 My contribution to this panel will be focused on the role of foreign aid. This does not mean that I don't recognize all the other dimensions, but I'm going to try to focus on that. And it's no secret that there's a lot of skepticism about aid in the popular press and in the academic literature as well. And of course donors don't always make it easy for themselves. There's a lot of clunkiness in the aid business and lack of coordination and waste of time and efforts are not unknown features. But does this mean that there's no role for aid in the different types of crisis that we have been discussing at this conference? Well, this is actually something that we at Wider have been looking at over the last three years. We have been doing a program on research and communication in foreign aid and we have tried to bring together 300 researchers from 60 countries. We've analyzed aid under five themes, social sectors, growth and employment, governance and fragility, gender equality environment and climate change. There are about 240 working papers, five position papers, lots of academic publications, policy briefs and so on and it is all available from our website. Some of the key messages include that aid is indeed effective and has had a very respectable rate of return, including in places with weak institutional environments. We have substantiated that. In addition and for example aid to education health sectors has helped reduce maternal mortality in the female male gap in youth literacy. And aid has, as Sandrine was referring to, helped save lives in rough places. I have included here in this slide where we have tried to identify the 15 lessons that we believe can be drawn. I don't have time to go through them all. So aid has worked in a variety of crisis we've seen over the past 50 years. I shall not go into the complex econometric literature on the impact of aid that has over the past years has been strongly converging towards a much more clear and much more positive assessment of aid's role than now outdated earlier critics have put forward. Let me instead reflect on some of the concrete experiences that I personally had to illustrate the role of aid in Vietnam, in Mozambique and in the African Economic Research Consortium. I believe there are lessons there that we should try to think about. I have spent about 15 years in the former two countries and have worked with the ARC since the beginning in 1988. So case one, Vietnam. Vietnam is a country that is growing fast, is developing fast and it has for a quarter century had very high growth rates and Vietnam has the world record in poverty reduction in relative terms. For the last 15 years I've been involved in a number of research programs in Vietnam on development in the countryside, in urban areas, in the private sector and in the public sector. Progress cannot be denied. There is an OUP book coming out on this in the beginning of the next year. Vietnam is not yet a democratic society but it is an example of a country with a strong development state and it is a country that was for years the largest recipient of aid in the world. Aid is of course only a part of the story but it is an important part. Let's take three concrete examples. Few would dispute that physical infrastructure is an important part of the development process. In Vietnam, major shares of the aid, both the bilateral and the multilateral, has been used to develop infrastructure. It's worked. Example number two is quality control. Customers have supported development of internationally recognized quality control systems for prawns and fish. Without assurance of good quality these products cannot be exported. In 2014 Vietnam actually exported 7.9 billion dollars worth of prawns and fish that gave 100 euros per person in Vietnam an income and of course this had plenty multiplier effects. I could as some of you will know my wife works on seed quality control I could tell a similar story about good quality seeds but I will leave that for another occasion. Private sector development is a third example. The private sector has played a key role in Vietnam's development. Aid has contributed technical advice, training, credit, capital so it has affected the development of the enterprises both big and small and we have the data to substantiate that. So has aid to Vietnam made sense? Yes. It has helped with infrastructure, local institutions and developing the private sector and it has given growth and poverty reduction. So Mozambique, another world record holder in terms of aid for a period of time. I myself got to Mozambique the first time in 1980 and I saw very close by how this country was destroyed. It was as the American ambassador at a point in time said ruined as a direct consequence of the Cold War and apartheid and at the same time a million people including hundreds of thousands of children were slaughtered. During those years I worked very closely with Adriana Malian and Pietro Couture now respectively the economics and finance minister and minister for mineral resources and energy in the new Mozambican government and the new prime minister in Mozambique was my so-called counterpart. And what we have seen since then is something that we did not even dream of in 1986 when we were at rock bottom. It looked really hopeless. I could elaborate. But peace did emerge. Concerted efforts helped and aid did help and Mozambique recovered. Lots of success and lots of problems but when you come from rock bottom you have a long way not to walk but to climb. So what did aid actually do? Among the things that aid did there was a major humanitarian effort. Aid helped save lives millions of lives for years and it assisted in ameliorating the impact of natural catastrophes a variety of times and now we are seeing the cycle again in Southern Africa. It led to lead death and suffering that otherwise would have been the case. And yes aid did help in a transition from war to peace in the 1990s. Example number two investment in human capital as we sometime refer to it which of course is an investment that makes sense not just for its contribution to growth but in its own right. When I came to Mozambique there were 12, 13 agronomists. I knew all