 Good morning. I'm Jeff Frieden and I'm reporting on the proceedings of the state-of-the-world economy and finance workshop yesterday under the able toodalige and chairmanship of Jean-Claude Trichet. We had a lively discussion. Some were reluctant to leave after the allotted three hours, covering a wide range of topics in international economic and especially financial affairs. We started by noting that there are very substantial risks in the international economic order today. The first, and perhaps the most striking and most worrisome, is continued stagnation in Europe where the crisis continues to affect both economic activity and financial stability. There is grave concern both within Europe and around the world about the near-term future of the European economy and about the long-term implications of economic difficulties in the European economic space. Second, broader concern and source of risk in international economic activity is that we see the continued potential for macroeconomic imbalances. They have not gone away. China just marked its largest single monthly current account surplus. The German surplus remains large. These macroeconomic imbalances are to some extent exacerbated by large-scale capital flows, which in certain circumstances can be destabilizing. Overall, there was a consensus that we have not really found a full range of appropriate tools to deal with the ways in which an integrated international financial system can both provide the full benefits that it offers to the world without incurring very serious risks, such as those we have observed in the last few years. It was also observed that bad behavior and unacceptably high levels of executive compensation in the financial system risk creating a backlash within the mass public, which would make even more difficult the task of stabilizing and making full use of the benefits of international financial integration. Those are some of the risks that we identified in the course of the workshop. However, we also noted that there has been serious progress on many fronts, especially with regard to the harmonization of financial regulatory standards and related issues. There has been some substantial success, both in agreeing upon and implementing Basel regulatory standards with respect to liquidity ratios and leverage. There have been similarly important achievements, such as those discussed around the recent G20 Brisbane summit, as reported by and influenced by and overseen by the Financial Stability Board, especially concerning efforts to stabilize and systematize the resolution of systemically important financial institutions. Also on a more positive note, at least one of us was waxed enthusiastic about the prospects of abonomics in Japan. We all recognize that there is further action needed in the international financial and economic space, particularly with respect to non-banks and the shadow financial institutions that have caused such great difficulty in the last few years. With respect to credit rating agencies whose role in international financial affairs still remains somewhat puzzling and on the harmonization of accounting standards. So I would say that overall the feeling of the panel, the workshop, was that the news is mixed. There have been some notable steps forward in cooperative measures among the major financial and economic centers, especially with respect to the harmonization of financial regulation. At the same time, the global macroeconomic situation remains quite troubled and quite troubling, with Europe being the most worrisome cause for concern. Good morning. My name is Marie Claire Aoun. I'm the director of the Center for Energy at E3 and I have the pleasure to report the workshop too, which was chaired by Professor Richard Cooper and which focused yesterday on the challenges related to energy, climate change and environment. The workshop was opened by a recorded speech from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabules, who called for a global action from all the actors to fight climate change and for the urgent need to adopt a global agreement on climate change in Paris in 2015. The dynamics of the global energy system are changing. Of course, China is today the main engine for global energy demand growth, but tomorrow India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America will take over. So today Asia is at the heart of the energy and environmental challenges. If Asia fails to address these challenges, it will become the world main concern on the long term, but it will be also the world's saviour if it succeeds. Asia could become the world main concern because the effects of climate change are devastating. It was shown yesterday that climate change has indeed a negative impact on food security and water availability and leads to increased infection diseases. Health risks are also increased with natural disasters and with human displacements. There are also a growing number of viruses and vectors all over the world with the main channel of propagation related to deforestation. Climate change is also expected to increase concentration of air pollutants and air pollution has been identified as one of the main key risk factors for health in China. So all these facts clearly emphasize the crucial need for adaptation and mitigation strategies. There were, however, some good news yesterday in the workshop. There is a clear shift today in the way energy companies are addressing the climate change issues. Companies are taking initiatives to reduce gas flaring to improve energy efficiency and the accessibility of all to energy. There was an initiative launched by Christophe de Marjorie last year, gathering major oil and gas companies and opening the door to a new kind of cooperation between national oil companies and international oil companies to work collaboratively and share best practices and technical solutions to address climate change and energy sustainability. So there are some changes in our energy system, but this transformation is not strong and fast enough to achieve these two degree targets. CO2 emissions are still rising today, so to achieve this target, we need to clear a strong signal from Paris in 2015. The recent agreement between the US and China did send a powerful message, but there's a need for a wider policy coordination and sharing and the broader dissemination of innovative technologies. So to overcome the energy and environmental challenges, a strong focus should be put on improving energy efficiency on expanding widely smart grids and renewable energy, on developing electric vehicles, but also on reducing subsidies to fossil fuels. The