 It's a great pleasure for me to say that for this closing panel we have been lucky that Margaret McMillan, who is a professor at the Tufts University and a well-known contributor to quite a range of issues. Margaret has worked with Mark Millan, I'm sorry, I apologize. Now I think that most of us will have read the most recent papers of Margaret, they are well-sighted and they are deeply into the issues of transformation in Africa. Margaret is joined by Kari Alanko, Kari is the Deputy Director General of the Department of Africa and Middle East of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here in Helsinki. But Kari and I have one thing in common, we have two countries that we consider close to our heart, because Kari has been the Ambassador to Vietnam of Finland and he has actually also been the Ambassador of Finland to Mozambique. So you can sort of see that there is some sort of correlation here. The third member of the panel is Professor Gammano Mwabu, who is a professor of economics at the University of Nairobi. For those of you who sort of don't know that, Gammano was actually the one who wrote the first invitation letter to the first wider annual lecture speaker, Dr. S. Noss. It's a while ago, but it just to say that Gammano has a long association with wider, but he has also played a key role in the African-economic research consortium. He has had a number of important tasks there, so I'm very grateful that Gammano is willing to join the panel this afternoon. The fourth panel member is Professor Tony Addison. I think most of you will know him as the Deputy Director and Chief Economist of Wider. He actually was Professor of the University of Manchester and also a Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute. There's a small personal comment you know, I'm sure, that Tony has been at Wider before. Now just before he joined Wider in the first round, I made great efforts to recruit him to Copenhagen. I did not succeed at the time, but I am exceedingly pleased that I managed to get Tony back to Wider in December of 2009. It's a pleasure to welcome you, Tony. And then last but not least, Professor Ravi Kanpur, Professor from Cornell University. I already mentioned at the wider annual that Ravi is on our board, and I'm extremely pleased that Ravi have taken an active participation in this seminar, but also in order to support that you are providing all of the guidance. I appreciate that very, very much, and Ravi is the President of Society for the Study of Economic Inequality and will be no stranger to any one of you, I'm sure. I've asked this panel to in turn give us a few reflections. We are not talking about long statements, but just sort of reflect a bit on the conference and the themes that we have identified. To identify maybe a few key lessons, is there something that stood out? And then maybe suggest some specific issues for the future. But we're not talking about long statements. You should make them as short as you find it appropriate. And then after that, we will basically get into an open discussion. There will be a possibility for you to ask questions to the panel, but also for just simply putting forward reflections that you find, hey, after these three days for some, two days for others, is there something that you thought you would like to bring to the attention of all of the participants here, but obviously also for those who are then subsequently going to see the YouTube videos and so on. So this is a possibility for you to basically getting a message out which you may find important. So with this welcome to this final plenary, I would like to start by asking Margaret to go first, and then Kari, and then Germano, Tony, and then last Ravi. So I hope it's OK that we take it in these turns, and I look forward to your comments and to the subsequent discussion. So Margaret. I've learned quite a bit, and I'm going to be actually very brief. I think we have some growing consensus that there has been, on average, if that makes sense, some broad-based growth in Africa over the past decade. And I just want to emphasize the fact that the findings in Roderick and McMillan that structural change was growth-reducing during the period 1990 to 2005 had very much to do with the fact that we took the entire timeframe 90 to 2005. Once we break up the period 90 to 99, 2000 to 2010, as Alan Thomas and his colleagues did at the IMF as well, we find that in the latter decade, structural change seems to be moving in the right direction. In other words, people tend to be moving out of agriculture into sectors where they're earning more and consuming more. And I've checked this both with macro data and micro data using income data and consumption data. So the trend is pretty robust. Having said that, we don't have a very good understanding of why this is true. I speculate the 90s was still a period of structural adjustment when countries were still shedding workers from public enterprises and so forth and that these reforms have been consolidated and things are starting to move in the right direction. At the same time, people seem to have more voice, but if you travel in Africa, you hear people excited, enthusiastic about what's happening here at the conference. There are many people from different countries in Africa and there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's happening on the ground. And I just wanted to mention that in my home institution at Tufts University, I have two colleagues from Africa. One newly minted PhD, Adebiel, she's from Kenya. And another guy who has been with us for a bit longer, around 10 years, Ed Kuzwadi, he's from Ghana. I mean, 20 years ago, that would have been unheard of. So there is a lot of change taking place. What I would like to emphasize that I've heard a lot over the years about gender and more recently about youth in Africa and the issues surrounding youth and the issues surrounding women. And you hear these things, you think, is it a fad? You're not really sure. And I apologize to those of you who have been doing serious in-depth research on these issues previously. But when I look at the data, I was able to look at the DHS data and it's so startling how much worse off, in terms of at least being employed, for example, how much worse off women are and youth are. So I think that going forward, we need to do more to better understand why is it that youth seem to be disengaged and not in the labor force, especially in urban areas, and how is it that we can help women to be more actively engaged in, and even if they're only reporting that they're not employed because they're in activities that they are somehow ashamed of. So I'll leave it at that and thank you very much. Okay. Thank you, Margaret. Kari? Thank you. Thank you, Fin. First of all, my excuse is that I'm not a researcher. So if I say some odd things, things bearing that in mind, I must say that I was really fascinated by the whole seminar and the keynote addresses other presentations and discussions. It was a straight talk, and even the numbers that were presented was really refreshing for a development policy administrator like myself. On Martin Ravallian's keynote address, the highlight for me was that we development policy practitioners and administrators often tend to see poverty reduction only in the context of development assistance or as something related to the relations between donors and recipients, if I may use that term. And therefore, I think his keynote really put things into perspective, at least for me, giving this 200-year perspective on how perceptions on poverty have changed. And Eric Torvitz, the keynote address on inclusive growth, again, really deep analysis, which challenges many of the simplifications on which at least we development policy practitioners often work on, and particularly his discussion on causalities and linkages between growth, lower inequality, poverty reduction, what in which direction the causalities function that really at least gave a lot of things to think about for myself. And these topics, growth, inequality, poverty reduction are highly relevant, at least I think I would say to all donors, including Finland, because among our development policy objectives we have poverty reduction, inclusive growth, reduction of inequalities, and quite often we are struggling with how to balance different aspects in approaching these things. And I think it has been proven by the discussions that there are complex issues involved. And there are also choices to be made in trying to contribute to inclusive growth. And for us donors, talking about that