 So welcome to the discussion. I'm Kevin Delaney. I'm editor-in-chief and co-founder of Quartz. We're a business news site and we have co-developed this session with the World Economic Forum. Hello also to the people who are watching this session via live stream on Quartz's site QZ.com and on Yahoo Finance, which is also streaming the session. So the goal of this session is to tackle one of the more urgent questions posed this week. Can a renewed focus on its potentially damaging local effects save economic globalization from itself? And for clarity globalization can mean lots of things. Here we're primarily focused on international economic integration. This is a topic admittedly that is still unfolding amid developments in technology that are changing both where work is done and whether work is done by humans at all and in the mix are also advances in local economic development policy, corporate practices and measures such as universal basic income. So our very distinguished panelists committed to tackling this important topic are Chanda Koteir. She's the managing director and chief executive officer of ICICI Bank in India having helped establish ICICI Bank, which is now India's largest private bank in the early 1990s. She's shaped modern retail banking in India. Just next to her we have Mauricio Cardenas, the minister of finance and public credit of Columbia since 2012. He is a PhD in economics and a long career at the highest levels of government and policymaking in Columbia. Next to him is Sharon Burrow. She's the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation in Brussels. She's a background in education and was a teacher in Australia earlier in her career. She's a co-chair of this of this year's forum meeting. Next to her is Devin Wenig. He's the president and chief executive officer of eBay, the online marketplace with about 170 million buyers. He's the former CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets. Next to him is Manusha Fik. She's director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She's a PhD in economics also. So we have at least two on this panel. Her career has spanned academia and public policy, including at the World Bank, IMF. She's held senior UK government roles, including deputy governor of the Bank of England. And then finally, we have Rich Lesser. He's the global chief executive officer and president of Boston Consulting Group. He is in 50 countries and is focused on driving strategy and major change around the world. So for those of you in the audience, we're going to take questions before the end of this session. And those of you following us online came to ask questions throughout the session by going to wef.ch forward slash ask. I'll receive them on the iPad that's on the table next to me and try and pull them into the discussion. So I want to start before we get into this discussion by asking a foundational question of everyone here in the audience. I'm going to ask you to raise your hands to answer this question. Do you believe economic globalization is a net positive for societies? So if you believe economic globalization is a net positive for societies, please raise your hand. OK, that's a good solid majority. That's a very strong majority on the panel. Do we majority also? OK, great. Thank you. Sharon, I'm going to come to you first. So could you could you summarize the down to this panel is about trying to figure out if globalization can be managed in such a way that the downsides are are offset or are minimized? Can you start by explaining what you think the principal downsides of globalization are? OK, so we're certainly not anti globalization, but the current model has failed working people. You have a model of globalization. That means the world is three times richer than it was 30 years ago. That's a good thing. But it hasn't been shared. We have a stark inequality. We have massive unemployment and that wealth has been built of a global model that is based on low pay, insecure and often unsafe work. And when you want to know what that looks like, 94 per cent of our supply chains where that model dominates are actually a hidden workforce. No CEO takes direct responsibility. In fact, only a few CEOs actually follow the UN guiding principles for business and human rights and do due diligence and make their supply chains transparent and put grievance and remedy in place. I've just come out of Ethiopia and I can tell you I met a woman there last week called Yeshi. That's that's not about high tech or new tech, by the way, it's about the next wave of low technology and textile manufacturing. Sweeping into Ethiopia, Yeshi earns 20 US dollars a month, 20 US dollars a month. She tries to feed three children on that. I told the Prime Minister and the CEOs of the textile companies, we all know well, the European and American brands, they could pay four times that and still pay less than Bangladesh. And you know the story of Bangladesh. And so when I tell you what little it would take to actually reinvigorate people's trust, it would take 50 US dollars a month in the poorest countries in Asia. It would take doubling the normal wages, quadrupling Yeshi's wage in Africa, it would take a little more than 50 US dollars in Latin America. But when you know that corporations earn up to 17,000 dollars in profit for every supply chain worker, their direct employees and their hidden workforce, why is it that we can't share that prosperity? And then when I tell you that 75% of the world's people have little or no social protection and yet, as I said, the world's three times richer and it will cost less than 6% of GDP. Why are we perpetuating a model that is in fact exploitative? And why is it that people wonder why working people have such a distrust of the global environment? So globalization has failed working people. Manush, I want to ask you, would you add anything to that in terms of framing the problems we're looking at today? Well, I think globalization makes these competitive pressures transmit around the world much more quickly. But I think the big driver is technological change, which has increased the returns to very high skilled workers dramatically and reduced those to lower skilled workers, which has resulted in this massive inequality that Sharon describes. So we have seen growth in inequality and that has been made worse by the fact that if you look at what's happened to tax reform in most countries over the last 20 years, in most of the advanced economies, our tax systems have become less progressive. Top tax rates have been lowered, corporate tax rates have been lowered, and VAT has been increased, which is a very unprogressive tax. And so we've had a technological set of changes which have increased inequality