common matrix of triggers for disbursement and we had a very nice little group. We had the joint mission that was timed close to our mission of review. So, you know, practical things that will help the authorities, also forcing the donors to streamline a bit their demands. You know, there's, they get support from this and that entity and there's a long list of things they have to do. You know, what is really critical? You know, can we do only two or three? This is also something we will learn, we're trying to do better in our own programs, but you know, what is really essential? And that is even more important in fragile states, I think. I have a question before I'll turn over here, which is, you know, often countries in crisis, they've had massive peacekeeping interventions, lots of donor assistance, very reliable on donor assistance. But quickly, once the crisis has evolved, kind of claim the mantle of sovereignty and making it very difficult to say condition or, you know, you talk about country ownership and country leadership, but if it's going in one direction off the rails, difficult for then the international community to do anything about that. And I say this thinking of perhaps the Liberia GMAP model, for example, and whether that's kind of a model that works, kind of building into the agreement or building into the assistance, some lever of that kind or some kind of co-leadership. Maybe you can say a bit about the GMAP model, but just the idea that coming out of crisis, you immediately kind of shun all international kind of oversight after having been, you know, I think of South Sudan a little bit like that, for example. But then let me take a question over here. The gentleman here and then there. And I hope we can, we'll, if we keep answers fairly short, we can come back for one more round. Great. Laura Spenson with the Center for International, excuse me, Private Enterprise. And so I have three quick questions. First question, all of the prescriptions that we've been talking about today is really all about democratic development in terms of inclusiveness, rule of law, transparency, accountability, anti-corruption. And so if we're talking about democracy, why aren't we sort of using those measurements in terms of at least even indicators or even on the regression analysis in terms of seeing democratic development across those countries? And then that would pose an interesting dynamic with a country like Rwanda, for example. Second question is on informal economy and related to that, property rights in terms of the bottom-up approach, in terms of prescriptions in fragile states, in terms of quick solutions to try to really build all of this inclusiveness, tax base, and everything else that we're talking about. And was that looked at with regards to your study? Thank you. What did we say, gentleman here? Thank you. Name Muhammad Ali. I'm with the Somali Forward Foundation. And this question is directed to Dave. Dave, right? Yes. Dave. You lightly alluded to Somalia on your presentation. And I was wondering if you could elaborate more about the challenges that you and your team have seen during your analysis. Jennifer touched elegantly what we see to be a challenge for Somali, but we would like to know more how the IMF sees the challenge and how we could get the country into that resilience mode. It's a country with a lot of resources and that's strategically located in a good area in Africa. Thank you. Thank you. And gentlemen. Thank you. Adam Silo from the Senate. William Easterly has written a lot about the incentives and disincentives of donor funding, especially to areas in the tropics and in sub-Saharan Africa. And I sense a little bit of a tension, maybe a paradox or correct me if I'm wrong, between Miss Cook and the CSIS report that spoke about sort of almost like a venture capital investment portfolio looking from donor funding in terms of assessing different options. And then the funds report, which emphasize we need to have sustained engagement even after conflict. And so can you describe a little bit, you know, how do you, is there a tension there between do we provide funding as an investment to reward good behavior or is it conditioned or, you know, how does that work? Maybe a little bit of sort of the model that we see with the Millennium Challenge Corporation versus the more traditional development models. Yes. Okay. Should we turn to, even Bob too, you should feel free to pipe up on the sovereignty issue. We have the informal economy and property rights, Somalia specifically, and then this last question, which I can answer as well. Okay. All good questions. And democracy, yes. And then in terms of this issue of sovereignty, the question that you suddenly emerge from a conflict, however defined, to suddenly have a new internationally recognized government that has been there for maybe two days when the first donor shows up on the doorstep. It is of course completely unrealistic to expect that that new government has a real sense of clear sense of inclusive priorities. You're then very much in Bob's world. What can you do for me for the person that happens to be on the other side of the table? And, you know, that's something that clearly we understand, but also in many of these countries