from that perspective, choices include, for instance, the following, whether we should focus on institutions or look more for impact on grassroots level, where should we channel our resources, should we work through and with government structures, or should we put more emphasis on working with civil society organizations, should we focus on social sectors or productive sectors, how do we engage with private sector, how much emphasis should be put on governance issues, what about democracy, what about rights, what about conditionality for our assistance. So these are all sorts of things that we are struggling with. And I think one thing that was important, which is obvious, is that the seminar has contributed to a deeper understanding of these issues. And at least for me it was also comforting to note that researchers do not seem always to agree with each other on everything. And that there are different ways of interpreting the data and findings, refreshing. And I think role of research is extremely important, again for us donors, in drawing general conclusions from research on what works and what doesn't. And also I think research has a particular role for us in understanding specific country situations better so that we can plan our policies and actions in a wiser way. And I think two final conclusions that I would take away from this conference and discuss at our ministry. How could we donors make more use of research in our work so that we can do our job better? And how could research also play a more prominent role in informing the general public about the achievements and challenges related to inclusive growth in Africa? Thanks. Thank you, Kari. There was certainly nothing stupid in that. Kamanu. Thank you. So I'll follow my colleague and say that I'm a researcher, but I might say some quality. So I want to highlight a few messages from the preliminary sessions and also from one of the parallel sessions. So I will start with the presentation by Professor Topec. We learned from Professor Topec that because of better growth in Africa, poverty has declined over the last 10 years from around 58% to 48%. This is the first time that we have a very heavy country ratio when we grow the 50% mark. We also emphasized that non-income poverty may not have formed the same trend because although progress has remained on the growth front, the delivery of social services, especially education, health, water, and sanitation has been problematic in Africa. So he called for better methods of delivering these services. And in fact, if we look at the quality of these services, especially basic education, the quality hasn't declined. And so non-income poverty may have increased because the quality of these services has deteriorated. So on that note, I want to make a comment on the observation that income poverty has declined. This is an induction according to the hand-counting measure, the hand-counting ratio measure. Now actually I'm kind of embarrassed to say that although Professor Topec developed these measures for us in Kenya, applying these measures in Kenya in 1984, we haven't been using them. And in this conference, we have only used one of them, the hand-counting ratio. There are two others. There is the poverty gap, which is the poverty inequality. There is the poverty severity or the poverty intensity. Now the reason why I'm uncomfortable with the hand-counting ratio is because the best way to reduce poverty, the easiest way to reduce poverty is to get income from the poorest group of the population and give that income to the people just below the poverty line. That way you quickly reduce poverty. The hand-counting ratio will come down. But of course, the poorest people will come also. So we will be saying on the basis of the hand-counting ratio that we are making progress when in fact we are making no progress. If we use these three measures together, we will avoid that problem. So my plea here is that in the future, we use these measures which Professor Topec took so much pain to develop for us. I want to link the presentation by Professor Topec to Professor Ravallion's presentation, the first plenary paper. There, after a complex review of the evolution of poverty ideas, he said that in order to make, in order to reduce poverty, we need to do three things. We need to apply technology. We need knowledge. We also need voice. But he did not say what kind of technology, what kind of knowledge and how to actually develop these technologies. Actually, he said that we need technology to get out of poverty is obvious. What is not obvious is how to get this technology, how to get them developed. And this is what we should really focus on in Africa. And I want to extend his indeterminance of poverty reduction. Technology knowledge, knowledge here now should also include not just skills and so on, but also human capital in general. Which Professor Topec is saying that we should develop by focusing on social protection programs like in Brazil. And in delivering quality services, especially to the poor. Now, I will turn to one of the parallel sessions, which was on the informal sector. And there, two types of informal sectors were distinguished. The normal informal sector that we see more or less on a daily basis in Africa. Where people are saying small things and so on. And also the informal waste matter sector. The informal waste matter sector. The sector where people, the very poor, collect with the rudimentary technology. The waste matter from the industry, from households and so on. Doing very hazardous work. And also written to that one. It was highlighted that the informal sector means are also in that category. So if you actually look at Africa, what we find is Africa is an informal economy. The whole of it. So in Kenya, for example, 80% of our employment is the informal sector. And even in South Africa, where the informal sector was small. It's beginning, when you visit in South Africa, you see that it's beginning to emerge. Informalizing that economy. So the challenge now for Africa is not just to transform agriculture. But we must also transform the informal sector. We have to accept the fact that we have these garbanging dumps where people live. They manufacture things from these garbanging dumps. And we can't chase them away from there. But we have to find a way of transforming that way of livelihood. So that we have a livelihood that promotes health. Rather than the one that is hazardous to health like the one that we see. The informal waste matter sector. And lastly, my comment is one of my colleagues here about gender equality. We need empowerment across along the general lines. Especially the household sector. In most cases, the women are the ones who run the homes. But they're also not empowered in decision making. So some might think that's a small element. But it's very important. If there's no one running the home, the economy will not run. So thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Okay. Thank you. Tony. Thank you very much, Finn. I think the things that really stood out for me were data. The importance of measurement in relation to data. That was reinforced right across the conference. I think data is sometimes seen as an overly technical issue. It's actually a real social issue though as well. Because data allows you to construct a narrative about a way the society is going. And you want an accurate narrative about the way in which society is going. And if you don't have data, then it's possible for anybody, including the people who are most unlikely to advance the cause of the poor to tell their narrative about society. So data is not just a technical research issue. It's also a deeply political issue. And I think this conference has reinforced that. And the need for enormous investment. And I think also the intellectual debate reinforces that. Because we're away from a world where in the 1980s, economists made assumptions about how structural adjustment would work. Well, if you believe the assumptions, you don't really need data to measure the impact. Because you know what the impact was. But unfortunately for the proponents of the sort of harder line of structural adjustment, the outcome differed quite considerably from what the assumptions would have predicted. So in a complex policy world, we need data. And we need it not just as technocrats, but also we need it as politicians. Secondly, I think the conference has brought out for me the international dimension. But I think here also we as researchers need to think more about the international dimension. We've congratulated