and we've had tax reform, which has become less progressive and made that even worse. So before we get into some of the solutions, Rich, I want to just pull you in for a second. Manush alluded to technology and I think one of the challenges of this discussion is separating globalization and technology as driving factors for some of the some of the issues that were, can you help us sort of frame that as we head into some of the solutions? Sure. So it's actually a really important underlying component because it will add opportunities and also a lot of different pressures. A lot of the globalization logic looking backwards over the last few decades has been a low-cost sourcing logic that there were opportunities to arbitrage labor to take advantage of large countries that could manufacture at low cost and to use that as a source. And that's when we think about globalization and you ask people that's normally what they think they're talking about. In fact, the world that we're going to is changing the rules quite a lot because the nature of technology is allowing production to be done in exceptionally efficient ways to be much closer to market, more capital intensive to build it. In many cases less a smaller workforce, but also much closer to demand and much closer to customers and we have started to see a factor cost start to equalize more certainly between China and the U.S. It's a lot closer than it was a while ago and other countries have closed some of that gap, but also that the technology logical allows one to source production closer to market. So we'll see relocalization like the out of dust plant in Germany or others to come around the world from multiple manufacturers. But there are also and the other thing that comes with that is frankly, and I think Devon could speak to this much better, the ability to open up markets to the world so that smaller manufacturers who are historically limited to smaller markets nearby. Have so much more opportunity than they had before the flip side is the pressure on high quality workforce to raise the standard of workforce. And I don't mean just in the developed world. I mean around the world is going to be really intense and many communities in many countries have under invested in building human capital. And frankly, to the point that you were raising earlier, Sharon, I think companies in today's world have a huge responsibility about investing in human capital. It's the right thing to do society for the reason you articulated. It's the right thing to do business wise because if you can't get a workforce that's able to adapt quickly enough when technology is changing every single year, your risk of being left behind as an enterprise is much higher than it was a few years ago. And so what you're saying is that globalization was a driving factor for some of these inequalities and jobs this location in the past technology automation might potentially be a driving factor going forward. And so we'll look at just that one. Yeah, go ahead. I Sharon is rightfully pointed out some of the very serious challenges that exist in the model. We've also pulled hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty in recent decades. And as we talk about globalization, we have to acknowledge the challenges and there are many and it's appropriate to put them on the table. We also have to acknowledge many lives around the world that are in a different place than 20 or 30 years ago and then seek to figure out how we improve everybody's opportunity in the years ahead. Yeah, great. Excellent. So we're going to keep this in mind. We're going to walk through three different areas. The first one is social safety nets. The second one is empowering local communities. And the third one is education, training and all of those things that Rich just raised. So I want to start with social safety nets. I want to turn to Mr. Cardenas, Minister Cardenas first and ask you what is a modern social safety net look like? What does it need to look like? Well, first, thank you. I think we, I mean, there's an overwhelming majority here that considers that globalization is a net gain. I am part of that majority. But the real question here is how can we make globalization work better? I think there is always the option to improve the effects of globalization. And there are a number of ways because I think globalization, if you think about countries at that level of aggregation, it's probably good. It's very difficult to argue against that. Per capita income for the majority of countries has increased faster after globalization. But when you start discussing issues at the level of an industry, a region, a city, and certainly at the level of the individual is when you start seeing that globalization hasn't worked for everyone. So the question is how do we make sure that it works well for the majority? That it's, that what we say for the aggregate is also true for the majority of the individuals. And I think that's where the issue of social safety nets comes to place. What I would like to argue is that there are three ways in which we can make globalization work better. One is by compensating the loser. There are sectors, there are cities, there are, in many of our countries, unskilled labor. Those jobs are being lost. So you need to compensate, and that means transfer. But you also have to create more opportunity. That's more or less a human capital issue. You have to make sure that the ones that are losing because of globalization get trained in a way that in the future they don't lose. So that means creating those opportunities. And thirdly, I would say that we have to complement. So this is three Cs, compensating, creating, and complementing globalization. And what do I mean by that? Many of our countries have adopted the sustainable development goals. That's just one example. There are many, many issues, many ways in which you can complement globalization. It's like saying, well, a country has an agenda, which is not just to make sure that globalization works, is concerns about sustainability, concerns about making sure that you eradicate poverty, that you provide basic services to the majority of the population. So it would be absolutely wrong to think that globalization can be in itself a development strategy. You need to complement it. So my answer, before we go into specifics on how to do that, will be complement, create opportunity, and compensate immediately with transfers to the losers. Now, for this, you need the state. And here the taxes issue is crucial because globalization has also meant more tax competition, a race to the bottom, cutting taxes. We all think about the U.S. tax reform. But that's just the most recent example. It's not the only one by no means. So it's