that are coming right out of conflict, there are situations where there are enormous near-term economic needs. Often foreign exchange reserves are completely depleted during the conflict period. Ability to provide basic government services has been destroyed. What do you do? How do you engage in that kind of environment? I think this is, you know, it has always been one of the tensions that, you know, an environment like that caused with very early, very rapid interventions. The only way to deliver them is by building incapacity from outside, but that's not what you need for the sustainable. That's not how you generate the shared vision, the strong, sustained inclusive growth model. And to some degree, that is kind of the thinking behind why we put in this new IMF facility, this rapid credit system, is that we can go in and with no illusions that we're getting, we're anchoring support on a national poverty strategy. You know, we know that doesn't exist, so we don't even ask. And then when you look at the funding, you know, it really is a case that we look at, this is the current economic situation. Here's the basic vision, basic policy steps that have been taken in the last couple of months, where things are going. And that's it. There is no, this is the program for the next, you know, 12 months or three years, this is the vision, this is all these things. None of that is there. There are no conditions in terms of you need to meet these conditions to get future disbursements. That's not there. It's just, this is the situation. We understand the difficulties. The basic policy framework is there. And here's the fund money, one disbursement up front, a very different lending instrument from what we usually do. And part of the reason for doing that is, you know, that that, if you like, the rubber stamp from the IMF, that there is a policy framework, that there are some numbers that are being shared, that have been looked at, that have been discussed, is useful for other people in providing funding. But that is very much a transition into, let's use this to help bridge the period until we can have, until the authorities can develop a national policy strategy in terms of the longer term vision. It's the near term, but yeah, there is this tension of, you know, the timing and when we move in. And suddenly when you talk to some of our country authorities, Rwanda had been mentioned. I think this is, we held a seminar during the spring meetings at the Fund on exactly this issue of extinct fragility. And one of the speakers was Minister Gattetti from Rwanda. And he has a very clear idea in his mind as to how Rwanda developed. And yes, you know, you got to the end of the conflict period. Everyone ran in. But things, you know, things were patched together. But there wasn't really a development. There wasn't a vision. And it was only really when they sat back and produced their national vision and something that they could get domestic support around. The things happened. And that took a little bit of time. I mean, it's not an immediate thing. Moving on to a couple of the issues. Is this all about democratic development? I'm not sure I would have ever used that term. I'm not a politician. I'm very careful about using words about inclusion. Does that equate to democracy? No. At least not my understanding. And I think, you know, certainly what we have discussed, you know, is, is, does not imply a specific political system. I spent a lot of time working in the former Soviet Union. So I, you know, have different concepts of what democracy actually means in terms of, you know, and I think Jennifer had quoted the phrase that we often use this also in morphic mimicry, right, the hollow institutions. Many countries are good about putting labels on things, but that's not really how things actually work. And I think, you know, many, certainly in many countries I've worked on in Africa, there are traditional mechanisms that feed up, you know, views from the ground. Not traditional democracy, but there are ways that, you know, messages get up and I think, you know, finding, making sure that those concepts are reflected in, you know, the strategist is, is what I think is the important side. Property rights, informal economy. And I think this also goes back to the question from the IFF, which I apologize, I forgot the first time through. I mean, a lot of what we're saying, I mean, the IFF work is very important in terms of trying to identify, you know, what is driving these capital flows out of Africa. There are many ways you can look at it, but I think it's posing a number of very important questions. Part of those flows are basically fraud. Those obviously are illegal and should be addressed, including by national political system, national systems at home. There are components where it is profit shifting by international companies. In many cases, that is legal. That requires, you know, international cooperation to get that thing. And certainly those discussions are happening at the OECD and G20 level. But then also, you know, we should also not forget that a lot of the, you know, a key component in building states is this concept of revenue mobilization, getting the tax system together so that you can deliver services. A key