 Our next speaker is Mamdou Karakochua, this is as good as I kind of pronounced your last name and please excuse me if I didn't do it well. True, but it's a bit longer one than I am used to, which is a very nice name by the way. I have been trying and you know, I'm training myself, but somehow I did not get it yet. I will next time. Mamdou will speak about the economic factors that will impact the region and shape the region's economy, whether it is energy dynamics or prices, public debt, capital of low, excess supply of labor, technology and the productivity. So will you speak about all the issues that previous speakers spoke about? And you will be limited to the same time. Thank you. I will keep it short, don't worry. I mean, I won't keep it short, but within 15 minutes for sure. Thank you, chair. It's good to be back in Abu Dhabi. It's good to be back with World Policy Conference friends and colleagues. So thank you. Now, of course, this is all happening under the tragic shadow of what's happening, transpiring in Gaza. So I shared the sadness in Turkey. We all shared the sadness and you can feel it in the people. It's very real. Moving to the actual substance of my remarks, I will be at the intersection of geopolitics and geo-economics, but more to the geo-economics side. For the last few years, actually, we were on the same panel I think last year, I was more on the geopolitical aspect of things, but now today we go get into economics. Of course, Abdurrahman did a great job of sort of painting that picture, then the intersection. So I'll try to build on that. I will sort of challenge him maybe on a few things. You know, when you are sort of marginally a part of the Middle East, I am Middle Eastern, but you know, just sort of associate. One needs to be very humble. I'll try to do that. But as a speaker, I need to provoke a little bit, so I'll take a bit of a risk. So forgive me if I just don't get that balance right. Now, when I was thinking about this presentation, I just sort of thought back, and it was exactly 10 years ago in 2013 that I was asked by the Allied Command of NATO to write a piece on regional economics. So I thought, okay, economics, geo-security, this has been with me for some time. And I thought that would be a good reference point to take for myself. So that's the past 10 years. And that gives me some feel, at least I try to get tease out a feel for the next 10 years where things can go from here. When I look back at those 10 years, the reference that what I got out of my first analysis in 2013 was that the fundamental for me issue of development in the region is trust. The trust between its people and its governments. And that trust was fractured. And how do you rebuild it when there's so much pent-up frustration and impatience in the people? I mean, well-meaning governments, even if you try to deliver, execute fast, when people have been waiting for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it's very difficult. The challenge is immensely difficult. That's what I got. And with that, sort of, you know, when I think about it, I mean, if I divide the problem into two pieces, one is, will these economies grow? Will they create wealth? That's one question. The aggregate wealth. The second question is, will these economies put in place the mechanisms where the created wealth will be distributed to the society? It's the distribution, the engagement of the citizens that seems to be the problem in the Middle East. It is the creating wealth. I mean, you know, you compare it with other regions in the world. It's not the best, but it's okay. It is the distribution. Getting the people, getting the young people to be a part of this is the challenge. That's the problem. So looking back over the past 10 years, I wonder, you know, whether things have progressed in the past 10 years. Has the region come a long way? And when I think about that, the answer is not all that positive. I mean, the unemployment is high. Youth unemployment still high. Informal economy still huge. Women participation still very low. The quality of jobs, they're still low skill, low paid, low tech jobs. Not much change on that front. So and then the weak private sector. I mean, the dream has always been to get the private sector going so that the private sector absorbs these new bright, well educated people. It's not happening. It hasn't really happened to the extent that we all hoped. And this is not because the governments, the bureaucrats, the technocrats didn't try. Everybody tried. I think well-meaning people, very intelligent people are trying. They've been trying. And when I look back, I go beyond the 10 years. I do sort of remember the 90s and 2000s, definitely. It was the heyday of neoliberalism and IMF was in the region. There were programs with Egypt, with Morocco. So all this reform talk of you don't get rule of law, governance, reform the trade sector, reform the... You know, it was all on the table. We've had this before. And this until 2010, I think we had quite a bit of it. And then the last decade, of course, we had all these other realities. We had the aftermath of the Lehman crisis. It was the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I still call it the Arab Spring. And, you know, one after another. So these 10 years didn't really alleviate all these problems. But it wasn't for lack of trying. I think people have been trying. And I put the problem in sort of two different baskets. One set of problems is, as I said, there's this repetition of sort of their well-meaning and accurate, I mean, sort of well-targeted platitudes, but they don't go far. You know, when you say governance has to be improved, sure. Rule of law, sure. I mean, we all want that in my country as well. But it's the how. I mean, how does it happen? How will it happen? And we don't really see those, even incremental steps getting in that direction. That is one bucket of repeating sort of platitudes, right platitudes, but that don't get you to the result. Then there's another set where actually things were done, but we figured out that you do the policy, you actually implement the policy, but you don't get the result. And some of those examples, as I sort of delved into this, is, for example, I realized that in the last 10 years, the number of years of education have increased in the region in many countries. But that did not translate to better jobs, higher pay. So those better educated young people didn't end up getting good jobs, which is strange. So the thing was done, education, there was investment education, but the result isn't there. Then you look at, I mean, we always talked about the bloated public sector, the Egyptian public sector employs so many people. Egypt has actually reduced the number of the percentage of employment in the public sector. That's progress. But unfortunately, it seems, I mean, you would know better, of course, but it seems from what I read, is that the people who were, you know, the jobs that were left to the private sector were displaced not with formal, sort of, again, high