 It's been a privilege to speak at the European Central Bank and the John Monet lecture today. I talked about the fact that international assistance for developing countries has often been a force for centralization of those countries because the foreign aid becomes a resource that's controlled and allocated by the national government and changes the balance of power between national and local authorities. Local democracy is important. We talked at length. The real subject was plans for post-war reconstruction assistance to Ukraine. Ukraine is now involved in a terrible war for defense of its sovereignty and its democratic system. I argued that a large part of the success of Ukraine's growing democracy in serving its people has been based on recent reforms that created, for the first time in the history of that country, a system of democratically elected local governments that had a good, reliable basis of revenue that they could spend to provide public goods and services for their people. It was a reform that happened after the Maidan Revolution in 2014. From 2015 to 2020, these local governments were set up. Before the Russians invaded in their full-scale invasion in February of 2022, these local governments were spending about a quarter of the public revenue in Ukraine. There are many signs that although this was a new system, it was working for the Ukrainian people. When the Russians invaded, the Ukrainian people showed a heroism and a determination in defending their country. An important part of that turned out to be that this decentralization, far from weakened in the country, actually strengthened it because it meant that in every community of Ukraine, there were elected local leaders who were elected because they had the trust of a large part of their, many of their neighbors who turned out to vote for them, but they also being empowered by the national political system of Ukraine. They were people who now had an official vested interest in defending it, and they helped to organize, gave the people of Ukraine the organization they needed to resist at the local level, and that has made a difference, and has been a part of the heroic story of this war. So knowing that foreign assistance will be needed to help rebuild Ukraine after this terrible war, and knowing that foreign assistance is often a force for centralization, creates a difficult problem that at a technical conference like at the European Central Bank's annual research conference was worth discussing, and I talked about the number one thing is the European Union's aid facility should be structured in consultation with the mayors of Ukraine who have national associations and could be easily contacted. I averged and I think they will, I hope that they will reinforce that when they're consulted, that the European Union should open an office in every region of Ukraine to work with the mayors and their local town councils in helping them to develop proposals for funding from the European Union in reconstructing Ukraine and rebuilding it as a country that can serve its people and build prosperity in the years to come after the war. I averged that the European Union aid facility should plan on setting aside a similar fraction, the one quarter of the revenue had been spent, then maybe one quarter of foreign aid should be designated for grants to local municipalities to help them rebuild according to the priorities that they determine. Not foreigners and not necessarily the national government. The national government will need a lot of assistance too and the most important, the largest fraction will be to help the national government of Ukraine, but some fraction of it should also go to local authorities and in that I think it can be a plan for a new kind of foreign assistance that will not only help Ukraine but perhaps be a model for other countries in the world of foreign assistance that doesn't just strengthen the national government but also supports democratically elected local governments and helps to make Ukraine a model for the world. But the most important thing is for a country whose people have sacrificed so much in the last 20 months of war to defend their independence, foreign assistance should help them to have the kind of prosperous Ukraine that they have been dreaming of and I think will can realize with the help of generous donors in the United States and the European Union and elsewhere in the world. Thank you.