 I was told this would be a book launch. So I really didn't prepare slides until I saw the program a couple of nights ago. And there was no mention of book launch. And I thought, well, perhaps I should put a few slides together and then just to open the conversation. So I have a few slides. I can talk about the handbook. But first, Augustin, how much time should I take? 15? OK, good. So I have a few slides. I'll go quickly through them. I would like to echo what Justin said earlier, which is really to thank the many people who have helped on this really challenging project. Starting with Adam, who is here. Somewhere hiding in the back, as usual. Yeah, Adam Swallow is our editor at Oxford University Press, who has given us really the support that we needed to do this. And of course, Justin was not only my boss, but my mentor and my teacher. And I always go to him whenever I have questions about almost any difficult topic. And we always have the right answers. And of course, the amazing group of scholars who have contributed. I was surprised really at the level of interest. Of course, I could thank my employers, my former employer at the World Bank, my former bosses there for giving me the space to do this. And the institutions, including WIDER, which really has provided strong support. Not only intellectual support, but also financial support to organize an autos meeting. The African Development Bank put a lot of its own best researchers and some money to help us do this. So I thought I should just ask this question to start the conversation here today. Is Africa an economic enigma? And I would like to basically do three things. Tell you a little bit about the objectives and principles guiding the handbook. Say a couple of things about what I pick up from the handbooks. And on the last third point, what I would tell the prime minister if an African prime minister asked me what the heck is your handbook about. And then as I was writing this, I got Tony Addison, who is our host here, chief economist here in WIDER, putting on his Twitter account that we should avoid power plans. So I wasn't sure. Tony is a very subtle guy, but this was not a very subliminal message. It was basically to say, we don't want fancy power points. So I decided I would have a mix of strides, a couple of serious slide and things which are less serious. So first, what are the objectives and principles of the handbook? I will say the idea actually comes from a long home. That's probably didn't recognize a younger version of myself there. Professor Robert Solow, in my student days, I went to him. I used to do some work with him. And I went to him and I was puzzled that Nobel laureate of his caliber, whom I admire so much, would never touch Africa. And I will always ask him, why are you not working on Africa? To me, Africa is really the next intellectual challenge from here. All the best minds in research should be working in Africa. It should be a requirement. And he told me, well, Africa is too difficult for me. He said, I deal with economic growth. I know nothing about development. And he explained to me, of course, his perception of the difference. I basically can give some opinion and advice on how you generate growth in an environment where you already have everything, institutions, all the things that you need. But development is a complete, dark subject for me. And I will never touch it. And I was puzzled by the fact that Bob Solow, whom I really think is one of the greatest minds in economics, would say that Africa is too difficult for him. What was that supposed to do to a student? So when we launched this book, we decided, Justin and I, to basically ask the contributors to reflect on two ideas. How economics, the discipline of economics, has been applied or approached in the African context. And what the study of Africa has brought or could bring to economics. So we encourage every contributor to have these two questions in mind. And we really welcome a diversity of opinion. There are 140 contributors in this handbook, each of them writing long papers, 6, 8, 10,000 word papers. And we really didn't want people who simply agree with us. And we were very lucky because I am our editor and courageous. He said, just go ahead. We want good stuff. So it was also a challenge for us as editors to publish things that we disagree with. But we welcome that. And we, of course, have the books here. And I really hope even if you don't buy those, you can have your library's order one or two copies of each. OK. Here is just a small sample of some of the contributors. By the way, there are 18 of them attending this wider conference. I counted on the program, 18 out of nearly 140. These are just a few pictures. Of course, you recognize, I hope, all of them, or almost all of them, from Joe Stiglitz to Hajun Chang. Next to Hajun Chang is Julia Kaje, who's at former Harvard and now in Paris, who's doing this amazing work on the economics of media. Somebody looked at this and said to me, well, what's the criteria that you use to select these pictures? I said, it was almost random. They said, well, economists are not supposed to be good looking. Most of them look quite nice. That's strange. So you have Jeff Sachs, Roger Meiss, and Korshik Basu, Ashley Ben-Undulu, Ernest Aite. Hakim Ben-Amouda here was minister of finance in Tunisia until a few weeks ago. And we are very grateful to him because he was writing his chapter while dealing with one of the most difficult period in his country's history. Mustafa Nabli, central bank governor in Tunisia at the time and also an amazing range of people. Paul Collier, François Bourguignon, Andrew Berg from the IMF. So you have people with very different views. Maggie Macmillan, who's been doing this cutting-edge work on structural transformation. So that's basically what I wanted to say on the handbook before giving you a couple of highlights. What I've seen in there, of course, it's impossible to try to summarize a work like this. It's completely impossible. But I just pick one or two questions which kind of present me from the beginning. Is the economic age different in Africa? That has been an old debated issue. Even in economics, people tend to forget that. But there is a very important paper published in 1960 by William Jones called Economic Man in Africa. If you don't know that paper, you Google it. It pops up immediately. Economic Man in Africa by William Jones, 1960. And he was an economist, and he wrote about this question of the rationality of the African agent, at least how it's perceived. And he debunked a lot of the fantasies. And he was attacked by many anthropologists who kind of held the other view, that the