like contradictory in terms that we have competition in tax matters, reducing tax revenues, but at the same time, we need the state to deal with the effects of globalization. Manus, you've written recently about a social contract and the idea that there is a new social contract. Can you summarize with that, at a high level, what that would look like? Well, we know that we're starting from a place which is highly unequal and which globalization and technological changes are continuing. And we know we have an automation revolution about to happen and transform work. And so I think we need to rethink how are we going to help people adjust to this new economy in which automation and technology will be so important. And there are many elements to that. We have to think about retirement ages as people's work lives are going to have to grow longer. We have to think more creatively. I think about part-time work and making part-time work just as easy and that you get your benefits and that you aren't discriminated against if you're a part-time worker. I think we have to invest a lot more in active labour market policies, which means basically helping workers train for new jobs. There are some countries, the one that everyone always cites is Denmark, which are really good at that. They spend 1.7 percent of GDP. Most countries don't spend anywhere near enough to help workers transition to the jobs of the future. And so I think we need all of those things. Portability, more part-time work, more flexibility about the length of working lives, enabling investment, and we need a floor. And that floor can look like many things, but we need some kind of floor on people's incomes to make sure that that people don't don't reach a point of desperation. In fact, we have a common kind of commitment to this because we've called for a new social contract. Our premise is if you don't have the floor, including social protection, but then you don't have a minimum wage on which people can live with dignity, evidence-based, what's what's the minimum you need? And you don't have bargaining so that you can actually share the productivity, then you won't heal the fractures in the workforce today and therefore enable us to negotiate our way through industry 4.0, the energy transition. So in other words, we call it a new social contract with a just transition. We need to change the rules. I don't think you mentioned a universal basic income, but I'd be interested in what the panel's view on that. That is, you know, as a definition of a social safety net is among the tools that people that people talk about. I mean, it's expensive estimates for most of the advanced economies are it would be about six and a half percent of GDP. That's the IMF's recent estimate. And so very few countries can afford to add six and a half percent of GDP to public spending. And if it comes at the expense of programs that are more targeted, I think it's I think it's problematic. I think for many low income countries, I think it's it can be a very good solution if you fund it with progressive taxation because in low income countries, there's a lot of evidence now about 80 randomized control trials which show that giving poor people in low income countries small amounts of money can have huge benefits for nutrition, education, their life prospects. So I think you have different answers in low and middle income countries relative to high income countries. And I'm going to pull Devin and Chanda and in a second. But Mr. Corinas, Minister Corinas, universal basic income. What's your view? Well, if it's six percent of GDP, it's unrealistic. Yeah, it's it's it's not it's not possible. I think we have to move in a way in which we create more formal jobs, more social security, but also in in in a way that is sustainable. That means to the extent that the economy can support that to the extent that we have the resources to support that. So it's a slow process. It's not something that you can do overnight. So I want to one of the topics that's come up is is looking at a region local level. And I want to and Chanda, maybe I'll go to you have the experience of building out a retail banking network in India. What sort of an insight does that give to you into how these how these these issues play out on that level? Yeah, so I mean, if you talk of a country like India, I think, you know, whether we talk of the impact of globalization or building social nets, I think the remedy or really the solution has to be very tailor made to what that country specifically is. I mean, if it's an aging country, I think you only tend to look at pensions and so on. But India, you know, when we have more than 50 percent of the population that's below 25 years of age, I think the focus really has to be about how do we create sustainable livelihood opportunities for that young demography, because we want to make sure that the demography is a demographic dividend for us. And it turns out to be a demographic dividend for us. So it's about, I think, you know, as I view it, it's not just about providing education or providing health or providing financial inclusion. I think we have to make it economic inclusion. And, you know, let me tell you what the how the country has therefore been moving on this. I mean, you've seen that in the last from 2014 onwards, first starting with financial inclusion, the countries opened about 300 million bank accounts of people who were totally unbanked so far. That's just about opening the bank account. But then that becomes the fulcrum around which the entire social net safety net improves or builds because around that, then you build ways of then directly transferring government benefits. And there the countries use technology to do direct benefit transfers, which means that more money directly reaches people rather than it being taken away by the intermediaries. Then from there on, we're talking about creating, helping people create livelihoods. So we have in the country something called mudra, which means we actually help entrepreneurs or people become entrepreneurs. And it's again about 100 million people who have been given micro loans to become entrepreneurs and of which one third are those who had never got any credit in the past at all and were never bankable at all. So I think you create different kind of social nets on the basis of what your country's requirements are. And and and that's what India has been doing. And it sounds like just pulling them into the economy is among the absolute and making them participate in the economic growth more and more. We have some great questions coming in here, which we'll get to in a moment. It's weft.ch forward slash ask for anyone who is following. Devon, I want to pull you in. So eBay among the