 One of the things we talked about throughout the day and we cover in depth in the report that Matt Goodman and I prepared and circulated to you as a working draft is the importance of IT enabled global supply chains or value chains. It clearly is a challenge and opportunity that many companies face in dealing with them, but global value chains are sort of the defining structure or defining feature of 21st century trade. These are the reasons that over half of trade in goods excluding fuel is now an intermediate products. It's things our specialization has taken place where production is highly fragmented, things are assembled on planet Earth, not necessarily in any one country. The economies of Asia Pacific have made great strides in dealing with global value chains and they have succeeded in being participants through both upstream and downstream in global value chains. The economies of the Asia Pacific are adopting to these new realities in many ways. There's still a policy gap and we talk about this in the paper and we make some recommendations about how to address the policy gap. There are multiple ways to do this, but I'd give you three headlines. First, there's been a tremendous amount of progress already in the APEC region. If you look at what economists often call the nudable of free trade agreements and creating arrangements, tariffs have fallen dramatically over the past 20 years and the barriers to trade are getting lower all the time and that's good for value chains given the way they operate, given the uniqueness. Second, APEC represents a good opportunity for dealing with value chains because improving your performance as a value chain participant is by and large a self-help program. None of the things that are required for good supply chain performance require a binding commitment in a trade agreement. You can be a good importer. You can run an efficient, honest, custom service. You can have good infrastructure, both physical infrastructure and communications infrastructure. You can have sound rule of law. There are lots of things you can do as an economy to put yourself in a good position to become a global value chain participant that don't require signing a trade agreement. So APEC as an organic consensus-based forum is a good opportunity to practice these things. Also, if you look at the current architecture in the Asia Pacific, we noted in our report and I think it's apparent that there are seven APEC economies who are parties to both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the RCEP. Those seven economies have a strong interest in making the disciplines and procedures adopted by the two larger and separate trading arrangements to be interoperable, which if you're a Singapore and you're a party to both RCEP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, you don't want two sets of rules for how you deal with custom procedures or goods in transit or de minimis or whatever it might be. So there's opportunity for APEC to work on the kinds of things that have been called connectivity or supply chain performance that you heard Aero mention and we've talked about all day. So we think there's a big upside because of the self-help nature of supply chain and performance improvement and because there are economies well placed within the APEC region who have a strong incentive to make future commitments interoperable. I'd like to turn now to our panelists. We have three expert panelists, each of whom brings a different perspective to the question of supply chains in the Asia Pacific. Sarah Thorn is Senior Director of Federal Government Relations for Walmart Stores Incorporated and manages a whole range of international policy and development issues for the company here in Washington. Pamela Passman is President and CEO of the Center for Responsible Enterprise and Trade or create.org, which is a non-profit working with companies and supply chain partners to protect intellectual property and prevent corruption in supply chains. Prior to founding this non-profit, Pamela was Counsel for Microsoft and was in private practice as an attorney. And finally, we have Anku Nath, Senior Manager of International Affairs for Deer and Company, Anku now does a wide range of public affairs and international public policy issues for Deer and Company. And Deer and Company is much more than just green tractors with yellow wheels. They do a lot of work in the agribusiness and in the food security supply chains in the Asia Pacific. What I'd like to do now is thank you for your attention. Second, turn it over to each of the panelists for some comments. We'll have a discussion and then include you in the audience and get you out the door as you intended. So thank you again and Sarah. Thanks, Scott, and it's really a pleasure to be here to discuss these issues. We've been engaged at APEC for quite some time now, and in fact my CEO of Asia Pacific is the chair of the National Center for APEC, so it's nice to see Monica here, so you can tell that I'm going to be a fan of APEC. In truth, we are fans, and so what I wanted to talk to you about today was a little bit about Walmart so you understand our presence globally, but also why we believe APEC is the right place to be looking at value chains and why we are so supportive of APEC. So Walmart, we're a really big company, and I think, and I say this and people kind of just put it in context here, we're now a $466 billion company. We have over 2.1 million people who work for us around the globe. We're in 28 markets in the retail presence and we sourced from about an additional 60 markets. So we buy a lot of stuff, we move a lot of stuff, and our primary mission is to help people live