workshop raised also the role of natural gas, which is considered to be as the less pollutant fuel, fossil fuel, but is it the right answer on the long term? The participants considered yesterday, most of them, that natural gas should be seen as a bridge solution, as a baseload capacity to support the development of renewable energy until long-term solutions are widely deployed, such as carbon capture sequestration. It was also highlighted yesterday that the fight towards climate change should be addressed together with the growing global energy demand with the need to provide cheap and available energy. Countries, it was mentioned that countries such as China should be provided the opportunity to grow. In this context, the expectations from the COP 21 in Paris are high, but multilateral negotiations have proven to be a difficult exercise in the UN institutions and were often dominated by geopolitical and economic concerns. Some participants considered that the Paris conference could be a successful diplomacy, but there is a risk that it may not reflect a meaningful agreement. So participants considered that to be successful, the agreement in Paris should be related to sustainable development goals, that the debate on climate change should be shifted from quantitative targets to actions, such as the implementation of adequate financing tool. The participants called also yesterday for a joint global effort to implement carbon pricing mechanisms in order to reduce carbon emissions. So as a conclusion to be successful, the fight towards climate change should reflect local, regional and global alliances, including initiatives from the private sector and from the civil society and should be driven by a strong and sustainable political will. Thank you very much. Just to start, I'd like to explain why we decided to have that discussion on cooperation between Asia and Africa in the field of agriculture. We do believe, I mean, in the small group we were there in the workshop, we did believe that increasing the production in the farm sector in Africa is one of the main challenges the world is faced for the next coming years. And we do believe that with respect to agricultural development, Asian countries have made considerable headway in many fronts that are relevant to Africa, including agro-processing, drought and famine management, water harvesting and agricultural research technology transfer, the establishment of rural and agricultural credit mechanisms, the setting up of micro-credit and financing system, farm policies, successful economies in Asia have implemented policies and strategies that boost the development of the private sector and of the farm sector. And the first part of our workshop was dedicated to the introduction of different cooperation programs that exist between Asian countries and different African countries. We all have been told, we all know that Chinese cooperation is very important in different African countries, but we add by one of the Indian speakers that we add in our workshop a very comprehensive description of the different actions and programs implemented by different Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, this is not something very well known, but Vietnam is a very active country in the agricultural sector in Africa, such as India and of course China. Dr. Surash, one of the Indian speakers, gave us a very deep description of the historical context in which that cooperation took place and helped us to understand better what are the main challenges and problems this cooperation is faced with. Then in a second part of our workshop, we focused some concrete programs that are currently being implemented by Asian stakeholders in some African countries. And because of the experience and competencies of some of our speakers, we focused mainly on the financial sector. We had a very important contribution, but by Mr. Krishan Jindal is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Napskans. Napskans is the consultancy service, a really own subsidiary of NABAR. NABAR is the National Bank for Agricultural Development in India. With more than 7.440 million groups of farmers or rural inhabitants supported by the institution and a huge experience and deep experience of microcredit financial support to rural development in India. And Mr. Jindal introduced the different programs that Napskans, these specific subsidiary, has implemented in Africa in cooperation with various local development agencies. These programs can be classified in three different groups. Napskans is providing support to African farmers for promotion of microfinance by undertaking capacity building, assessments of local banks, providing initiative loan products, conducting studies on the weaknesses and strengths of the local rural financial institutions. As a second field of action, Napskans also arranges visits of delegates, African delegates in India so that they can discover and understand the best practices that exist in the Indian farm sector in terms of financial institutions and financial support to farmers. The third activity of Napskans is a new project in some African countries, specifically in Malawi, the creation of an institute for agricultural development in that country with the support of the government of India. So from that example of Napskans, we discussed with the help of some other speakers, specifically Mr. Maxim is from Morocco. He has a wide experience of rural development in African countries. We discussed the way this financial support could be improved. Our last part, our last period in that workshop was dedicated to, I would say, I would call it a prospective approach. What could be done to improve the cooperation between Asian and African stakeholders in the field of agriculture and rural development? And we are very lucky because we had two speakers that gave us a very original approach of two different questions, two different issues. We focused our discussion on one first issue, which is the scientific cooperation between Asian and African countries in the field of plant biology and agronomy, plant quality improvement, I would say. And the second, the second topic that we decided to focus on was the question of farm policy. We are with us, Philippe Chalmain is French, is well known in French as one of the most important experts in world commodity markets. And we had a deep discussion on the question of farm policy. What could Asian countries do to help African countries implementing new farm policies? I would like to give you some details about those two very important issues because it could be, it could be also, I would say, a proposal for