things that eBay is is looking at in terms of this is small businesses and how in sort of regions, local areas, cities to have an impact on the economic opportunities there. Can you can you explain? Yeah, I mean, first of all, it matters to me what role technology plays in society. It matters to me, particularly what my what role my company plays. I think we've spent a lot of time focusing on the negatives and how to constrain globalization. But I loved what I just heard because the other side of it is how do we give fair and full access so that people participate in the economy and take advantage of globalization. What we see our business is a platform. We don't sell things. We enable other people to sell things. And most people that sell on eBay are 20 million small businesses. They're entrepreneurs, everyone from a one person single mom that works out of her living room to the entire spectrum and in every country of the world. What I see is that when people have access fairly to technology, they thrive and they grow. And we're very focused on that. And we've done things like I just came from here from Akron, Ohio, which is definitely not India, I understand that and it's not some of the places you're talking about. But Akron is a disadvantaged town that's lost its manufacturing base. And now in some of the old plants that were steel and rubber manufacturing plants, you see entrepreneurs that came out of nowhere that for the first time have access to online tools and they're growing and they're revitalizing Akron's economy. And we've partnered with the local government to bring them into eBay, train them, micro loans, the entire spectrum. And there's so much optimism about revitalization of this old Rust Belt town. And it is not rich people and it's not a constant, these are entrepreneurs at the most basic level who are supporting their families with small business. What I would like to see rather than universal basic income is how do we train people and how do we use the money that would be spent giving people money to give them access? That means broadband, that means loans and capital, that means training, that means proficiency for the digital economy and that does not mean a billion people who are software engineers. That just means proficiency with the economy that's coming. I think that's a massive opportunity. And if we don't accelerate that and lean into it, we're missing a huge global opportunity to lift people out of poverty. So we're going to shift to this question of training and what is reskilling and what does it look like when that's successful. Rich, I just want to, before we get there, I want to pull you in just for a second. So part of the issue is job dislocation from specific areas like Akron probably as manufacturing has moved out. What do you think the response is? I grew up in Pittsburgh so I can totally relate to the Akron story. So what is the responsibility of a business, do you think, in the face of this dislocation to float their workers to the next island of employment, basically? So can I step back to that? I think the WEF has been probably more than any other institution talking about multi-stakeholder engagement for decades. I really think we're at a moment in time where there's a convergence of interest that says multi-stakeholder is so important right now in particular, partly due to technology, partly due to income inequality, partly due to populism and societal stress, and partly due, frankly, to the clear observations that it's in business's best interest for their own value creation to take a broader approach. And I think it has four elements. One is the ability to clearly and sharply articulate purpose. People know why you're there, what you're intending to achieve. It attracts great talent to your company. It helps you sharpen what you try to do in the world. The second is around total societal impact and understanding broadly how you can take what you're good at and take it just like you're doing in Akron, Deb, and you know that you take what your natural skills are and you apply it in ways that allow your core strategies to reflect a societal impact, not just a near-term impact. The third is around human capital development, so recognizing that the rate of change in the world forces companies to recognize if they don't invest in developing the right human capital strategies. They will be left behind with what's happening in technology. And the fourth is around diversity and inclusion and making sure that what they do can draw on everyone and benefit everyone, whether that's related to women or ethnic minorities or people of different nationalities, that that's just good business. It's good business. I think purpose, total societal impact, human capital investment, diversity and inclusion are the agenda. And if you take that agenda and that is a win-win, that is society oriented, that is business oriented in a rapidly changing world. Sorry, I was trying to link the three things that you said about empowering local communities, about training people and about the responsibility of business. No, and the responsibility of the business. And I want to just give an example of what we do now as an organization. Earlier I spoke about the country. But as an organization, we are a bank, we are a financial services institution. So we in any case said that, you know, to get people more included, economically, we should also focus on rural areas and not just on urban areas. So we actually picked 500 villages in India and we said we would digitize the entire payment systems and open their bank accounts and bring them into the part of the financial system. But that was not it. We said that if we have to increase the sustainable livelihood of those local communities, we combine this financial digitization with two more things. One is providing skill training and the second is providing them market and credit access. So in terms of training, what we do is we actually take the local training to these rural areas. We train the people into skills which are locally relevant to their community. And then we through use of technology provide them the market linkages. Either it's to suppliers and so on and so forth. And we provide them the microloans because then again we are a bank. And through that what we have done is we have trained almost 200,000 youth who otherwise could not afford to either get educated or start a business of their own. We've trained about 200,000 of such youth, provided them a part of the credit. 