 Okay, well it's truly a privilege to be introduced and to be part of a panel with such distinguished colleagues. I'm going to present some joint work with Kunal Sen and Sam Volpe who's joining online. This is entitled, Waiting on a Miracle, Growth Episodes and the Dynamics of State Fragility. While I won't be speaking about democratization per se, I'll be focusing on fragile states which of course is one of the themes of our conference together. As you've already heard our speakers note this morning, state fragility is a development problem with one in five people and the majority of the world's extreme poor living in fragile contexts. If we look, if we shift to look at economic growth in fragile states, we can see a couple things. This is looking at the most recent year of economic growth before the coronavirus pandemic and dividing the world into four quartiles from the most to the least fragile. You can see perhaps not surprisingly consistent with this narrative of poverty, fragility traps that the world's most fragile countries are growing the slowest. However, that belies substantial differences across countries with both the slowest growing country or the most rapidly contracting economy in the world which in that year was Venezuela as well as the fastest growing country in the world which in that year was Libya being among the most fragile. And while much policy in fragile states as we learned this morning from our panelists is around thinking about peace building and conflict resolution and perhaps humanitarian assistance as all of you who've worked in fragile contexts know development actors will inevitably turn to a country's growth and development agenda. And our purpose here is trying to understand those dynamics around economic growth in fragile states. This builds on prior work that Kunal and I have joined with Lance Pritchett. The book on the left deals in development is based on the premise that the countries we care about do not experience the steady, you know, 2% growth rates of the high income OECD economies. But rather in these countries what matters is growth episodes where a growth episode is that period of time maybe five, 10, 15 years at which a country grows more or less at the same rate of economic progress. And if you look at countries over time they tend to go from periods of perhaps growing at 2% on average per year to 7% and it's our focus to use that as the unit of analysis. And what matters for countries we found in that research to avoid bad economic outcomes is to avoid negative growth. It almost seems tautological but in fact the rich countries generally don't have those long periods of negative performance. Now in that book as well as in subsequent work that Kunal and I did in this guide book for deals in development in fragile and conflict affected states which is through wider we find and argue that growth episodes can favor or disfavor different political and economic actors. Some growth episodes might lead to broad inclusive reforms, broader rights in economic and structural transformation while other episodes preserve narrow clientelistic rent seeking networks. And if we think about these growth episodes in fragile contexts it has implications for the dynamics of state fragility in these periods of high, medium or negative growth which can lead to different investments in state capacity, the prevalence or lack thereof of violent non-state actors and state legitimacy. The research question of this brief presentation is when can or do nations grow out of fragility as an economic growth and are more rapid growth episodes associated with larger improvements in state fragility and building on the hypotheses that emerge from the prior more historical case based work is their good growth and bad growth where state fragility only improves under the right conditions. To do this we needed to first assemble some new data. Many of you in the room might be familiar with indices of state fragility but those have two weaknesses for us. One is that they're relatively recent and to look at growth episodes you have to go back a long time to run the statistical tests to identify changes in growth rates. And the other is that most indices of state fragility include economic growth or the lack thereof collapse as part of the definition of state fragility. So what we needed to do was define a new index of fragility that went back farther and didn't include economic growth and we did this with VDEM data with five components of state fragility building on the recent International Growth Center report on escaping the fragility trap. And those are the existence of non-state violence, the government lacking legitimacy, the state having weak capacity for essential functions like delivering health education and infrastructure, an unattractive private sector environment and deep societal divisions. And then having built this index we looked at countries, we looked at each year of the data and identified the most fragile states in every year of the data and then from that picked the countries that made that list of most fragile countries the most number of times which gave us a universe of 35 countries. And then we looked at their whole growth series from 1960 if it was available and run what's called a bi-parent test which statistically identifies growth breaks which lets us find out when the average rate of growth changes from one growth episode to the next. And then we categorized that into these four categories at the bottom. From crisis growth which is really economic contraction of less than negative one percent per year per capita, stagnant growth which is around zero, stable growth between one and five percent and finally what we label miracle growth which is referencing the title greater than five percent per year. And to show you what the data look like here are a couple examples of two different countries. On the left we have Angola, the blue line is the log of GDP per capita and the red line is the fragility index where a higher number means it's more fragile. And as you can see here Angola these series tend to run in opposite directions from one another. When the economy grows state fragility decreases and vice versa. On the right we have a different case which is Nicaragua and here the blue line of GDP per capita tends to actually track the red line of state fragility. And I'll give you an example of a couple growth episodes here to just try to bring this to a bit of a bit of life. In Angola between 2002 and 2008 the country had recently emerged from civil war oil prices were rising and production increased so this led to large rates of economic growth and not surprisingly the level of fragility was reduced during that period. But if we look at the sub-components