better by saving them money. Our core customer is the underserved consumer, the consumer who generally doesn't have a lot of disposable income and is choosing between things like how do I feed my family and how do I close my family. So in order to actually serve that customer, which is the core Walmart customer, we need to do things more efficiently and we need to do things better, faster, cheaper. And so we really do align with the sort of mission of how do you make sure that things are working better because what's happening around the world is the barriers to trade are essentially costs and they're costs to us, to the ultimate consumer. And so we're fans of trade and we're fans of economic integration and liberalization anywhere we can find it because we actually do think it redounds to more efficient economies, better competition and ultimately to the consumer. So when I think about APEC, the word that really does come to me is connectivity, both in terms of the work of the APEC related to supply chains, but also as you heard in the panel before in terms of the connectivity between the business community and leaders around this issue of integration and economic liberalization. And I really wouldn't underestimate that when I had worked on APEC earlier in my career and I came back and I said, what's happened? And I felt like Rip Van Winkle, it's been 10 years, 10 years ago I was working on voluntary sector liberalization and all of these other sort of programmatic issues. And I thought, well, it's kind of a sleepy place. I really don't see a lot of progress. And I think I've come to believe that that's not at all true. That the progress you see is incremental. But the progress also in a world where you've had a global recession, where you have people taking backward steps on liberalization, you have a forum here where people are actually talking about how do I do this better? How do I integrate and how do I remove barriers? And so you have an enabling environment to do things like the TPP, like the RCEP, where you actually have people think in the right way every day and you have people meeting with the business community every day to think the right way about these core issues. In terms of the specifics and connectivity, we are really excited about the work that's happening on supply chains. And we're very hopeful of a good outcome in Bali related to supply chain connectivity. We really think of APEC as an incubator. And the work that APEC has done on supply chains and identifying the choke points, the eight core choke points to supply chain connectivity is important work. But the work that really needs to be done is to say, how do we erase those choke points? What are we doing to say for the policy, what are the right policies? And then how do we put that capacity building against those policies to make sure we can see success? And as Scott said, the good thing about APEC is it's not zero sum. I think when you enter a trade agreement and recently in the WTO, I've been sort of confounded by this is the goal seems to be, how do I not liberalize? How do I get to protect those things that I want to protect as opposed to realizing that liberalization is actually in my own self-interest? And certainly in this area of trade facilitation and connectivity, it's in your own interest to have products cross your borders more efficiently and more effectively. It's in your own interest to be able to have your exporters be able to export to the region. You know, we're big and we can never come probably any barrier through a workaround, but the people in our supply chain tend to be small. So 96% in the United States of our suppliers are SMEs by definition, by volume. And they can't figure out how to get around those barriers. And so it's incredibly important for all economies to say, how do I make it so that anybody can be able to export and anybody can take advantage of this regional integration? So we're very hopeful that in Bali we'll see this sort of statement from leaders that says supply chain connectivity is important. We want to create a capacity-building fund so that we can have these policy recommendations and we can have real concrete progress against this. And I do think it's important because we're also very interested in a trade facilitation agreement in the WTO. But if you have a work program already in place with no binding commitments, but with a work program that says here's a barrier, it might be customs administration, it might be single window, it may be release times or automation. If we have a policy change and a work program and we do it and it works, you set up these economies to be very well placed to take on the commitments in the trade facilitation agreement. And also to know very well what are the things that I need to do to make my economies function better. So that's what we're hopeful for. We hope to see it come out of Bali. We're very supportive of the work that's being done in this area. You know, and back to sort of the framework and the business government perspective, I do think it's very, very important to have that interaction and have that real, real-time communication between business and governments. We've been to several leader meeting CEO summits and I have to say that conversations we have are meaningful conversations with ministers at all levels. And as an incubator of ideas, APEC has been phenomenal. In my other life, I work on a program at Walmart, our global women's economic empowerment program. And one of the core principles of that program is to double our sourcing from women and businesses around the globe. APEC is one of the only fora that has identified a work program against those major