 All right. So well, thank you, Lisa, for the introduction. I am very happy to share this panel with Santiago Levy. Santiago is going to talk about the case of Latin America. So for the purpose of division of labor, I will focus on Africa, in particular, South Saharan Africa. And I will talk about the green shots of social assistance, in particular, in the region. So you have to excuse me for generalizations that I will make. But this is for the sake of simplicity when I go through all these topics. But I want to start by saying that we have witnessed like an emergence of social assistance in the global south in general. So I would say primarily these new institutions are in the area of social assistance. And one of the things that have characterized these new institutions is that they are poverty focused. And they are seen often as complementary policy tools that are required to reduce poverty, in combination of economic growth, basic service provisions, and so forth. So if you look at this graphic, it illustrates the race of these social institutions. By the early 90s, there were really very few social assistance programs in the world. By 2012, there were more than 160 programs operating in the developing world. So as you can see by different types of programs, the increase in the number of human development cash transfers in Latin America has been in particular important. But at the same time, other kind of policies, including social pensions, are worth mentioning. And also, perhaps other categorical programs that usually focus on households and families in vulnerability. So this increase in social assistance has been very important. And we can refer to it as a new wave in new policy thinking in the developing world. So as I said, I will focus in particular in South Saharan Africa. South Saharan Africa has, over the last 10 years, include social protection. And when we read social protection in that context, we usually think about social assistance. But many of these policy tools have been included and even adopted, at least on paper, on the national social protection strategies in a number of countries and the Living Stone process through the African Union. In a way, I agreed to push the agenda of social protection forward. And also, social protection has been increasingly seen as an important policy tool potentially against major aggregate shocks, like food and financial crisis. And these ideas are coming primarily from the experience of Latin America. So these are, in a way, the green shoots of social assistance in South Saharan Africa. But the green shoots are very diverse. They are very heterogeneous and complex. So we have observed a typology that is characterized by purine contrasts, primarily categorical based on age, either social pensions or focusing on families with households in the southern part of Africa. Whereas in the rest of the continent, in the West, East, and Central Africa, there is a much more heterogeneous typology. Some programs focus on human development, and they provide transfer to families with children. Whereas others are public works, primarily providing cash on a temporary basis to young people, with strong enough to provide work in exchange of income. And also, more complex policy tools that combine asset protection and asset accumulation, like in the case of the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program. But these are very specific cases. But overall, this typology is highly complex. And what we see is that one of the main institutionalized programs are primarily in the southern part of the continent. These are middle income countries, and with relatively strong institutional and also more fiscal space to sustain these programs. It is less clear, though, the models that we observe in the rest of the continent. So the response to many things, in particular the origins of the welfare institutions in Africa, whereas the southern part of Africa, in a way, emulated the experience of European welfare systems and was introduced in the 90s, in particular in South Africa, and other countries in the southern part. Well, in the rest of the continent has been primarily driven by donors. So donors have been playing a very substantial role. And we see a transition from food aid, characterized in the 80s, towards a transition to income transfers. And this is also the response of a number of factors, including conflict and major shocks. So African countries experience shocks, in particular conflict. And this emergency and humanitarian crisis were responded by food aid, which have been transformed into more institutionalized forms of income transfers. There are other forms as well of social protection in the continent, which are more indigenous, which responds to the way societies have organized. And this can take form of savings and also insurance schemes that have been there for centuries. But in effect, the major origins of social assistance in the region responds to either the influence of European settlers, or the influence of donors more recently. So from this kind of landscape, we developed a kind of typology. We identified two models. We called models, the MIC model, which, as I said, is more dominant in the southern part, and is characterized by a strong participation of the state. In the southern part, in a way, the participation of the state was the response also for the reconciliation process that southern African countries went through. So social pensions became an instrument for social cohesion. And in a way, that provided incentives for the continuation expansions and strengthening of these institutions. Some countries like South Africa has experimented with other modalities, but primarily the main or the flagship programs are more age-based categorical designs. The less clear model, what we call LIC model, which is more dominant among low-income and lower middle-income countries in Africa, have been the response of a number of things, as I said, usually food and conflict crisis. But also, the transition has been more complex. And one of the things that we observe is that it is often driven by donor priorities. And also, this model bears in the design. So whereas some are pure incomes, pure income transfers, others combine incomes with the utilization and provision of