ourselves that there is growth in Africa. Policymakers in Africa congratulate themselves and rightly so. But this is quite vulnerable to both the super cycle in commodity prices but also to the very large decisions that are now being made about monetary policy in Washington and elsewhere, which we know from past experience can have major, major ramifications for the global economy. And we know that small African economies are vulnerable to shocks. They remain largely undiversified. And poor people within those economies remain vulnerable to large shocks. And we do not have yet enough buffering, either at the micro level through social protection or at the macro level through economic diversification to cope with what may come over the horizon at us in a very unexpected way. So related to that, my third reflection is on the need to consider industrial policy to diversify economies. But we've already had a conference here at Wider in June about that and I urge those of you who have not yet looked at the conference website to look at the papers from that because I think it really does help us to start thinking through some of the subtleties of economic policymaking. Because the policy issues really are becoming, in some cases, subtle. As you move from a low-income country to a middle-income country, inevitably, for example, your financial sector grows and deepens. And policy makers want to know how can we advance inclusive growth by developing a better financial sector, a broader financial sector, a financial sector that reaches more people without blowing ourselves up in the way that the richer economies or some of the richer economies have done over the last few years. And that's not an easy policy issue to grapple with. That's a deep and complex issue about regulation and appropriate financial development. Policy makers are asking urgent questions about how they invest the natural resource windfalls that they have, both for the good times they have now, but also for the bad times that they may have to cope with later on. So those are all really big policy issues. And I think if we are to serve the need that Cary identified to really use research to help policymaking in Africa, but also to help the donor partners of African countries, then we need to have the ambition to go out and try and address and at least provide some answer to some of these very, very big questions. So I think I would urge a sense of ambition on all of us as researchers and obviously as policy makers. Finally, I'd like to offer a personal reflection. I began my career in Tanzania in the early 80s, in 1980-81. It was an organisation called Tumiabai, which is the National Price Commission, which became one of the most hated institutions in Tanzania because it was trying to control the prices of basic commodities, basic consumer goods in the context of hyperinflation. And as a young economist, it was a real education experience in really how tough it is to do really good policymaking in Africa. At the time, it was almost like being on a crashing aeroplane. Things were getting worse and worse day by day as Tanzanian policymakers tried to cope with very, very large external shocks that were hitting them at the time. So my personal reflection is that here we are discussing inclusive growth in Africa. We're discussing some of the problems of success that we're seeing now in the region and some of the challenges as you move from a low-income to a middle-income country. And we should not underestimate what an achievement it has been to move that way in the last three decades. And that achievement has been an achievement of African governments foremost in African societies. It's been a big achievement of researchers, particularly through organisations like the Africa Economics Research Consortium. And I would submit it's had at least some help from the donor community, both through technical assistance, budget support and so forth and the provision of global public goods. So without wanting us to become overconfident, because I say you never know what is coming over the horizon at you, I think we should at least have some sense of congratulation that we've got this far over the recent period. Thank you, Tony. Ravi. Well, thank you. Thanks, Finn. I want to focus on possible research directions and research areas and I'll divide them into two, conventional and perhaps less conventional. I think there's a lot to be done in the conventional analysis of interlinkages between poverty, inequality and growth and we've had a lot of discussion of that in this conference. And just because it's conventional doesn't mean that it's passe and we should now move on. A lot more work needs to be done on that. In particular, for example, just to take a simple note of the growth elasticity of poverty reduction, its determinants, what sectoral patterns are best, etc. There's a lot of discussion of that but I feel there's still a lot more to be done and learned, particularly with new data sets that are coming on stream. And particularly also bearing in mind a number of people have mentioned that the data issues are really quite significant. By Andy McKay's presentation in a panel where he pointed to the problems of data sources for monetary measures of poverty and actually argued that the quality of data sources for non-monetary measures was better in terms of comparability, consistency, etc. and not in some sense having to worry about price corrections and all of that sort of stuff. So I think that's part of our normal science, so to speak, which we as development economics researchers do and I think that's extremely important and we should continue. As another example, the causality from inequality to growth. A lot of work has been done on that but I think we should be doing more on that and particularly looking at the mechanisms of the linkages. So that's sort of a whole conventional aspect of it. Let me now turn to perhaps less conventional. Again, these are all things that we're working on so there's nothing new under the sun but I thought perhaps we might emphasize some of these things in the future. One aspect that I want to emphasize is the group's dimension of inequality. Much of the discussion in this conference and elsewhere is on the standard interpersonal perspective on inequality. The Foster-Grithorbeck measures, all of these things are sort of focusing on interpersonal distribution of income. Whereas I believe a lot of the reality of inequalities in the African context or elsewhere is group-based differences. Maggie mentioned the gender dimension, the youth dimension but I'm also thinking of other salient divisions in society along ethnicity, religion and so on. Now, I haven't seen that many papers on that in this conference. Is there a reason for that? Surely our data allows us to make inroads into that type of analysis, that type of assessment and it may be unspoken but those are the things that concern policy makers on the ground as well. Another type of example that I would say of something that we've been working on but is less conventional is the implications for policy of the structural transformation argument. We can put it in the context of rural versus urban or we can put it in terms of broader structural transformation that Maggie mentioned which is she said from the late 90s to now if one looks at the data then actually the transformation has been in the direction of higher productivity and so on. And for a short time you can think of it as being a rural to urban but you can think of it as industrial or whatever it is. So the policy question is how much should you encourage, if you have 100 million dollars to spend, should you spend it on raising the productivity of currently low productivity sectors or should you spend it encouraging movement into the high productivity sectors? We tend to say both things. In conferences which focus on rural areas we say you should spend more on rural development in urban areas of course we should spend more. But I don't believe we have a framework in which we can answer the finance ministry question. Not the agriculture ministry question, not the urban development question but how should scarce resources be allocated between these two in order to have a maximum poverty reduction? It also raises the question of what your objectives are. Is it poverty today versus perhaps a much faster reduction, a greater reduction in poverty tomorrow? These are tough questions and these are actually the policy and political questions that policy makers are facing. So the reason why a policy maker may be investing a