economic agent is actually different in Africa. And they thought he was positive. How about I can see, 20 minutes left? OK, so I wanted to revisit this question. So there are a couple of chapters that go through that. Is economic thinking in Africa has to be different? Are economic policies in the African context have to be different? Whereas I would say in the first question, no, the economic agent rationality of people, or irrationality of people, depends on the incentive system in place. So I don't think there are people who are particularly rational or people who are particularly irrational. Amartya Sen, by the way, has this interesting paper in 1977 called Rational Fools, in which he also attacks the idea of the rational agent in a very elegant way. But I think that in the African context, policies and thinking should be different, simply because the countries are at different levels of development. And as Justin said, the endowment structure there is different. And we need to build policies and thinking, which depend on the endowment structure. The half book shows me that macro policies in Africa have generally been very good. This is an exception. This is an actual currency from Zimbabwe, which they scrapped two months ago. It's only $100 trillion, Zimbabwe dollar. It's less than $1 US dollar, but they scrapped it. But this is completely unusual, even in Zimbabwe today. So things have improved a lot in terms of the macro. I could show that on the fiscal side. Let me skip this. Institutions. Let me say one thing about this because it's a bit controversial. And it's also something that Augustine probably would disagree with me. And since I see Professor Samuel Wang here with the guru of Tanzanian economics, I cannot resist to stop here for 10 seconds. These are two legends in African history. Former President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Everybody consider almost a cent. Probably the least corrupt leader Africa has ever had, if you perhaps lead the side Mandela. And then on the right, former President Felix of Ft. Bonny of Cote d'Ivoire, who advertised publicly that he was corrupt. At the press conference, oh, yeah, I found a reference. At the press conference, he was asked, is it true you have Swiss bank accounts? He got angry. He said, is there a serious man on earth who doesn't have a Swiss bank account? OK. So he didn't hide away from that. But the difference between these two countries, Tanzania, 60s, 70s, Cote d'Ivoire, 60s, 70s, they all have distortions. But I think President Felix of Ft. Bonny, he only said that his country needed to target industries which would generate a program which were really consistent with the country's comparative advantage, whereas President Nyerere did not. And today, even though he was advertising the fact that his government was not both corruption, people still see him as one of the best leaders Africans have ever had. My point being then that our obsessive focus with fighting corruption and building institutions for countries which are 400, 500, 1,000 GDP per capita may be two emissions and misleading. But we can come back to that. Social change has taken place. This is from an important paper by Margaret Macmillan in the handbook. I'll just skip this. But she has sophisticated empirical analysis to show that structural change is actually occuring. Actually, the title of her paper is Africa's Quiet Revolution. But of course, it's still very slow. So let me jump at the last final slide, perhaps, which is what I would tell the prime minister. I had a former boss who always said to me once I took Robert Barrow, Robert Solow, to Albania, and we wrote a report to advise the Albanian government on how to create jobs. It was a thick report like this. And I brought it to my boss at the war bank, and she said, well, I'm not going to read this. That's 400 pages written by Robert Solow and Robert Barrow. I'm not my showcase. And she said, can you imagine if you were in an elevator with the prime minister and you had two minutes, what would you say to the prime minister of Albania? That's what I want to know about your report. So let me finish with the two minutes, 10 seconds of advice that I would give to the prime minister. First, what Justin said, avoid taking the wrong reference. For too long, we have thought that Burundi should set its goal to be like Switzerland, because they are all land of countries, it's small. And that they should build in Burundi right away the institutions that Switzerland has. But it's difficult. And in fact, it hasn't worked my level. Let's not focus too much on precondition. You need to have all these before you can grow. Now, the last bullet point on Justin's presentation earlier, you really need to look at what you have now and how you can make the most out of what you have now. And that will generate a dynamic. Don't start by listing all the precondition of the things that you need to have. Any country, even the poorest one, people with little education, has something that they can do now to generate and start dynamic growth. You need to find a niche. You need to get into global value chain. And you need to remember one thing, Rwanda's market is the war market, not your next war market. And this is very much the last slide. Nothing else just to provoke, again, some of the people in the room here. I know I always get in trouble when I say this. There's been a focus, for good reason, on regional integration in Africa. We need to remember that Africa currently is 44, 45 countries. If you take the number from the African Union. OK, well, but these 55 countries, 55 countries, if you can't, yeah, by the African Union. African Union have 54, but Morocco stepped out. So when you bring Morocco, you have 55. According to the African Union, I'm not making any political statement about Sahara with the Republic. I'm just taking the, I know Mina is from Morocco, so she's jumping at me right away. I'm taking the African Union official. I'm here from the Royal Atlantic. So, and these 55 countries represent less than 2% of global trade. And look at how big the continent is. If you feed the Western Europe there, you feed the US, you feed China. And in fact, in Madagascar, I checked, if you can fit into Madagascar, Japan, and the two Koreas. OK, so it's really a large place. And that's less than 2% of global trade. If you want to put all your money into infrastructure to develop regional integration, you're wrong. I think at this stage, you should look at the US, 21% of global GDP, Europe, 23%, China, 16%, 17%, and that way you should go. That's what the Rwandans and others are doing. So let me stop here and hope we have time for a small fight.