social services. And there are a number of examples in Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, and other countries. Other characteristics is that many of these programs are pilots. They don't have the scale that we observe in southern African countries. And then the level of institutionalization is much more uncertain about the long-term sustainability of these programs. So other factors that also have, in a way, strengthened the MIC model is not only conflict, but also the demographic and other kind of health shocks that the region has experienced, in particular HIV. So with the HIV pandemic, we, certainly, many countries found many thousands of orphans without the care of individuals. So many grandparents, in particular, grandmothers, started to take care of these children. And then, suddenly, social prejudice became not only an instrument against poverty in old age, but also became a very effective policy response to this kind of crisis coming from HIV. And this is of a different level of magnitude than the kind of designs that we observe in Europe. Because in Europe, we don't have the same family structures or the function is that we observe in Africa. So because we have these family institutions in which family response to vulnerability of members of the family, then the social prejudice has become a very effective way to deal with child poverty. Acknowledging that, of course, not all the children have grandparents, the government and the South African government explore new programs and they introduce the child support grant. But all these responses have been really driven by domestic forces and domestic dynamics. The LEIC model is really very different in the sense that has been also the consequence and the response in a way for a number of factors. First of all, the economic growth that many African countries in the world have experienced in the early 2000s. But also, all the things like the relief, the discovery of natural resources, in principle, open the physical space for many countries to explore these new policy strategies. And also, donors have been changing their priorities over time, particularly since the 90s and the introduction of the MDGs. So we see transition from the donor community from more productivist approach to investing in physical infrastructure like in the 60s and 70s, moving towards investing in human capital. So all these kind of transitions have been important to understand this what we call LEIC model in social assistance in South Saharan Africa. There are two main shifts that we observe. One is this shift from food aid to cash transfers in the context of humanitarian assistance, which is an important thing, but not necessarily in the domain of social assistance, which usually have to deal with much more longer-term, regular, reliable transfers to households in poverty and vulnerability. So as I said, this typology is complex. And it is very hard to predict how the LEIC model will transit. So we don't have a clear idea about how these institutions will evolve on which direction they will take in the following years. Some of these institutions have got some momentum because of the fiscal space that was generated. But now with the crisis that many countries are facing and with the commodity prices going down, there is a level of uncertainty about this. So I want to say that they are mainly three determinants of what may explain the development of these institutions in the future, primarily financial, institutional capacity, and then, very importantly, the politics and the political economy dimensions of these institutions. So the first dimension, which is financing, of course, is a very important one because you start to really simulate the cost of this program and you soon realize that although for some countries are financially viable, for most low-income countries, they are still very expensive. You look at the cost of this program when you, for example, estimate how much would it cost like to finance a basic pension, a child-focused transfer, and an employment insurance scheme. All of these programs vary between 3% and 6% of GDP, which is not small for a low-income country. But then when you start to look at how much those programs will absorb in terms of government revenues, the amount is dramatic. So when you see the needs of these countries in terms of infrastructure, investments in schools and security, and so forth, becomes a very complex issue, in particular, in political spheres. It is very common when you discuss with finance ministers. They are very looked at actually to scale up these programs. And it is obviously they have very limited incentives when the capacity to redistribute and raise taxes is also limited and inadequate. So the reason why it's difficult is because the structure of the economies of these countries are complex. So they are still very dependent on agriculture. The informal sector is very extensive. So it's very difficult to tax. They're also institutional and administrative limitations. And as I said, political economy factors, because many of the governments in these countries operating in very imperfect competitive political regimes. So they have incentives often to avoid taxing, for example, the rich, to finance these kind of schemes. But nevertheless, having said that, there are still some potential opportunities. And we explore this in a number of papers that we have produced. So the first one was what was the ability of countries to redistribute. So in another way, what would be the minor tax rate on the rich in those countries necessary to reduce or eliminate the normalized poverty gap? So we did some very basic estimations. And then, as you can see, the minor tax rate would be simply prohibitive because very few countries have the capacity to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. So redistribution is perhaps a more longer-term strategy than these countries can adopt. But in the short-term or medium-term, it's very unlikely to happen. These are just financial considerations without the political economy aspects of that. Then resource mobilization. Well, there are few potential avenues, as I said, revenues from natural resources. Although, as I said, the variability in commodity prices is very uncertain. But then