of fragility it was not universal. In fact there was decreasing legitimacy as well as private sector investment was becoming less attractive during that growth episode. Now contrast this with the episode on the right with Nicaragua from around 1978 to 1988. This coincided with the Sandinista revolution which overthrew the very narrow narrowly benefitting Samosa regime and then a civil war ensued with outside financing of that. Now besides the revolution the new government imposed a number of reforms that increased access of everyday people to the state and so even though we have increasing violence which would have increased the level of fragility the other indices actually fell indicating that there was reduced fragility over this period. Now in this chart we plot each country growth episode on the two dimensions of changes in economic performance and in fragility. And so above the horizontal line here are countries that were growing in per capita levels and below shrinking and then on the left countries that were decreasing in fragility and on the right countries that were increasing in fragility. And I've already told you about Angola here which during a period of rapid growth also experienced rises or rather a reduction in fragility which might not be too surprising. And on the bottom right we also see another unsurprising quadrant which is countries that were shrinking economically and also experiencing more fragility. You can't quite see it in the mix of data points but Iraq in the 1980s fits in that period where the oil price fell after the 79 oil embargo and Iraq was in a long conflict with Iran. Now on the bottom left we have the perhaps surprising outcome of countries that despite shrinking their economies were experiencing a reduction in fragility like Nicaragua. And then the top right also perhaps surprising. We see countries that are increasing in fragility despite the presence of rapid economic growth. And I've circled the data point from the Republic of Congo in the early 1980s where there was a coup that led to increased fragility but there was also rising oil revenues. And this builds on observations that we had in our prior work. Now this you will definitely not be able to get through while I talk but basically what we do is we divide all the data points in each of these quadrants and then look at the trends in the components, the subcomponents of state fragility. And let me just share with you a few observations from this data. One we see that fragility is decreasing more often than it's increasing in the sample. And that decreases in fragility tend to be during high growth episodes and vice versa. But then when we look at the subcomponents there's some differences. So state capacity tends to be on a broad secular path of improvement. And state capacity improves. So an improvement here by the way is decreasing on any of these variables because a higher score is more fragile. State capacity improves and it only regresses over here during our negative growth and fragility increasing episodes. We also note that non-state violence and government illegitimacy tend to follow fragility rather than growth. So periods of growth are not necessarily associated with improvements of this and they move along the broad trends in fragility. And finally private sector attractiveness and social fragmentation worsen more during high growth episodes than during low growth episodes of increasing fragility. Now those were just data points and we might worry that countries, the same countries always appear in the same quadrant or some other thing. And I'm not going to presume this is a causal identification here. But what this chart does is it shows the coefficients from regression results where we can control for country fixed effects as well as year fixed effects. So we're basically looking at within a country over time what is the effect of being in either miracle growth, stable growth or stagnant growth compared to that baseline of crisis growth. And as we noted earlier most fragile states do experience crisis growth. The red dot here is the coefficient on fragility and we can see here looking at stable growth and stagnant growth compared to crisis growth or collapse. There's very little average change in fragility but only when we get to miracle growth is there a reduction but it's not statistically significant. Now what jumps out is more significant is that when a country is experiencing miracle growth in other words greater than 5% per year both state capacity as well as social fragmentation improve relative to periods of crisis growth. And we don't see too much on stable growth or stagnant growth. The exception are these green dots up here which indicate that government legitimacy actually improves the most under crisis growth compared to any periods of positive growth perhaps indicating that this adage of never waste a good crisis is true for the restoration of government legitimacy. Now in this chart we divide the sample in a number of different ways and the idea is to look at different components of fragility recognizing like Tolstoy said about unhappy families that not all fragile states are alike. The left to look at weak state capacity and the red dot is the more fragile countries in other words the countries with weaker state capacity and then the green dot here is as countries that have better state capacity amongst the fragile group. And then this is just the coefficient on miracle growth because it turns out from our last chart is that's where the action is. And as we can see here both for weak state capacity and private sector unattractiveness it's actually the more fragile half of countries that experiences larger improvements in state fragility or better better better outcomes. And we term this the catch up effect. So it might be that just the mere presence of having rapid economic growth is associated with improvements if you're only fragile in those dimensions. But contrast this with the big green dot on the far right which indicates that amongst countries that are less socially fragmented in other words more socially cohesive. A period of miracle growth leads to a reduction in state fragility compared to countries there that are more socially fragmented having miracle growth leads to no change in fragility. And then just to conclude from this we can conclude a couple of things preliminarily one is that initiating a more rapid economic growth episode in fragile states is not guaranteed to bring about improvements in fragility. And we saw that miracle growth episodes affected different components of fragility differently. And finally not all fragile states are alike and that miracle growth or rapid growth interacts with differently fragile states in a different way. Thanks.