barriers for women and businesses related to access to market, access to finance, and leadership development. That is, in some ways, really incredible statement to think that you have these economies of age specifically saying women matter, women in the economy matter, and we want to figure out how to get women and businesses more integrated. And I'll tell you, the women and businesses that we work with are the smallest of the small businesses. So when I talked about the supply chain integration and the barriers, to get these women into formal supply chains and trading, we have to tackle those true barriers to trade through that supply chain connectivity. Similarly, in terms of sectoral liberalization, APEC is doing it. They're not just talking about it. They're not worrying about it. They're looking at environmental goods and services liberalization, and they're actually doing the work. And I don't know if this is going to be the model going forward, but it does set us up very well for having these regional agreements. And finally, I'll just mention an area that we're interested and excited about and think there could be so much more work done is this area of e-commerce. We're no longer just a brick and mortar business. We're brick and click. People come in. They come with their smartphones. They look at our stuff. They order it online. We don't mind, because we hope they'll buy a few bananas as they go out the store. But this is what's happening, all businesses. And it's not just Walmart. It's almost every business is thinking about how we leverage internet infrastructure to make our businesses more efficient and to reach more customers. We certainly are. We fully believe there will be places that we enter in markets that we entered. We may not enter in a brick and mortar sense. We'll enter through e-commerce and have distribution centers. And so thinking through what are the rules of the road related to the e-issues are going to be particularly important to us. And we probably will straddle the users, the internet architecture people, as well as the IP people, as well as the content folks, because we're all of those things. And so we feel like having that dialogue with the business community is looking at barriers, whether they are cross-border data transfer, whether there are fair use issues, is an important place. And because you're not going to worry so much about what is my binding commitment on cross-border data transfers and what if I have a national security or privacy concern, you can actually have a very robust dialogue that kind of demystifies these issues. And hopefully we can get some good voluntary action. And that leads to better commitments. So that's my connectivity shield. Thank you, Sarah. Pamela. That was great, Sarah, providing a lot of context and switch on your microphone. Scott, also thank you for the opportunity to participate and to add Create's voice to the call to action to APEC leaders to build on existing work to establish a more integrated and trust-based approach to value chains. Create.org is a nonprofit organization that was established in late 2011 with a specific focus on working with companies to proactively engage their supply chain, their business partners, to share leading practices on how to protect intellectual property and how to prevent corruption. And Create.org is a reflection of the new reality of trade, that the rise of value chains are altering patterns of trade and competition. It's also a reflection that value chains drive more integrated and close working relationships and are most successful when there's a high level of exchange of information, technology transfer, and trust among all the parties. Yet in many markets, and in a significant number of markets in the APEC region, the rule of law and local enforcement of intellectual property laws is weak, corruption is growing, and the rules-based trading system is not sufficiently addressing these issues. So a common high standard policy approach to value chains, fully supported by governments and collaboratively implemented by the business community, will be critical to harnessing the economic potential for all countries and players. While a number of issues in areas for policy reform and leadership within the APEC framework have been raised today, two issues that impact at a foundational level, intellectual property protection, and anti-corruption, I think should get more visibility and attention within APEC. In addition, these two issues go really to the heart of a lot of the other issues that you've talked about today that impact supply chain integrity and impact trade facilitation, investment, the digital economy, connectivity, and of course the regulatory environment. We've been engaged with a diverse range of multinational companies headquartered in the US, Japan, China, Mexico, Brazil, and Europe. And in these discussions, we continually hear very common things about the challenges they face within their value chains and outside of their value chains. And these go to the issues of counterfeit and pirated products, misappropriation of trade secrets, and the prevalence of corruption. And yet, as we all know, there's a whole series of bilateral, multilateral, regional, global agreements, arrangements on IP, and on corruption. Yet the problem is growing. It's estimated that there is $650 billion of counterfeit and pirated products, which is expected to grow to $1.7 trillion by 2015. And there's estimates that show the cost of corruption equals more than 5% of global GDP, or $2.6 trillion. We also increasingly hear from the business community and particular supply chain managers that are very concerned about these issues. In a