upcoming discussions in the future of world policy conferences. We had Professor Haudwing from the University of Arizona with us. Professor Haudwing is a geneticist, probably one of the most important experts in rice production in the world today. And he is presently appointed by the AXA Foundation, the AXA Endowed Chair of Genome Biology and Evolutionary Genomics at the International Rice Institute, Research Institute in Los Banos, the Philippines. This institute has played, as you probably know, a significant role in over 30 plant and animal genome sequencing projects, which include both Asian and African rice, maize, barley, soybean, oil, biome, and tomato. And Haudwing's research interest nowadays is the question of the use of genome biology to discover and implement sustainable solutions to help solve world anger and to feed the planet. His current focus is to understand the genome biology of the wild relatives of rice, which possesses many important biotic and stress traits that have been lost in present day cultivars as consequence of domestication. Haud has told us about a very important program, which is the International Orisa Map Alignment Project, development of a genius wide comparative genomic platform to help solve the 9 billion people question. As you know, rice is one of the most important food crops in the world and provides more than 20 percent total calories to half of the world population. And as the population increases more than 2 billion by year 2050, we must find solutions to grow enough food to feed the world in a more sustainable and environmentally sound manner. So this program is an international cooperation program that would help farm farmers in Africa and producers in Asia to cooperate in the sense to improve the quality of the different variety of rices used in the two continents. We had finally a very important discussion led by some comments done by Philippe Chalmain on farm policy. Philippe Chalmain noticed that in all Asian countries, the the growth of the local farm production has been closely linked to the fact that government implemented farm farm price policy supports a price guarantees, at least at the first period of the starting development in those countries. And he said that one of the most important contribution Asian countries could give to the the takeoff of agricultural production in different African countries could be to help African countries to implement such farm policies that would stimulate farmers to produce more and to invest in new technology. He noticed that in all Africa in all Asian countries, and it is true also in Brazil and from Brazil, the takeoff of the local agricultural production has been closely linked to some guarantees of prices provided by government. He also recognized that in African countries, the challenge is much more difficult to address that than it was the case in Europe when the common agricultural policy started by the 60s. As far as say in many African countries, most of the population is more and more urbanized and urban farmers are very low purchase power, so we have to define, we have to design a very sophisticated and a well-balanced policy that could provide farmers the stimulus to produce and that could keep the capacity of consumers to buy the food. And in that sense, an international cooperation in mention, for instance, the experience of the Bill Gates Foundation that is already provided support to such initiative in the sense of providing the financial resources local government needs if they want to build such support policy which are costly and which cannot depend only on local taxpayers and or local consumers. To sum up, I would say that with a few people, we were a small group, we were very creative and we had very interesting new proposal by the end of our discussion. Thank you. I think we can open the floor to any questions, comments, additions, subtractions from those either who were present at a workshop or who weren't. I can't see very well out there, but why don't we start over here? Is there a microphone somewhere? Thank you. Good morning. Thank you very much. That's our master from New CB Graduate School in Nagoya, Japan. I have a question to several questions, but a limited just one, to the workshop one. After hearing your report, I became a bit gloomy because the climate of economy may not be as promising as it should be. But what was the discussion on the relevance or competence of multinational organizations like IMF and World Bank in underpinning the recovery of the stagnating economy? Thank you. That's a good question. Most of our focus was on broader trends. We did talk about the role of international institutions, particularly the relative success in some of the initiatives such as harmonizing financial regulation, the role of the BIS, the Financial Stability Board under the eages of the BIS. And it was also pointed out, so I guess I would, there are two parts to it. The first is that in the financial realm, the fund has played less of a role and more of a role in the financial regulatory area has been played by the BIS and there was substantial discussion and some self-congratulation, I suppose, deservedly so, that there has been substantial progress in the harmonization of financial regulation under the eages of the BIS, the FSB, the three rounds of, four rounds of Basel Accords. With respect to other forms of international cooperation, it was pointed out, I think very correctly, that in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the crisis in 2008, there was quite a striking degree of successful coordination and cooperation among the major monetary authorities of the principal financial areas. Not so much an international institutional response, but a cooperative response that was successful at coordinating monetary policies in a way that, frankly, a lot of people would not have expected before September, October of 2008. So on the one hand, there has been progress under the, in the institutional realm in financial harmonization. On the other hand, there has been substantial and successful cooperation among major monetary authorities. Other observations, questions, comments, objections, anecdotes? My name is Yutaka from Japan and the agriculture issue, I am very interested in. You mentioned the, even Vietnamese are helping the African, the sort of agriculture products and increase of some, transfer some of their technology. What sort of background of Vietnamese to help the African? Because there's some sort of donation, sort of more benevolent activity or some strategic activity for Vietnam. I'm very surprised. I'm very happy to hear that Japan is