resource in a particular area is not necessarily because he's unaware of or is stupid in terms of the transformation issue but for those sorts of reasons and actually for those things I don't believe we are giving sufficient help, analytical help to those policy makers. There are many, many other such questions. Let me end with the third one. There are many other things that I could, maybe you can talk about it. Let me turn to an aspect of WIDAS work program on sustainability and climate change. If we think about Africa, if we think of the climate change issue as divided into two concerns, the mitigation issue and the adaptation issue. I think by and large as a consensus that in the African context essentially we're going to do in the adaptation set of issues because in terms of emissions and so on, Africa is not a big player. The mitigation versus adaptation issue is a China question. The mitigation issue is a China question, not an Africa question. But let me pose the following question. Would a reduction, would mitigation in China be good or bad for Africa? Because the concern about mitigation in Africa and India is that this will actually lead to growth rates in these countries if it's not accompanied by appropriate compensation. Let's now feed through the consequences of mitigation efforts in China which lower the growth rates in China which then have an impact on Africa. So should Africa be supporting mitigation efforts in China? Because it will have to deal with the adaptation consequences of greenhouse gases 50 years down the road. Or should it be worried about it? Because the immediate impact of reduction in Chinese growth will be a reduction in all this growth that we've seen in Africa which again many of us know is related to at least partly to the commodity boom as a result of China, China and India's growth. So that's an unconventional type of question which I haven't seen discussed in this conference but perhaps we might think about as we go ahead. There are many others but I'll stop there. Thank you very much Ravi. Thank you Margot for pointing out that something is happening in Africa. Thank you for pointing out that we do need to pay attention to empowerment of women and we need to focus on the youth. Thank you Kari for pointing to the need for productive collaboration between research and policy practitioners. You pointed to or gave us a warning about simplistic use of measures of poverty, the need to transform the informal sector. Tony used to control the price of beer and now you're pointing to the need for data. I think that's absolutely appropriate. It does stand out and it is clear that you're identifying the need for developing informed narratives can play an absolutely key role in policy making. Thank you Ravi for pointing to different research directions both conventional and less conventional and also for pointing out that there are big issues out there which we should not be afraid of asking. Development economics historically has never shied away sometimes for some periods but it is at the core of our profession to also dare ask the big questions and I think that was essentially what you were pointing to. So with these comments basically I'll now invite you, everybody here to ask questions to the panel or reflect on how to ensure inclusive growth in Africa and we have sort of about 35-40 minutes for that before I will be concluding so I think that there will be a chance for everybody to join in but if you run out of steam then of course I'll just basically conclude. I think I tend to start out there because looking out the window is kind of nice so I'm going to start over here this time and may I add that it would be perfectly fine also within the panel for you basically to engage if any one of you have comments to the other panel members please do not shy away. I am down here on the floor for one very specific purpose which is we like to have a conversation. Yeah please. Yeah, Philip Baumgartner, University of Bonn. Thanks to the panel for the issues and I have a comment but it's also a question so maybe you can react to it. So my background is in agriculture economics and I've been looking specifically at these large scale investments and I think the type, the way agriculture is done is changing with globalization of the food production system and big agribusiness coming in and partly going more into the value chain. What if I combine that with what we heard in the last session today about industrial type of policies what can governments do or what should they do to encourage these investments but also to seize opportunities and not, yeah, to build on them. You want to react? Okay, we'll collect another. There was a hand over here, yes? Thank you. My name is Hayford from Ghana, University of Ghana. Of course if you look at the development literature and as we're looking from this conference theme of inclusive growth in Africa obviously one of the key things that we are talking about has to do with agriculture and knowing how agrarian poor societies in Africa are I have been wondering why I haven't seen cooperative and organizations featuring in our discussion throughout this conference and I know that in recent times it's been the focus or it's been the talk of the day once we empower corporates at the local level they're able to be empowered and certain decisions and it helps in reducing poverty levels so if maybe some light could be shared on this and going forward what we should be looking at. Okay, here, Arne? Okay, we've been talking about structural transformation I think this is key issue if you want to substantially reduce poverty in the long run I've been following the transformation of the Kenyan economy in terms of employment structures over the last 40 years and the proportion of people in the formal sector employment is the same now as in the 1970s so people are leaving agriculture getting stuck in the informal sector and what's driving this is that I also estimated the capital to labor ratio and that peak in 1980 has been going down since then that means that people leave agriculture, they're stuck in low investment sectors so the key question to my mind is how do we get investment up or to bring about the substantial structural transformation that can long term reduce poverty investment has to go up and we haven't really discussed this very much which is the key question we started out in the first lesson in the development economics with Louis and everybody Okay, thanks Arne, we take one more here, okay? Super. Being a researcher myself I would tend to agree with the research that there is indeed a place for not only more unconventional but possibly also some more controversial research in areas such as the one that we're dealing with more specifically this was something which Tony hinted at the role of the global economy of geopolitics in general in the inclusive growth so here both inclusiveness and growth are relevant of particular countries it's not something that we can afford to be impatient about and dismiss out of hand, I think the weight of history is so much with us that it has this at least a little odd that such little attention is being paid to issues as I mentioned earlier of colonialism and war and international debt and aid and when I talk about aid I don't simply mean little finicky pieces of work which enters up an explicit violin song on whether or not aid is effective at the margin but on larger issues of international redistribution I think it is important for us especially in the context of this to deal with this in the context of measurement which also is very closely linked to the theme of this conference I think there is a great need for us now to start looking afresh at some of the various axioms in the measurement of inequality and poverty which we have often tended to take for granted and this is particularly true for the axioms for instance of symmetry and transfer which is so much a staple of studies relating to interpersonal inequality but which become casualties when we think of group inequalities and likewise it is again a matter of some surprise that the question of how to measure inequality of how inequality remains invariant when there is a change in the size of the pie is one which was addressed more than 40 years ago by people like Serge Christophe Com and yet we still stick only almost exclusively in all our empirical work with relative measures of inequality which probably accounts for our getting our diagnosis on what's been happening to inequality with growth completely wrong and so these are some instances of areas