survey of supply chain executives, a significant majority of them are concerned or very concerned about counterfeit products, data security, breach of intellectual property rights, and supplier ethical standards. More than 70% of Asia Pacific companies believe they were vulnerable to corruption and bribery, according to a survey by Kroll in 2012. We continue to read about counterfeit and pirated issues in the defense industry and pharmaceutical, chemical, and auto, all having very significant health and safety risks. The use of pirated software embedded in products and use in manufacturing is also quite significant. And I do want to spend a little time on trade secrets, because that's an issue that we're hearing more and more about. A forester consulting study that surveyed Australian, European, and US companies regarding their data security practices found that trade secrets comprise an average of 2 thirds of the value of a firm's information portfolios. And that increases to 70% to 80% for knowledge-intensive industries. And outsourcing and global supply chains magnify the risks of trade secret theft. And in particular, small companies who don't necessarily have the ability to patent all of their inventions rely quite heavily on trade secrets. Yet trade secret protection is far from uniform across the APEC countries. While there are efforts underway to include firm commitments towards strong statutory protection of trade secrets, both criminal and civil protection in the TPP, it's not clear if and how soon that would be put into place. The low criminal penalties or lack thereof in some jurisdictions is actually very troubling. And as criminal penalties are believed to provide a greater deterrent than civil penalties alone, this movement to implement criminal penalties is very, very critical. But even if penalties are strengthened in the TPP or otherwise, getting the capacity of law enforcement in these countries to be able to enforce the law will be very important. So we hope that the APEC governments will recognize the importance of trade secrets to economic growth, to investment and development, and support the TPP efforts and other efforts to advance laws to provide strong criminal and civil protection for trade secrets, as well as facilitate the sharing of information and intelligence on trade secret misappropriation. So APEC has an opportunity with the momentum behind TPP and RCEP to drive a consistent set of policy standards and procedures for ensuring the integrity of supply chains. Government and industry should work together to develop a consistent set of best practices and where appropriate work to codify such best practices and international standards and develop methods to verify that such best practices have been adhered to. If such standards are developed and serve to reduce government and industry concerns about the security and integrity of the supply chain, there'll be less incentive to enact trade barriers in the name of national security or otherwise. This fact makes the quest for internationally standardized approaches well worth pursuing. And APEC has a rich history in promoting liberalization of trade policies and sustainable business practices. And as Bart Peterson outlined this morning and Bob Wong reinforced this afternoon, it's done a lot of good work on anti-corruption and transparency. And it's also done very good work on government procurement both through codes of conduct and capacity building. This all provides APEC with a unique role to play in developing a high standard Asia Pacific framework that addresses these key issues. Create.org has worked with multinational companies on how best to protect IP and to prevent corruption to learn what are these best practices that companies can implement both internally and in their supply chains. And this has led to the development of create leading practices for IP protection and create leading practices for anti-corruption which is currently being piloted by 60 companies in China, India, Taiwan, Japan, the US, Mexico, Germany, and Brazil. And this is available in English, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese. And what it does is it helps companies take a measure and improve approach which is designed to share leading practices with supply chain partners so they can improve standards for protecting IP and preventing corruption. The online service is scalable and practical and enables multinationals to engage collaboratively with their suppliers and with their business partners to assess and benchmark the current processes and systems in place and then improve these systems over time. It's been incredibly rewarding to receive feedback from individuals in companies in China and other parts of the world who've participated in create leading practices. They're very interested in improving their management systems to world-class standards and view this program as a way to gain competitive advantage, expand business, and move to being a more strategic partner with global customers. By APEC governments and companies, first working to share leading or good practices, second encouraging companies to develop and implement business processes and management systems to address these issues, and finally deploying tools and training to ensure their improvement. The APEC countries will have a strong foundation for the successful implementation of TPP and RCEPT and for 21st century trade and economic growth. It's about creating both an incentive system to drive the right behavior and providing the tools so that each company can demonstrate its capacity to add trustworthy value to the value chain. APEC has an opportunity to develop the architecture on what