also participating and China is so well known, but I'm first time to hear the Vietnamese are helping Africans. Well, Japan has a relatively very whole experience in Africa. As you probably know, the Japanese scientific institutions have been in charge of a very important program to improve the quality of rice produced in some African countries. Vietnam, nowadays I was mentioning in my, in my introduction yesterday, the example of Vietnam because Vietnam has launched a very interesting program to support to stimulate a corn production in some areas in Mozambique. Of course, in each of the examples that one could mention of cooperation with African countries, they always have some, I would say, strategic objectives that overpass the fact that you apparently helped local people. The well known example of Chinese cooperation has been very much discussed in the, in recent years. It has been said, for instance, that China was even buying lands or implementing land grabbing strategies in different African countries. One, we have to separate what is probably a sort of myth and what is the reality, but there's always a strategical vision. I would say that most of the Asian countries do understand, do see Africa as a continent that could provide the raw materials and food staples that the need, they will need to import in the coming future. And probably Vietnam is in such a situation. This is a case also for India. Our Indian speakers did mention that some cooperation exists between Indian companies and partners in Africa and that the final objective of that cooperation from the Indian point of view is to diversify the supplying of domestic markets. And probably it is the case also in the case of Vietnam. I do not see this as a very important problem as far as it is not implemented without taking into account the question of the supply of local market, the necessity to increase local production to supply local consumers. But we also mentioned in our discussions that before Africa to become a supplier of Asian countries, one of the most important challenge that has to be faced is the question of transports and infrastructures and communication. You cannot produce rice in Mali or in Kenya to export to Asian countries if you do not have a more efficient transport system. Over there on the slide. Thank you. Good morning. Carlos Perez-Verdia from Mexico. Muzon, I wonder if you could elaborate on what the group thought about the COP in Peru and specifically whether it is success in Peru is a prerequisite for success in Paris. And Mr. Frieden, if I may, the large flows you were talking about and you mentioned this yesterday at the workshop you see some of the trouble or the source of them coming from the large imbalances that still exist. However, five years or six years after the crisis, a huge crisis, we still see pretty much the imbalances being what they are. So I wonder if you see some kind of wedge between the real and the monetary economies that somehow we are failing to grasp and seeing how it's resolved. Thanks. Yes, thank you. We did indeed talk about international negotiations and more specifically about the COP20. But it is more seen as a sort of stepping stone towards the COP21 that the main factors should start to be discussed at the COP20 and the main decisions will be taken during the next year. But what was also interesting is that Mr. Vujérémique, who had a long experience in the UN institutions, talked and insisted about the fact that the international negotiations on the climate issues are sometimes very difficult because they are sometimes that there are more priority short-term concerns which are which are brought on the table such as geopolitical concerns or more issues related to the economic crisis. So the discussion was also around how to make the climate change issues be the priority topics because they are the priority on the long term. And clearly we then focused on the fact that if Paris is successful it will need to really move the discussions from the targets to the actions. So to work more on the financing issues, to work more on mitigation and adaptation strategies. And also there was a clear focus yesterday on the fact that we need to work on carbon pricing mechanisms and to improve the pricing of carbons globally and not only in some regions, not in order to avoid any problem in terms of competitiveness. On your point, we didn't discuss the issue in great detail. So all I can do is give you my own view. And I think my concern, and I think it was echoed by others, is that typically one would want capital flows in response to opportunities for productive activities. Capital flows to reinforce productive investment in various economies. And as we all know, that borrowing is not a bad thing if the borrowed funds are used to increase the productivity and productive capacity of the societies in question. And that happens to a very large extent. The problem that I think we see is given the size, the efficiency, the speed with which capital can move around the world, and the extraordinarily low real interest rates in the advanced industrial countries, the financial markets are exquisitely sensitive to short-term movements, even transient movements and rates of return. And so that, I think, leads to what we've observed, which is that we get massive sloshing of funds from one country to another without a real sense that this is going into productive activity. And in as much as that's the case, I think it does hold the danger of creating the kinds of boom, bust cycles in response to large-scale capital flows that we've seen over the last 10 years. I'm really, in some sense, repeating what I said yesterday, but I didn't hear anyone disagree with me, so I'll repeat it and say that it was the sense of the workshop. I don't know if Mr. Trichet agrees, but that, I think, is the kind of concern that we observe. And it's not something that's directly amenable, at least in the first instance, to financial regulatory harmonization because it's a response, it's a perfectly market-based response of financial markets to the search for yield and the existence of an extraordinary facility of moving money around the world in response to very small differences and rates of return. So I don't think we've really addressed the underlying problem, which requires both variations or innovations in national government policy and at the international level. As I said, that's my view, not necessarily. The rest of the workshop dissociates itself from my view. Other observations? There are no objections. I think we can move on to the next session, more or less on time. Thank you all. Thank you.