tech, high value added private sector jobs, but they were substituted with low skill informal sector jobs. So people, the new job opportunities that were released from the state were not picked up by the sophisticated private sector. So that isn't working. That link doesn't work. So I mean, Egypt did, government did what it had to do, but the other piece isn't in place. Then we look at FDI, the foreign tract investment. There is some FDI coming in, but the shift from the real estate construction energy to the more labor intensive industries, not happening as well. And the worst thing, or the worrying thing, is FDI. We always hope that when a multinational comes for with a green field in a country that it will sort of ripple around, people will work with this multinational, this multinational will hire people, skills will flow to the other companies. That doesn't seem to happen. That link isn't working. So things are, we're doing things. We're implementing these policies, but not getting the results. Something is wrong. So that's, you know, that's, that's the sort of the what I teased out of the last 10 years. That brings me to now. So what happens in the next 10 years? Will we, in 10 years, if we all gather here again, 2033, will we again be saying, ah, you know, it just didn't happen. We tried and we didn't get the results high unemployment, low women participation? I hope that's not the case and we have to figure out a way. Now, what is different about now? What is different about now? What I'm feeling, I mean, our chair has introduced the headwinds coming our way for this region as well. We have the energy transition. We don't know what's going to happen to the oil price. We have the reasonably, you know, relatively lower global growth coming our way that will impact the region. We have probably after 10, 15 years, positive real interest rates coming that will hit the public debt of these countries. So you know, there's, there's, there's the climate issue, there'll be droughts, there'll be food insecurity, food prices going up. So the next 10 years, if it is business as usual, doesn't look any better than the past 10 years. So we really have a problem. So, you know, I've given so many negative messages, what am I saying? You know, I don't obviously have the clean answer, but I'll just, you know, sort of try something. The one thing we know is we're probably, you know, you go to any meeting and we're in the midst of transitions. We come to the globe is going through multi-layer transitions, poly crisis, so on and so forth. That's the talk. So that means, I mean, every transition is uncertainty risk, but at the same time, every transition, it's a discontinuity. Sort of cards are reshuffled and you can find ways to position, reposition yourself. So there is more room for strategic play when cards are reshuffled. That's probably where we are. That's what it feels like. And what am I saying? Let me give a bit more substance to it. One, the geometry of the world is definitely changing. It has already changed. So we were actually in a world of globalization. Everybody was integrating. There was a development model for that. You bring the rural population to the urban, they manufacture, you sell export to the world. That was the development model. Not working anymore. And because that's not the world we are in. Instead, the world we are in, let's call it a fragmented world, brings in other geometries. It is the French-shoring idea. So you look at the map and it seems, you know, Europe should French-shor in this region. That's just a no-brainer when you look at the map. Not happening at the moment. But the strategic discussion, dialogue, effort, I think it is there. It is, it can be done. In a narrower sense, the energy integration with Europe is happening. You look at the Morocco-U.K. X-Links, sort of the under-ocean cable, impressive. Very impressive undertaking. The Italian-Tunisian interconnection, impressive. The Algerian-Spain, interesting. So that is happening. Some integration is happening. That's a different paradigm. Then you look at another geometry. It is the Chinese BRI versus the American Indian Europe corridor. So, you know, we have all these investments coming your way. Can these countries in the region look at this reshuffling and come up with a strategy and then focus on that strategy that will give them the push, the jumpstart, the leverage where the communities, the societies will feel, OK, this is the new vision, the new direction we are going. That, I think, might be an opportunity. But it will not, it's not easy. I mean, I'm obviously just trying to imagine things. I'll just finish by giving one little sort of example from my humble history and experience. You know, in my 30s, I was given this great task of founding and managing Turkey's first technology park. So it was a development project actually. And the idea was to get European American high-tech companies to come to Turkey to work with the local tech companies. And that's what we want, actually, from FDI in the region. And what I noticed after that, what I got out of that experience, yes, sure, rule of law, good governance, all those things, they need to be in place. They can really make your life miserable if they're not in place. And they did make my life miserable, but it is not enough. It is definitely not enough. You need to have an agile vision. You need to have leadership that knows that vision and can sort of maneuver with it. And you need to make sure that everybody in that community in that society knows about that vision. It is not, we cannot work with one size fits all policies. These need to be agile. These need to be sort of flexible. But you need institutions and institutional actors who can actually deliver, who can execute, who are given initiative, yet guidance. It is that kind of a structure works. So basically to wrap up, I think if we look at this problem as business as usual, the next 10 years, it does not look good to me. But it is, it seems to be full of strategic opportunities for the region. The region may well find ways to negotiate, you know, just find balance with Europeans, Americans, Indians, Chinese, to deliver. But it will require a different set of policy thinking, policymaking. And I hope that happens at the next time we meet in 10 years. I hope we'll have better stories to tell each other. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have one more speaker. Please write down your question. But thank you. You have covered so many issues, unemployment and formal economy. It's an issue. Economic reform, whether would it work or not, that would depend whether the patient in the intensive care or outside the intensive care before you start the reform program. Education, yes, there are very good dedicated people. They graduate, they go to Europe, they find good jobs, they participate. You have to have a private sector. You have to have a vibrant private sector. And whether the government is crowding in or crowding out the private sector is something, you know, we kind of speak about it.