95% of them are either now in an employment or earning as becoming an entrepreneur and you'd be surprised to know because we talk of a country like India and we talk of rural areas, more than 50% of them are young women and girls from the rural areas. And these are these girls who, talking about textiles and so on, I met a lady in one of the smaller villages and interiors of Rajasthan where she was not even earning $50 a month. But through this training, through this market access, through this microloans, she's now earning about $500 a month. And that's not it. She tells me in her local language is that you come back next year and I would have employed five more young girls who would be earning at least half as much as what I am. And this is my commitment to you and you come back and see my prosperity next year. And so you've trained over 200,000 people in local areas and you're not training people to work for the bank. You're just training them to do that. This is absolutely apart from those who work on it. These are skills like vermicomposting. These are skills like brick making. These are skills like air conditional repairs. These are skills like mobile phone repairs, stitching, embroidery, and some of them also want to get into sales, office administration, and so on. So what we have done is we've tied up with about 20 companies on the side who give us the content for providing the trading. We've tied up with about a thousand of our clients on the other hand who either give them market access or employment to these people. So these are not bankers. These are not people which we are doing for us to absorb them in the bank. These are basically local communities who cannot afford to get further educated, who cannot afford to just on their own, you know, they're not bankable. We provide them the skills and then we make them bankable. In fact, we have an organisation called SEWA, the self-employed women's organisation in India, with almost two million members and they build cooperatives and they use platforms to access markets. They've built their own childcare centres. It might shock people to know childcare is not a formal sector, not recognised as a contribution to the economy in India and we want to fix that. But I wanted to actually go to the point you made. This model of globalisation has simply said, well, these are the consequences. We'll provide structural adjustment, but frankly, if your community's devastated bad luck, that's just the price of a globalised economy. This morning I actually was on an interview panel with the CEO of NL, an energy company from Italy. Now, with climate transition, we fought for a just transition to be put in the Paris Agreement. We now want to see just transition on the basis of both technological change as well as energy shifts and industrial processing shifts. But what does NL do? They're reducing their... They have to reduce their carbon-fired power stations. They've got to close something like 23x2025. That's a massive challenge, I can tell you, just having held the hand of a community in Australia that took five years and slightly rocky outcome, but now a just transition. But in fact, they want... They're growing, of course, their renewable energy sector at the same time. But are they walking away from those sites? No. They're taking responsibility where they're not suitable for renewable energy to look to industrial renewal. And so, whether it's the Indian model or whether it's anywhere, if we don't take responsibility collectively for reinventing our communities, then what are we actually saying? That we're just going to accept the consequences of a profit take that creates the 1% and everybody else be damned? That's not the model we need. And if that's... If we don't affect just transitions, and that means community renewal as well as workers' rights, their pensions, their skillset, income, et cetera. But UBI can be part of this, but we say it's an idea you should explore carefully. You know, in India, there have been, in fact, examples where there's nothing else. There's no social safety net, and it's created a fundamental market and security. But if you go to most countries and you have to make a choice between less than 6% on a universal social protection floor, health, education, child protection, maternity protection, unemployment benefits, pensions, or you give people a tiny sum of money because you're not generating the jobs and the sustainability upfront, then what's the choice? I'd rather see people with security when they need it rather than everybody having a tiny bit of income that may be very, very useful in circumstances where there's nothing. But it's not the floor that we've committed to through the Sustainable Development Goals, as the minister said. I want to go, we're going to go to questions in just a few minutes. Before we do that, I want to ask a question about what are the skills needed for the future? And maybe Manush, you can start us here in terms of dislocation, inequality. What are the skills that require them? Maybe Devin, you can come in next. I mean, I think it's no accident that the people who voted for populist parties around the world and voted against globalization are people with, by and large, the common characteristic is low levels of education. And it's not because they were stupid, in fact, it's because they're very smart because they figured out that this system, given that they have low levels of education, will not be in their interests. And so increasing education has to be part of making any type of new globalization work differently. So that's just a starting point. I think in terms of the skills you need, I mean, we know that automation is going to mean that anything that is routine and repetitive will be automated. So the skills of the future are things that are not routine and not repetitive. Sometimes people call them the soft skills. They're creative skills. And I think, since I run a university, of course, teaching people how to learn is the most important skill we can give them, giving them the research skills, the ability to find information and synthesizes and make something of it. And the other thing I'd say about the skills of the future is we know people's work lives are gonna be much longer. You know, our children will probably work until they're in their 80s at least, if not longer. And they will need to retool multiple times. And so that ability to learn will need to be able to be deployed several times because they'll change. I mean, I heard a fantastic statistic the other day. The average CV on LinkedIn has more than 20 jobs in it today in five to six different career streams. That's today. So already people, I admittedly you could say, people who are on LinkedIn are more likely to want to change jobs. They're the overachievers, who? But it's indicative, and I think it's a forward indicator of the degree to which people will change jobs in future. And we need to give them tools, both the ability to learn, but also