certainly some opportunities there. There are also quite a few risks. Besides corruption, there are also certain behaviors that, as I said, are very unlikely to happen unless systems become much more competitive. Then there are some possibilities shifting expenditure from subsidies for highly regressive expenditures to expenditure on the poor, like the experience of Mexico. So now the question is, in a way, this is very an important point, but there are risks as well because what we have seen in Nigeria in 2012, when the government decides on due the fuel subsidies and you see these massive demonstrations to the extent that the president was forced to stop the policy reform. So these are important things which are very unclear. And although there are some potential avenues to increase the resource mobilizations, they are not necessarily clear to what extent they will be efficient and sufficient to be implemented by governments in the region. The institutional capacity, well, as you can imagine, some of these governments have very weak institutions and therefore they have resorting to community management and a mix of providers. And some people who advocate these kind of practices argue that they can foster more awareness from local elites and they provide engagement with these groups. But at the same time, based on what we have observed as well, is that you can replicate, well, some kind of social disparities that exist in the community. So whereas engaging with local elites can be very important as well, if there are existing discriminatory norms, they are more likely to be reproduced and reinforced. So these are things which are some of the risks of depending on this kind of institutions. For the southern African countries, I think they've been much more engaging with the private sectors. And this is what we have observed as well in Latin America now. So the government has full control of the programs, but now they are private service providers who are more increasingly engaged in the provision of cash. So of course, the main challenge for those countries is to improve the quality of the services that are together provided by these institutions. But going back to the political economy considerations, so as you can see in the map, there have been important democratic transitions in the region. From the 80s where the majority of countries were really autocracies, there has been a transition to more, relatively more competitive regimes, but nevertheless, there are important challenges. The other important factor is that we know much more about what works. So research has in a way facilitated that. So the number of impact evaluations and studies that were produced on social assistance institutions since the 90s has been tremendous. So we know much more about what works in this area and has been quite important for replication processes in this region. So these, as Donald liked to call it, the evidence-based agenda has been quite important in that respect, at least in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the fact is that we still don't know too much about what is gonna happen. And rather than to give answers here, I just want to put forward some questions that we have for, as we call it, the future for development economics. So we have more questions than answers on these topics. But for example, we don't know what does the emergence of these institutions mean for welfare institutions in the region. So what we know or what we could predict in the leak group of countries is that social assistance may lead to new institutions, that may be poverty-focused. However, in middle-income countries, these emergence of social assistance has also led to parallel institutions. Parallel institutions that have also important implications. You have a system that you have contributory and not contributory schemes, often based on the concept of citizenship. You have light-course protection, vis-a-vis basic protection. You have insurance against contingencies, often life-course contingencies, vis-a-vis investment against structural poverty. So these are kind of parallel institutions which we are not clear what would be the final outcome of how these institutions will evolve over time, but these are important considerations that we don't know at this present time. So we either don't know what are, in a way, the implications of these transitions for the economic and social development of developing countries in more general. And we don't have clear theoretical guidance as well about what we may predict from these transitions. From economists, we can, in a way, is to predict what more opportunistic incumbents may, how they behave, but we are not certain. So we have some ideas about what can happen, but then there are more questions than answers in that respect. So in order to address these questions, I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about what we are doing here at Wider. So we have a project, but then part of this project is trying to build a new database, a database that is compiling information about social assets and institutions. The idea is to collect information in a longitudinal form that will collect specific indicators on programs, institutions, and political economy dimensions. So these are a number of reasons why we have done this. We believe that there are important positive externalities from developing databases, but at the same time, there's a huge gap in knowledge about these topics. So the SAPI aims to contribute in that respect. So this is generally the content of the SAPI. The database will be available at the end of this year. So I invite you, if you are interested in these topics, to use the database. And well, I can leave it here just by concluding that, well, we are not clear about the direction towards social assets that is leading in the South Saharan African region, but there are important considerations. These are primarily related to domestic institutions and financial aspects that will, in a way, predict or shape these processes. And donors and foreign aid has always been an active agent in that process, but donors had not necessarily worked effectively with governments in the region, so there is a lot of room for improvement in that respect. So I leave it here, so thank you very much.