in which we could both go back to under research topics and also take one work in more unconventional areas okay I will now okay as is I will come back over here later but now we should as is from wider you have mentioned about informal economy and we know that informal economy is not taxed and not included in the GDP while the 60% of the labor force and 40% of the GDP is generated so the question would be what kind of accurate measures you think we could think about and do you think that the further research is needed in this aspect okay thank you as is Carol thank you Carol Newman Trinity College I just wanted to echo Arna's comment in relation to the need to increase investment and maybe this is coming from my background on the learning to compete project and I would say it's not only investment that's needed but responsible investment investment that links in with the private sector helps informal firms to formalize and I think I'd like to hear the panel's comments on that okay Eric I think I should respond to Germano Moab who he had a I think very pertinent question why do you always use just a head count ratio after all you should know about the poverty gap and poverty severity and I think there's one very good reason for this which is that there is generally a very high correlation not always but generally a high correlation between the head count ratio and P1 and P2 now but I take your point and I definitely will try to see if I can find any data on the poverty severity comparison let's say from 2000 on but my intuition tells me and that's purely intuitive my intuition tells me that the reduction in P2 in the poverty severity would have been even higher than in the head count ratio but that's speculation then I have a very quick comment on a big question I slightly disagree with him there is an excellent report that you must be familiar with the McKinsey report on employment which just came out and they use a large number of consultants and it's true that their classification is not in terms of formal informal employment it's in terms of vulnerable and stable employment but what they do show is that in the countries that they selected and I think it was a sub-sample of about ten countries the proportion of people in the vulnerable sector had actually come down and even though the difficulty of finding jobs for the new entrance into the labour force is enormous there still has been some progress okay thank you Eric anybody else here okay we'll move over here up here in the front and then we will move down thank you I have a question for the panel on the inclusive growth what do you think about the role of regional integration for reaching inclusive growth because that's one of the key priorities of the African Development Bank and also we see it as a way to reduce spatial inequality but you know it has its challenges you have regions like East Africa that's growing quite rapidly and you have regions like Saku where most countries are caught in middle income traps so how do you see that and also maybe adding to inclusive growth also even in small countries like Switzerland you can have major in regional inequalities which are not related to ethnic diversity or religious diversity thank you okay thank you then here in the middle gentlemen in the blue shirt I'm Steven from the University of Jerusalem Tanzania and if we start with the main theme of our workshop that is inclusive growth we all know that inclusive growth now is like now replacing what we are used to call proper growth that is the kind of growth that is related with the poverty reduction and over the last three days the link between growth inequality and poverty has been quite very well established in terms of the papers the posters and the presentation my concern was on the role of environment the role of environment in terms of environment sustainability environmental degradation and the special natural resources because if we speak of inclusive growth in Africa that means like a growth that is related with poverty reduction in Africa we all know that Africa for example 80% depend on agriculture and more or less same percentage depend on forest for as the main source of energy now if we are leaving out the issue of environment in all its aspects like environment sustainability environmental degradation and natural resources I think we are leaving quite a linkage that would have completely changed the picture and therefore my suggestion is maybe for the for the future workshop on inclusive growth we should also try to look the issue of environment and all its aspects thank you thank you very much I think I will now ask the panel don't feel obliged but those of you who wish to make comment engage Margaret so on the question of investment I'd like to throw that question right back at you I need because how are we supposed to know what to do to improve investment there's tons of research which is very boring because it's been reiterated over and over and over again about the lack of infrastructure, credit constraints all these things I saw somebody once put it into a framework which was this is more about formal versus informal which made a lot of sense to me I mean the costs of becoming formal and so forth have to outweigh the benefits the government has to be providing enough services that it's worthwhile for a company to show itself and to invest for the future I mean there's a lot that can be done but I don't think we can do very much about it I mean I don't know who you mean by we right so it's up to the Africans to decide that they want this is what they want and this also to the point the question about the agribusiness in Africa I'm going to say something out loud which I probably shouldn't say but I heard a rumor for example that the investment by the Chinese in the shoe industry in Ethiopia was there were two people involved in that responsible for that one was Justin Lin from the World Bank and the other was Meles is that how you say his name he's not with us anymore I mean the truth is a few people can make a big difference there are lots of examples of that like Costa Rica and Intel I mean the president found out that Intel was considering the president of Costa Rica found out that Intel was considering investing in somewhere in Latin America had a list of top countries that wanted to invest in somehow the president found out about that and decided that he wanted to go after that investment and I don't know how he did it but a lot has been written about that by people at Harvard Business School and then well reasonable integration I think is extremely important because market sizes in so many countries are small but politically obviously it's very challenging and then I just wanted to say something about what Ravi said and to plug a publication of ours so Ravi you were at the conference we had a conference about I don't know in Ghana on structural change in Africa and James Thurlow who just left Wider to go back to IFPRI and Paul Drouas had a paper in that conference and it's a special issue forthcoming in the world development about transformation in Africa but their paper does exactly what you were asking it compares the cost and benefits of investing in the rural areas versus the urban areas and they use a computable general equilibrium model which I know a lot of people don't like however they do I mean they're able to quantify the costs and benefits and I mean I think the kinds of questions you're answering that a finance minister would ask those are political questions not really economics questions and I think all we can do for a finance minister is lay out different scenarios and then they make the choices based on who their constituents are but other than that I don't think that's my view anyway Okay, Margaret, Ravi? Yeah no no I would of course I would agree with that what I was suggesting was that we should be presenting the finance minister with the options in this way or rather analysing the options that he or she would want us to look at and I was suggesting that we don't really have the framework familiar with the furlough paper and I think that's what we should be doing more of is what I was saying let me just take up the informality issue please so there's all sorts of definitions and so on and so forth but I think I'm one of those who sort of believe that actual informality is not coming down I said there are lots and lots of different forms of definitions dimensional ILO type definitions and so on I think the broad thrust there are differences and Brazil is different from other countries but the broad