educational institutions need to give them the tools to enable them to retool multiple times over their careers. Devin, skills of the future? I mean, I'm gonna say what you might expect me to say, but I think what's misunderstood is that technology is not a sector. Technology and digital enablement is the economy. There is nothing that won't end up being touched deeply by what's happening in technology revolution. And because of that, I do think that the education system is woefully unprepared for the economy that I would say is coming, but it's already here. That does not mean that what the world needs is two billion software engineers. What it does mean is that even in creative skills and arts, digital proficiency is increasingly the difference between people that are thriving and succeeding and those that are being left behind. So the fact that in the United States we're having an immigration debate, and the other side of that is not an education debate because it ought to be two sides of the same coin puzzles me. STEM skills, there needs to be a serious reevaluation of STEM training for students all around the world. Can I say a word about the skills of the future? For many of us in countries like Colombia, the skills of the future is not so much about choosing what to study or suggesting American recommendations. It's about the ability of people to go to college, to enroll in tertiary education, technical, technological university education. Seven years ago, Colombia only enrolled 36 out of 100 of the high school graduates. Now it's 53, so it's a remarkable transformation but still too low. We need to raise it to 70, 75. And that's the way to prepare for the future and for globalization. And maybe for other countries it's about what majors, what careers, what type of training, but for many of us it's about the ability of creating more slots in universities. In fact, both of these, you could join up their kind of answers because on the one hand, we agree, people talk about the digital economy, it's not, it's the fact that digitalization like the tram tracks of the future, they're already here, they're vastly accelerating, but that means while every area of our economy, at least for those that are connected, remember 50% of the world's people are not yet connected to the internet, so that's a whole other level of challenge. But when you look at the fact that if you take the engineers, I interviewed two Indian software engineers, just a couple of months ago, and you remember the first way of outsourcing in this traditional model of globalization, everyone thinks has benefited everyone, well in India of course you have 93% of the jobs are informal, they're informal. And these software engineers were supposed to be the big winners, but in fact what's happened is their jobs have become informal freelancers because no longer are they being employed by companies who are simply using the next technology application, training people on that and when it's done, they're done. So it is about saying how do we employ graduates, how do you create jobs, but how do we also take responsibility for formalizing work and what's the regulatory framework so that we're not just going to see the worst of globalization sins today transformed and multiplied as digitalization changes the way we do business, not necessarily what we do business about because the industries of today will be there tomorrow, the tasks might be different, but indeed while skilling is a luxury, I think we can solve. Unless we invest in jobs, you're going to have more of the same. So we're going to go to questions in the audience in just a minute. I want to take two of the questions first that we have that we've received online. The first one is from someone named Samir, what can we do to attract more R and D activities from multinationals in developing economies and to embed them into their national innovation systems better? So this is multinational R and D investments in developing economies. Probably sort of question you think about, Minister Cardenas, do you have a view on how that works? Sure. Well, you have to grade incentives. I think multinationals are not going to do that without having an economic logic and rational for it. One option naturally is tax incentives. Ensure that you provide a context in which companies invest in R and D and those investments are deductible. That's one aspect. Another aspect is to ensure that there is a dialogue with the corporations that when they want to operate, they want to have access to a market, which is a large market. Of course, India is the best example. Colombia is a 50 million population country. Access to that market, but also make sure that you invest. It's not sale products to that market. You invest also in expanding the technological frontier. So it's dialogue, it's incentives, and it's also on the part of the corporation's commitment that they want to do it, that they feel it's important, that they feel it's necessary. Another question, this one is from Anonymous. Hello, everyone. My question is how does gender relate to globalization? Chanda, maybe I'll ask you as a female CEO, do you have any view on gender and the sort of dynamic with globalization? Yeah, so just first on the R and D I just add that I think also what you need to create is the talent because the MNCs would take their R and D to where they'd find the right talent apart from the other things that were spoken. But I think that is what we've seen in India, that the companies are creating their centers of various kinds. Some are very simple back office centers. Some are very high tech R and D centers because they find the right talent there. And then the R and D is done partly for the Indian market, but partly for the rest of the world. On the concept of gender, first of all, when we talk of diversity in workforce, I think we only tend to think of gender diversity. I think as we look at globalization, we should talk of all forms of diversity. It's diversity across different aspiration levels. It's diversity across different age groups. It's diversity across different backgrounds and so on. But what I have seen, at least if I talk about India, is that I think India has, again, done much better than the many parts of the world when it comes to gender diversity. I think basically the recognition has to be more economic rather than a nice-to-have attitude. When you recognize that you cannot grow and prosper if you ignore half of your talent force. How can a company grow? How can a country grow? If you keep aside half of your talent force, I think that's the recognition that actually encourages policies that then include more and more women in the workforce. And India has gone through that. There was a time when