it means to operate with integrity and widely held respective business practices. Thank you. Thank you, Pamela. Anko. Thank you, Scott. And at the top of this, Scott very kindly introduced me. I'm with John Deere and he also introduced Deere as a company that does more than sell shiny green tractors and that's the point I'm gonna get to in just a moment. But I'm gonna first start off by saying that like a lot of other companies in the US and around the world, Deere is very much committed to the Asia Pacific area. And it's for a number of reasons that many of you are already well aware of probably more than even I am. But we'll start off by just talking a little bit about the large and growing population there. When I say large and growing, I'm not just saying, okay, our population rates are going up. I'm also talking about the growth of the middle class. In places like India and China, especially you see the middle class growing by leaps and bounds, but also in the smaller countries as well. And when you see the middle class increasing at such a rapid pace, you also see consumers in that middle class demanding more sophisticated goods, more of them, more varied goods, and the ability to get them quickly. A lot of those consumers probably aren't looking for John Deere tractors, but the food that they're getting might be somehow touched by a tractor or the road that they use to get to their grocery store might be paved by one of our construction equipment machines. So it's like we're talking about here, it's a value chain. There's a lot of different moving parts in getting these sophisticated consumers what they want and getting them all of this at the scale that we must now serve. So just to give you a little idea of what Deere offers these consumers, primarily, I'll go back to our mantra at Deere, is that we are committed to those who are linked to the land. And so I talked a little bit about the ag side and the construction side. Those are the two big ones. And it is tractors, but it's not just that we're producing a tractor, say, you know, wholesale in Waterloo, Iowa. These tractors are built of several components, thousands of components, engines, transmissions, cabs. But a little bit more than that now, we're looking at the use of modern technology like GPS systems. Our tractors in the US and North America and several other countries around the world now make their own cell phone calls. They're connected to computers. Imagine that you're a farmer in Thailand, for instance. And you don't have a lot of margins. You know, you're growing rice and you have a margin about yay big in which to feed your family. You know, if you're running a tractor, let's say 10 hours a day and you find out through a GPS enabled device that your tractor is idling 30% of the day, imagine the fuel savings you would have if that tractor all of a sudden, that information can now be used to use it more efficiently. So those are the types of technologies we're using and you need to think about this whole value chain of which we have to procure all of it and have to procure all of it quickly enough that the consumers can be served. So going to that quickly enough part, we're trying to serve pretty much every single one of the APEC economies in one fashion or another and all of those parts are not coming from the same location. Like I said, we've got operations around the world, we've got facilities around the world, about three dozen of them just in APEC countries alone. And when a farmer needs to sow his crop or needs to harvest his crop and has ordered a piece of equipment from us, let's say it's a tractor, he has maybe a few days, maybe up to a couple of weeks within which he has to sow that crop. Otherwise he and his family or his business are out of money for that year. If you don't have the right machinery at the right time, Mother Nature doesn't wait because a customs official has decided that I don't really understand this part, I don't really know where it's coming from, I don't know who you are or even worse, why don't you slip me some cash into the table and we'll get your good over the border. We need to work on a more efficient scale. So that's really where I wanna say that APEC comes in. And it's an interesting way that DEER has engaged in this topic and that's through the policy partnership on food security. And it's one of the programs under APEC through which the private sector is institutionally engaged with the public sector on both forming policy as well as implementing it. So it's important to note that as much as the private sector through APEC through NCAPEC works with APEC, in this case we're actually starting from the ground up, we're starting from the idea level all the way through seeing projects to conclusion. And now the policy partnership in food security doesn't sound like a direct correlation to global value chains, but it really does because at the end of the day you're talking about markets and markets obviously as we all know function on a global scale now. So I'm gonna just start off a little bit by talking about what the PPFS is. And it starts off by defining food security and they say food security exists when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. So food security therefore means producing food but also having access to food when say your family farm down the road or the fields 100 miles across the country aren't able to provide it. In a lot of these countries subsistence farming has been the way of life for generations upon generation. That is no longer the case when you've got these sophisticated consumers who now want to have chocolate chip cookies and brownies and everything else hot dogs, hamburgers, whatever