thrust is that actually as measured in standard ways it is not coming down as a fraction of the workforce and that's an interesting question for us because in Econ 101 in developed economics 101 we're taught it will come down in fact we have a plot of informality as a share of the workforce in the informal sector and that goes down actually there are two plots one is that one the other one is the share of the population in the urban sector is going this way and then now we have our lowest models and so on which sort of support that of course one of those things is one of those graphs one of those things is happening we have urbanization happening but the other one doesn't seem to be happening and I think that's an interesting analytical conundrum for us as to why is it that that's not happening one answer is of course is the regulations obviously it's the cost of becoming that's why it's so that may be true as a level effect the question is does that give us any purchase on the time trends here if anything regulations in such say in the case of India have become less stringent over the last 20 years and certainly the enforcement of those regulations become less stringent over the last 20 years and yet in India for example the share of informality has not declined so that's an interesting question and little question as to why that's happening one thought that some of us have had is that maybe the nature of technology itself is changing that maybe our mindset on formality versus informality is actually something stuck in something 40 years ago 50 years ago we think of the textile factory and the 2,000 workers etc. versus the small whereas I mean think in terms of generators for power if you wanted to be off the grid you needed your own generator and 30 years ago even 20 years ago they were incredibly costly and in order to justify that you have to spread that cost over a much larger scale but now everybody can set up their own little thing and so something is happening on the technology front in the last 20 years which may suggest that the optimal size of firm has actually gone down certainly in some areas and maybe that's what we're seeing in the last 20 years I mean these are just the speculative thoughts for us researchers to think about but the phenomenon of the share of informality not declining I think is or even declining even if we say declining very slowly I think it's something which is both an interesting research area and it worries the hell out of policy makers they think we were told that actually a measure of development is that informality goes down and it's not going down so what's going on what should we be doing okay you tell me the regulation of the problem so I'm going to think about it but you tell me something else so I think we need more analysis and policy makers will welcome that okay, come on so on regional integration actually it will increase the market size so that is good in one way for inclusive growth but on the other hand it can exclude because you see some people in some countries may not be able to complete so the poor people there although they were exporting before may not be able to export so in addition to having a regional integrated area there should be a mechanism for redistribution or to help those areas which are lagging behind in fact this is what happened in the 70s in the East African community where Tanzania and Uganda felt that it is a Kenyan businesses that were using the infrastructure in their countries and that will end up to break up of the East African community at that time so there are those two sides to the regional integration now on the issue of the informal in the informal sector this is the most interesting aspect of African economies because if someone cannot survive in the rural areas or in the formal sector somehow they can find a way of surviving in the dandy sector, the informal sector and there there is no regulation now if you re-regulate then what do you do with the people there if you say you cannot set up your small kiosk so then what do people do so actually it is a very difficult problem to solve and perhaps as people stay there maybe there is need for research to fill out the technology to transform that sector and also the data is needed on the size of the sector so thank you very much okay Tony yeah I mean one thing that might link all of these questions and they are very good questions and comments is actually the structure of public finances and also the generation of revenues because you know we know that without public revenues we can't fund public investment we know that without more revenue we can't fund social protection we can't fund better schemes of regional integration or more investment in particularly agricultural technology to improve African productivity and underlining this is the generation of revenues scooping up the revenues that are driven by the growth process that are yielded by the growth process then investing those through some satisfactory system of public finances the formation of what has been called a fiscal social contract and then delivering a much broader base of benefits for society as a whole and obviously this is crucially important in the more resource abundant countries and you know when people talk about the Nordic model they often think about the welfare state in the Nordic countries but actually a big part of the Nordic model is the actual success in generating a growth process which yields the revenue and then yields the just redistributive mechanisms in other words having a very successful market economy supported by a state that yields those revenues for redistribution now in that regard we've seen a lot of progress in Africa in the 30 years at least if you look at again Tanzania one reason Finn mentioned that they used to put a price on beer was that the beer factory was the only factory that was kept running at 100% of capacity utilization with the meagre foreign exchange that Tanzania had because it yielded the beer tax so the budget aside from floating on on aid money was actually floating on the beer tax but since then fortunately we've had the introduction of value-added tax systems a much greater awareness of the need to build domestic tax institutions all of the nitty gritty rather boring stuff of tax policy management and I think this is a really sort of crucial link and a kind of missing link in the conversation around inclusive government unfortunately at the moment the discussion around tax issues in Africa is getting a bit derailed by the saying we should be cracking down on the multi-nationals and the nasty transfer pricing policies which may or may not be true but really taxation policy comes down to the rather mundane matter of building a good property tax system for example building a good corporate tax system moving quickly to an income tax system eliminating tax exemptions there are a few things that get people marching down the street demanding more justice but it is actually crucial to the formation of modern states and that's really what we need to see much more of going forward okay thank you Tony listening to the comments and reactions I can't help just maybe to mention that in wider we have over the past two and a half years of course working on our so called triple crisis work program within that context we've had a program on foreign aid and I'd like to sort of mention that while that program has had an element of foreign aid we've actually used that as a way to be digging into issues of growth and employment of social sectors of gender and of environment and climate change and we are in a process of putting out a number of so called position papers and certainly some of the issues that have been touched upon here are quite central to some of these position papers so I'd like and also sorry I should also mention the fragility and governance so I mean those of you who sort of are thinking well while the heading there is aid and something I would like to encourage you to just sort of browse through because you will find a lot more in there on these various dimensions and there was at least one question on environment and climate change where I think that take a look at our position paper there it might actually be quite useful because we have been trying to synthesize what we believe that you can say I'll move over here now and just ask Suxent please My name is Aptur Gaffaro and I'm from Ghana my interventional role is directly to the team of this panel which is how to promote inclusive growth in Africa and I guess we will probably need to have very clear answers