of them. That number has since been multiplied by 100. Now I don't know all of them. A third dimension is growth and poverty reduction. No Mozambique is very far from the income level of Vietnam but it is certainly at a very different level than in 1986 and we do now have a new government that is trying to do its best in spite of the present squabbles. In spite of all of the difficulties the average GDP per capita in Mozambique has increased from $155 in mid-1980s to now almost $1,200 and in Vietnam from $740 to about $6,000 these are purchasing poverty adjusted numbers just let me repeat them from $155 to almost $1,200 and from $740 to more than $6,000 in two of the countries that have been the most aid dependent in the world so when aid is designed and implemented sensibly it does make sense. ARC, the problems of Africa are many and some of them go deep but one of the central factors in the 80s and 90s is in economic policy. ARC was started in 1988 with the explicit purpose of trying to contribute to solve this problem. Today ARC is a well functioning regional institution without aid this would never have happened. This goes in for example the following three dimensions in relation to macroeconomic management. We now see a series of African central bank governors who are a product of ARC at least I for one keep reminding myself that Africa has managed the recent crisis better than Europe in a more sensible way in many ways. Ben-Hendul from Tanzania is one example. ARC has also been responsible for a unique educational program and ARC is the African Economist Network many times together with WIDA I know that it's very difficult to measure these kinds of impacts of networking and communicating and getting together and so on and so forth but I certainly believe that in the ARC case one can point to a very distinct impact. And these three cases and they are only three I mean I have a limited time but this corresponds exactly with what we find in carefully econometric studies namely that aid has contributed in a significant way to economic growth through support to physical investment human investment and institutional investment. Those of you who keep thinking that or maybe aid undermines institutions do take a look at a recent JDE paper that addresses this topic very directly. Let me stress that nobody, no sensible person would ever argue that everything is working in aid. I started by using the word clunky as a way of trying to capture that. But we do as I see it have a moral responsibility to work with poor people and poor nations and this is reinforced on my side by noting that there is nothing in the up-to-date literature to suggest that on aggregate aid doesn't have a sensible impact. Of course assuming that you have reasonable expectations as to what aid could do. But do let me try to put things in perspective. This slide's aid is the line at the bottom. Remittances is the blue line well above and FDI is the yellow line on top. So could we just throw out aid because it's so small and insignificant anyway? Well, don't forget that aid can do things that the other flows can't. These flows are not substitutes. They complement each other. Yes, if you look at this graph, aid is larger than it has been before, now 160 billion in constant prices. I think it was 2013, constant US dollars. But try to look at this one. Look to the very right side and you will see that the share of donor GDP that is allocated to aid is somewhere between 0.15 and 0.2%. We promised decades ago to allocate 0.7. And if you think about what this says about donor effort, we could kind of ponder, I guess. Needs are still very great and as this conference has demonstrated, needs are increasing in a number of cases. Aid is also decreasing as a share of recipient country national income. And this one I kind of like. I mean, I know it's a little bit populistic, but this one asks, how much in dollar per capita do recipient countries actually receive? So aid corresponds to about 25 dollars per person per year in aid recipient countries. I mentioned a number earlier, 100 euros. But that 25 dollars, while it is in some way small, it can still make a difference if we use it correctly. But we are right now doing things that I worry about. We are now shifting the allocation to being money spent in our own developed countries to take care of refugees and undermining the flow that actually go. So it's not 25 that ends up out there where it's really needed. I'm trying to illustrate that aid that has given growth and poverty reduction, Vietnam. Aid that has helped put a country back on its feet in spite of the problems, Mozambique. Aid that has contributed to a significant increase in quality of economic policy, AARC. And I would like to just insist that these are things that have been, things that I have lived. And I do believe that I am able to act both as an engaged person that dive in but also as an academic that is capable of standing back and trying to look at things in perspective. And I would like to stress that these messages are consistent with the RECOM program of 240 working papers and all of the academic literature that I'd like you to take a look at. And I for one cannot really see why aid could not in future help address the kinds of crisis we have discussed at this conference. Rather than throwing aid out and being skeptical and talking about it not working, might it not be one of the areas where we could try to mobilize international enthusiasm as part of the response. There's only one part. Aid does contribute in spite of its clonkiness. So I would like to argue that uninformed rhetoric and cynical criticism is not really helpful. Certainly not today. But I would like to insist aid is only one element of the international response to crisis and in many cases it's a minor element. Involvement of other policy areas such as foreign policy, security policy, trade policy, and economic policy may in many cases be primary call for, and I've listed a number of cases here, where aid is not going to be the solution. And only if these policy areas are productively addressed can the factors driving human suffering and the war economies be overcome. I thank you for your attention.