women hardly used to even apply to certain jobs because they used to feel that they're not welcome in that. From there today, their companies were actually encouraging women to be part of the workforce. But not just that. I think there is no country in the world that I see where the fighter pilots, there are a lot of women, where the most athletes in the most difficult, so-called men-related fields, the Olympic medals are won by girls and women, where even the warships now, a huge amount of R&D is being done by women. Where in NASA, there are teams which are only women. And then finally, as a banker, I would say I've not seen a country in the world where 40% of the banking is headed by women. Okay, that's a dare or a goal you're putting out there. We're gonna go to questions in the audience. And do you just have a quick thing to do? Just two very quick comments. One is, building on the minister and Chanda's comments, yes, you've got to have a welcoming market and you've got to have talent, but then any large company would be foolish to think they can concentrate its innovation in R&D in one country. In fact, we're arguing just the opposite, that if you want to really take advantage of the huge base of global consumers, you need to diversify where you do innovation and leverage connectivity. And the second, just because Chanda said it so well, we just published a report yesterday about how diversity drives innovation. It was a multi-country study and she's exactly right that yes, gender is really important, but there's actually multiple forms of diversity that drive innovation. There were six that were all statistically significant and the three most important ones were background, industry backgrounds, people of different industries, nationality background and gender. And that when you put those three together, you get a meaningful impact in innovation. Okay, we're gonna go to the room now. If you raise your hand, we'll get a microphone to you and I'll ask you when you, if you stand up and say your name and your organization. Can you pass the microphone out to somebody? Okay, right here, thank you. Good evening, I'm a global shaper. My name is Laysa Narsentseva from Kazan Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. My question is about educational system and what should modern companies do? Should they wait before until government reforms educational system or should they provide in-house training for skills which they need? Thank you so much. So does anybody want to... I mean, that's a no-brainer. You know, I remember a time in the Australian economy where we had to reshape, reskill the economy, had to reshape the economy. We'd opened the markets, floated the dollar, you know, all the usual kind of piece and there was in fact an absolute commitment by businesses to actually invest in structured training somewhere around the late 90s that just crashed. And now I hear CEOs talking about, oh, we need lifelong learning to deal with the future. And I think, where have you been for the last 25 years? Because this has been a concept. And if companies don't invest in their own training, then they're not going to keep their actual employees, but they're not going to skill themselves up. And that goes to the question of gender. If women aren't in the work force in the same numbers for starters, if by any indication on any indicator that progress for women has actually stagnated in this global economy, and we're not conscious of investing in both their education and other areas of care so they can participate, then we're not serious about growth, productivity, inclusion, whatever kind of indicator you want to put on it. So companies can't simply stand back and blame someone else. Of course, we should all work together. I'm a teacher by trade. We must have quality education everywhere. But if companies simply say, well, it's somebody else's fault, I'm sorry, but they're not equipped to be part of a sustainable future. Okay, we have some questions over here. We'll take these two, thank you. Anil Gupta, University of Maryland. A question probably to Ms. Kocher. So there are two big trends and wanted to see how those intersect. So one, of course, is rising inequality. And India is certainly a part of that story. But the second, of course, is the massive spread in broadband, mobile broadband. Would the hypothesis be valid that the digital connectivity that you talked about is actually potentially a rest or slow down or reverse growing inequality? Yeah, I think clearly connectivity actually, in fact, brings more and more people participate in the economic growth. And I really believe that the world especially India, I think it's a DSM world, digital, social and mobile. And every business has to kind of reorient their own business model so that they become seamlessly a part of the DSM life of the individuals. And the way connectivity has spread in India, I think it's not just democratization of technology, but it's democratization of opportunities. The market linkages that I spoke about, we are able to provide market linkages to many of those people who we train only through use of technology. There are now today women in the villages who are through WhatsApp, sending their embroidery designs to those factories, which are in the same district, but still many kilometers away. There is therefore money that comes directly into the bank accounts through use of technology. We have seen that in some of the villages that where we have worked, earlier somebody would go and sell milk and just be reliant on the cooperative or the head of the cooperative to say what was the weight of the milk, how much money they should get and then wait for 20 days to get the money and so on. Just put technology, we put milk measurement systems there. Now the villagers come and pour the milk, the machine checks the fat content, checks the weight and calculates what is the amount to be paid to the villager and that money is directly paid from the cooperative bank account to the from the cooperatives account to the villagers account. So this is what technology does. I think technology is democratizing prosperity and bringing more and more people into economic inclusion. I'm gonna take a question from here and then we'll come back to the room because it's related. This question is, besides micro loans, what specific steps have you seen governments in emerging countries do that really allowed them to take advantage of globalization? Are there any other specific measures that any of you can think of? There are a number of programs that of course are targeted towards improving the opportunities in the context of globalization. I would just begin by saying that in countries with limited resources and especially fiscal