to a number of why questions if we are to be able to address this question this how question more effectively I mean the last session before this panel we heard of an emerging Brazilian model of development and how and whether African countries can learn some lessons from this particular model but we understood from the presenters as well that the images of this model was facilitated particularly by a strong inter-party national consensus as to how to enhance development in Brazil I mean the question that came to my mind when I heard this is why have Brazilian political entrepreneurs been able to foster such a consensus whereas in Ghana every single political party that comes to power is very quick in discrediting and discarding the development plans of this predecessor so the bottom line of my point is in thinking of how to promote inclusive growth in Africa we cannot and should not gloss over the unique characteristics of the African state and African politics okay thank you anybody else here okay there are two here we start here in the front and then Denise afterwards Hi Riza Daniels from the University of Cape Town I'd like just a panel to reflect on two issues which one is the role of indigenous knowledge systems inside of Africa and how they can be leveraged potentially to assist the development process the second is in the presence of non-market land tenure where you have the existence frequently of both market tenure system for land co-existing with the tribal form of tenure this exists across Africa in many different countries and my question is just how this how we go about dealing with these issues in the process okay thank you Denise Daniels from the Paris School of Economics I wanted to raise three remarks and to ask questions so first remark there is if only because of the growth of China of the Chinese economy at this very moment a rush on mineral resources of the continent so not only oil but also many other mineral products even countries that were not formerly oil exporters are turning into oil exporters if only Ghana but also Cote d'Ivoire and there are many other examples and so part of the growth that we observe is also driven by the growth of the prices of these raw materials the growth of the output, the associated investments in infrastructure in particular or even expenditures in insurance that are associated with the exports of those raw materials my second remark is that we still lack a bit of with some exceptions the evidence on the intensification of agricultural practices is still fragile and it's not completely obvious that technology adoption is high and even that there are the useful technologies that are really meaningful for African peasants are available actually in many sectors of agriculture the third remark is that as we have seen in some presentations there are some countries who experience great growth at this very moment are still recovering from past shocks whether they are political or whether they were macroeconomics so there is a process also of recovery of many reversions so that part of this growth could not be perhaps sustainable so after having done these three remarks I wouldn't like to be seen as the bird of despair but just asking when we think of inclusive growth and thinking in particular of this rush towards manual resources it would be interesting to hear the panel about how to make these rents extracted from minerals more inclusive than in the past okay Eric you had a two handed intervention wait, you just need the mic I was going to raise a related issue I couldn't clone myself so of course I was limited to certain sessions and it may very well have been that what I'm going to bring up has been discussed but I heard very little about the whole issue of land grabbing about the whole issue of investment into natural resources and it seems to me that it's not at all inconceivable that in the short run this is going to bring a flow of foreign direct investment there is going to accelerate the growth but the consequences in the medium and long run could really work strongly against inclusivity now I'm just raising this as a question and maybe it has been discussed but if it hasn't there is something we ought to keep in mind okay you may not be able to clone yourself but you have some people who want to at least be somewhat approaching you in terms of asking pointed questions anybody else here in the back Surab I'm sort of at wider so we unfortunately did not hear too much about conflict issues in this conference so one emerging result is that conflict leads to strengthening along off ethnic networks and in the presence of such effects how does one promote inclusive growth once you recover from conflict okay Rachel hi Rachel Kisselquist also from UNU wider and building on the previous comment I think in reflecting on the overall lessons of the conference it would also be interesting to be sure to keep on the table and to highlight issues political issues and the role of citizen participation of voting of civil society participation and so on in creating inclusive growth and demanding inclusive growth in supporting or not political leaders that provide for inclusive growth I think these are issues we need to tease out a bit more interesting panels on these topics but I wanted to highlight that in my comments okay fine taken that's for sure okay here I was glad that the point was made about urbanization I think I just want to expand a bit on that and the significance of it Africa is going to double its urban population in the next 20 years or so so I think it's critically important both to prevent conflict disasters of various kinds and also longer-term planning ahead I think that we try and get this right and I think that must be urbanization must be a key part of this inclusive growth agenda getting out the structure and organization of our settlements better it links a number of points about the environment doing it in a way that you know is less energy intensive less resource intensive it also links with Tony's point about tax collection if we do organize our settlements effectively improves you know ability to raise property taxes and doing it of course in a way that will facilitate economic development I think is critically important so that urban agenda I think must be critical to the whole inclusive growth agenda thank you anybody here okay over here thanks Finn Amelia Santos from UNCTAD I just want to make a general comment about how timely this conference was especially when I look at the report of the high panel to the post-2015 development framework and if I pick up the five priority areas for for Africa basically we have been discussing them today leave no one behind basically inclusive inclusiveness sustainable development at the core transfer economic jobs for inclusive growth build peace and effective and open accountable institutions for all and finally a new global partnership so I think we have been successful in discussing issues that we are going to be working on for the next 15 years so now how we translate these priority areas into into research I think is very important particularly the last part that has to do with the so-called nature of globalization as Eric presented but also the endogenous nature of what countries need to do to translate trade policy and other policy areas into into more inclusive partnerships so I congratulate Wyther and Finn Tony and the team that work on this and I think it's brilliant that the international community managed to pick these five priorities areas for for Africa but also that is relevant for other developing countries so now we have to do research and I think it's a good area that to work on thanks very much just behind that is the name from university well what about financial inclusion in Africa we know we all know that many many African people are excluded from formal financial institutions such as just have having a bank account and so on so what do you think about financial inclusion is it so important to support the inclusive growth process and so on thanks okay unless there's somebody who really have a really burning question I will then turn now to the panel if I may add a personal observation before we go to the panel there is one issue that is at least sort of being discussed in terms of the high-level planning process and it is a point that I have made which is that it's interesting when you look to that agreement among these leaders of the world is that the only absolute target they could agree on is leave no one behind I would maybe say that it would be kind of nice if we could