component of that is to have, you know, it's not just putting the laws on piece of paper. It's not just training the tax inspectors, but it's making sure that systems are in place that support the fair enforcement of those legislation. The property rights, the avoiding tax exemptions for individuals who may be favored. And there I think we have a lot of work to do. And I think, you know, we pursue it. But there is a need to get judicial systems, national oversight systems, national audit offices functioning to be able to reflect those. In terms of the question on Somalia, I apologize. I don't cover Somalia. I can put you in touch with the people who do to give you a fair answer. And then I think in terms of the this issue on the tension with the CSIS, do you go in upfront or not? I will let Jennifer take that. But the one thing I do want to point out is one of the things that comes out very clearly in these reports is that if you dig through the econometrics, some of the components we look at is the rate of return on investment was public, private, social investment. And the rates of return on public investment, basic infrastructure in a fragile state is really, really high. And countries by themselves cannot generate the resources to do that. Basic infrastructure, I mean the roads, electricity, power, water, really high rates of return. International capital markets don't lend for those kind of projects. That in my mind is one of the key components where things like the millennium challenge comes in. Those things are really important. Many of the donors ourselves kind of come through the budget side, which can also be challenged that way. But there is, and it's really did strike me. And it was something I was looking for. I don't think I, I don't think I hired this ahead of time. So I was happy to see any results. Those investments are really critical and they need to move. Do you think you can I mean, just at time. So if you can, yeah, but do go, but just, no, I just wanted to come back on the GMAP. I mean, but it was very specific context. I mean, it was post, you know, Charles Taylor and Liberia institutions were hollow. President Johnson Sirleaf just got elected. At that point, there were audits of key state institution that were done by the major donors because there were perception of widespread corruption that were, that was so egregious that it was really threatening the peace transition process. So there was an agreement on the, what was called the GMAP, which is a partnership between the government and the key donors to, to clean up, I would say, basic institutions. So in, in, you know, the positive part was it's a partnership, it was a partnership with the state. It was coordinated, but it was also very intrusive and painful, I think, on the, on the Liberian side. They literally had international financial controllers sitting in the central bank and signing all the checks. So it was not really a homegrown thing. It was, you know, a forced cleanup of, you know, a state that had the only source of legitimate revenue was from the international shipping registry. And then the rest was illegal diamond sales, basically. So, so, you know, build some basic revenue generating capacity. It was cleaning up a bit the capacity to pay first the recurrence spending, to pay the civil servants, and then to, to develop basic budget institutions, clean up what was at the time the national bank, to give the state apparatus a perception of more transparency and less corruption. So, so, but I wouldn't say, you know, again, it was extremely intrusive. The Liberians hated it. It was necessary, I think. It's a process that in many ways is unfinished, but it was a very particular moment in Liberia's history, I think. Enrique, any last word? Comment? I think everything that, on the issue of, of, of democracy, just to add that we made the point in the paper that we did not look at electoral democracy per se. And in fact, some background statistics do show that the correlation between measures of democracy and growth or resilience is not particularly encouraging in any direction. So, it's not so much electoral democracy compared to a political settlement that, that is sufficient to keep the peace and to create some degree of political stability going forward. I have a lot to say, but we're over time, so I'll save it for the next event. Okay, great. Well, thank you. Just on that last point, I think we're, they're not so much intention, intention, the two approaches. Ours is perhaps disperse funds, but remain there for a long time and scale up over time as you kind of gradually see what works and what, what, what functions, not necessarily as a reward, but, but to find areas that are where you're going to get the most return for assistance investment. Listen, I want to thank you all very much and apologies for going over time. I really want to thank the IMF team for kind of prompting this and for actually a very interesting report and discussion, and I hope down the line we can have more collaborations on some of your work and some of our work in places where they intersect or complement each other. And a big thanks to Bob Lamb, too, for coming into town to do this with us. So thanks very much and please thank my panel with me.