resources, targeting programs is much better because then you can achieve more and you can reduce the specific issues for the specific groups of the population. Some of the policies that are more horizontal have to do financial inclusion. It's not just micro lending. It's also access to technologies to make payments, digital payments, building a history of payments which enables that individual to get a loan when you're in the informal sector. Some of the reforms also have to do with the ability to provide a subsidy so people can progress in the education ladder. That's also very important. But in addition, for example, in the agricultural sector, you need to make sure that people have access to technologies. You need to make sure that they have access to knowledge and sometimes they have access to land, ownership of land. So all those programs together are really what enables people to take advantage of globalization. We're going to take one more question here, actually, right? Sorry, the gentleman right there, thank you. Lasecha Khanya from South African Reserve Bank. Two quick things. I got worried the way the discussion is going. We're talking about the benefits of economic globalization and we have reduced it almost purely to individuals. But to be controversial, how are you going to deal with the challenges of economic globalization without a global government? How does the global governance system respond to the issue of globalization? Check how the major economies have responded to globalization. Many countries have embraced it. Check the response to blocking investments to emerging market economies. That says that you are a company of this country, you shall not invest, you shall not export the jobs there. And therein lies the problem. We can't protect jobs because the nature of jobs are changing, but we can protect people. And so the focus should be, how do we protect people? But the political narrative is to try and protect jobs. That's the first one. The second one, and I'll close it because Ms. Khanya sort of touched on this and it was raised by Ms. Barrow. The talk of, oh, these jobs have been informalized. Oh, these software engineers, they are sitting there, they are not employed by any company. Has anybody bothered to ask them what they actually would like to do? And here we are as elites, trying to tell the poor what jobs to accept, how to shape their lives instead of asking the poor. In this changing environment, what sort of protection would you be looking for in order for you to take advantage of prosperity? Great, thank you. Here, here. You know, if you talk to working people, they know their industries, they know their communities, they've got big ideas, they've got aspirations for themselves and their children, I couldn't agree more. And I was sitting here thinking about that last question about what more should governments do? We were part of a conversation about global commons, not too long ago. And if the world is so focused on, you know, hopefully it's going to be a reformed globalization because we couldn't accept more of the same. But nevertheless, let's assume that we'll fix the climate environment, we'll fix, you know, the regulatory environment for technology that people will be included. You can't do that if we're not thinking about how collectively we are providing opportunities. And one of the things that has always struck me is that if one in six oxygen molecules comes from the Amazon, for example, yet we are not prepared to pay collectively, you know, an income to the indigenous people of the Amazon who actually, you know, cater, care for the forests themselves. And you know, I hear scientists go on and on and I agree with them about the raping of biodiversity. But again, those same indigenous people do have more knowledge and can do more to care for retaining biodiversity. But we simply think in terms of big business, you know, dominant market share, I'd ask you, how is Amazon going to fix that for us? You know, what's monopoly power that's not even earning money in the marketplace right now actually going to do to actually listen to the people, to have communities reinvent themselves with support in an interconnected world that cares about each other. So we're just about out of time. I'm going to ask you to the panelists, just in basically a sentence to summarize what they think the key thing is for globalization to save it from itself. Sharon, I'm going to start with you. You were the most critical in the beginning about this. Do you believe that globalization can be saved from itself? Can, yeah. If we change the rules. So you've been convinced in the last six years. I said the current model of globalization has failed working people. I didn't say globalization was a bad thing. You know, I'm an international union leader. I want to see quality jobs everywhere. I want to see people have the opportunities and the social protection I know we can afford. But we must have a new social contract. We must change the rules. Great. Rich, what's the key thing? I think the most important thing is that what we think of as globalization, the paradigm that's in our head is changing out from under us very quickly. Because it's not that there won't be globalization. We'll connect in different ways. We'll connect around services. We'll connect around digital. And the classic focus on production as the definition of globalization is going to shift. And therefore, the biggest challenge is how do we all, and I mean that both government and business, prepare the current generation and the next generation of workers to do this. And how do governments and businesses adopt a multi-stakeholder mindset around it? Great. We're just about out of time. Just really quickly, Manus. Education will make globalization better because more people will benefit from it. Great. Devin. Education and access. Great. Mr. Cardinas. I think we've been focusing on the national responses and what we have to do at the local level. But we also have to think about coordination, cooperation. This is not something that's going to work for one country, thinking that all the benefits are going to come to that country. We have to create an environment for more cooperation. Shonda. I think people are connected in any case. So the world is connected. So the issue is, how does the entire world work in coordination? And also, in every country, it's not just about the government. How do government and private sector work together? And in my view, there are three E's, therefore, education, employment, and entrepreneurship. If we enable that. So we're going to leave it there. We're out of time. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Thank you, folks, for watching our march. Thank you. Thank you.