push them to put a few more absolute targets for people in the developed world to impose them on ourselves rather than just leave no one behind which is obviously going to be most binding on some of the poorest countries but with that sort of reflection let me now turn to the panel Marquis you want to go first so I want to say something to my colleague from Ghana so you know this I couldn't also clone myself because I wanted to go to the development model one about Brazil but I also wanted to go to the Malawi session so I ended up at the Malawi session but you know this thing you're talking about in Ghana is an exclusive to Ghana we have it in the United States too did you see the debates between Romney and Obama but my friend you look a little bit young but why don't you run for president it's up to you you run on that platform why are we always putting each other down I mean it's up to it all it's it's gotta be homegrown and it's up to the to the young and and about natural resources and structural change I just want to plug this African economic outlook it's their annual publication they've been doing it for about 10 years now or five years but the latest one 2013 is about structural change and natural resources and there's some very upbeat messages in there one of the contributors was Jim Robinson from Harvard and he talks about countries that have industrialized on the back of natural resources and how the organization of the natural resource extraction can has a big impact on how inclusive that growth is so that's it okay just one reflection on the basis of what Tony said about the importance of transparent tax administration and that I think relates to one maybe one research area which has to do with the so-called political will because in some countries we sometimes need to question whether the country's leaders are really in favor of building transparent institutions which work for the benefit of the people and if research can throw some more light on those issues would be appreciated that's understood there might be some insight in the forthcoming position paper on fertility and governance which might be of use in this context and maybe I can encourage Rachel and Kari to take a good discussion on that we will actually from the wider side be launching a big meeting in New York on some of these issues Ravi, you want it or you feel okay, Tony? I think the issue of the investment of mineral resource revenues and natural resource revenues is really at the forefront of the agenda and if we can't find domestic opportunities for investing those resources then economic theory would tell us that the rate of return is higher abroad then they should go off abroad into some kind of sovereign wealth fund but that isn't going to produce you inclusive growth in Africa so we need some mechanisms for translating those resource rents through perhaps the banking system through more investment in agricultural productivity to actually generate that inclusive growth and that's going to be a really tough job but my final reflection is actually Martin Revalian very eloquently started the conference with a sort of 200 year review of history the history of poverty reduction and my reflection without going into 200 years of history is that if you look at the history of development in Europe yes, we achieved enormous growth, enormous rise in living standards we achieved along the way poverty reduction but if you look at that history it was also an incredibly brutal history it was a history of civil war, it was a history of wars between states these are the points that Saber and Sobu raised and if you think about why is it that the United Nations should work on economic issues well clearly it's obviously to be helping recipient countries, developing countries to avoid some of that European disaster so that history is not repeated but it's also to prevent wars between states which is another founding principle of the United Nations and wars between states, wars within states have often economic causes so I think the challenge for us in the next 50-100 years is for Africa yes to achieve the economic growth, yes to achieve the higher per capita income yes to achieve poverty reduction and inclusive growth but to do it without going down the disastrous route of war and conflict that we've seen historically has been the dimension of European and other countries history which now constitute the rich world and I submit that's a real challenge for the international system, a real challenge it's not for nothing that next year is 2014 and the 100th year, 100th anniversary of the first world war a comment on an observation on where to invest in agriculture I think we should invest in programs that increase food production so we pay attention to raising productivity in the food sector but that also has to be accompanied with land reform without land reform it will be very difficult for that investment to be productive and also a final observation we know from Asia and China that we can actually overcome our food poverty problem without overcoming the food poverty inclusive growth will not mean much, thank you Thank you Giammanu I would like first to thank the panel for having done a very good job in this final session so I hope you will join me in thanking the panel for this and now to a few closing remarks from my side the deliberations the discussions and so on from this conference we will be producing a summary report it will be made available so you will be able to sort of flip back and try to recap we would appreciate when you have that opportunity let us know if you agree, disagree do engage with us do sign up to the various possibilities of following what we are doing there is a website, there is a newsletter I think if you take a look at that newsletter you would actually be quite engaged and ready to there Tony is pretty good at picking out issues that are really interesting and that you can learn from so sign up also do look for the next conference do look for our call for papers we are trying to engage we are in the process of preparing our next work program as I have indicated once or twice we will be core to that work program in this very moment I do not know the dimensions of the program we are in a process of negotiations with donors and some of you might be horrified if I mention the different types of scenarios that I have to deal with together with my colleagues but what I can assure you is that wider will continue to be focused on transformation, inclusion and sustainability issues independent of the exact dimension of what we are going to be able to do we will be continuing with the development conferences for me it has been actually quite exciting because I do believe that this has been an example of how we as a global network can actually engage with each other and can actually learn from each other and it has been absolutely great for me to absorb, notice and sort of think about what all this means in relation to our next work program thank you very much to all of you for making this event such a great one I have one sort of thing I would like to strongly appeal to you which is that you will be receiving shortly a request for giving us some feedback it is of course always very nice to get feedback but let me add also a very simplistic argument and that is that if you do not give us that feedback we won't get the necessary dollars for the next conference so please may I sort of recommend, may I sort of appeal to you that you do give us that feedback both when it is nice to hear but also we will construct a criticism because we actually learn from that feedback thank you very much for participating but before I wish you a safe journey back I would like to express my sincere thanks to the wider staff who have made this possible I would like to thank Anna the conference secretary working with Minna late evenings long days on making this work I would like to thank Anna for having worked so much on the poster session and then I would like to thank all the people who have now been here running around with the loudspeakers making sure that it works the team that has been videoing and behind the scenes all of these things that are absolutely necessary for such an event to proceed in this way and one of the nice things for me is to say I do believe that we work as a team and I would like to thank you the wider team for that effort thank you very much so now all I have left to say is thank you very much to all of you in your different capacities at this conference and safe travel back home and see you next time thank you