it is that we're eating here but also that folks in China are eating, the folks in Japan are eating, the folks in Thailand are eating. To get that food security you have to both be able to increase production. You've gotta be able to increase it with fewer resources. That's both labor, that's a limited amount of land that's not going, it's not gonna increase for sure and often land is being gobbled up by infrastructure and urbanization purposes and limited water resources as well. So when you're looking at those limited resources and you still have to feed a growing population you've gotta start talking about importing food and there again you see the value chains coming up. So through the PPFS, we've come up with four different working groups and this is just so you have a little background. It's a fairly new organization, the PPFS, founded in 2011. So we're still in the infancy of really putting projects on the ground. And just recently we finished with the program under the first working group which has taken stock of what's already out there. There's a couple others that I think are interesting, one on facilitation on investment and infrastructure development and another on enhancing trade and markets. And it's good, interesting to note that again it's the private sector working hand in hand with the public sector to come up with the projects that are going to be developed under each one of these working groups. Already 81 different areas for reaching the food security goals have been identified and now the next step that we're very excited about it dear and throughout the PPFS is to approach each one of those 81 areas with a business plan. Not a policy, but a business plan. How do you create a sustainable business plan to reach these 81 different goals that will then help you reach that final goal of food security? So it's a very unique partnership. I think it's got a lot of potential and we're excited to see where it goes. So thank you. Thank you very much. Let me, before I open it up to questions from the audience, let me make one observation which is I want to tie back to something both Aero, Arzero and Bob Wong talked about which was connectivity. One of the things you heard from the panelists today is how important connecting with suppliers, customers and partners is and how much know-how and practical intensity is involved in these tasks. Sarah talked about Walmart's very sophisticated connections with their supplier networks and the way they're eliminating barriers to their suppliers. Anku talked about how Deere connects with their customers and that connectivity, that ongoing real time IT enabled way of connecting allows the transfer of immense amounts of know-how and Pamela talked about the importance of that know-how and protecting it in the supply chain. In fact, from the work I've done, I would characterize the real difference between 20th century trade and finished goods where, which the GATT and all the rules were developed to deal with and to compare that today's 21st century value chains, the real difference is the importance of knowledge and the way knowledge gets dealt with among suppliers, between suppliers in the transactions of the supply chain. So think about the last 20 years of trade policy and how much energy has been expended on the subject of pharmaceutical patents and access to medicines. And then consider that that is a tiny piece of the total scope of know-how and intellectual content that makes the trading system work. And one of the reasons I think companies and firms like dealing in APEC is there's a bigger picture to be seen. You can talk about things like connectedness and connectivity and drive things that are of genuine value and keep in mind there are issues of intellectual property like trade secrets. If you can't protect trade secrets and you can't settle disputes through decent contract law in your country, you're not gonna be a place that companies wanna locate suppliers. So there's a real live impact on people's lives and jobs in this. But I just wanted to make that point just struck me as I heard the three of you talk, how well connected they were and how important this is. The know-how, the intellectual content of trade is becoming more and more valuable. So let me stop there and open it up to questions. Same three rules for questions. One, wait for the microphone. Second, identify yourself and your organization. And third, ask a question, don't make a statement. So yes, Greg. Thank you very much. I'm Greg Rushford. I publish an online journal on trade called The Rushford Report. Could you talk a little bit about how your hopes for the TPP are and increasing the economic efficiencies of your supply chains and in what areas? Sure, so in full disclosure, one of the co-chairs of the Business Coalition for TPP is very supportive of the TPP engagement. In Truth for Walmart, we have an interest in almost every single chapter of the TPP. Certainly in all the market access negotiations as well as in services and investment. We, I think if you were looking for the highlight takeaway, it's a high standards agreement. And for that, we mean no exclusions. We mean we think if you start to unravel pieces even on the market access side, then it lowers the ambition overall. Because you take away dairy or you take away sugar or you put ridiculous rules in for textiles and apparel that don't lead to market access. There's no incentive for anybody to do higher standard agreements related to state-owned enterprises or data transfers, which are sort of these cutting edge and new issues. So we're excited about it because we do think that among like-minded countries, you should be able to overcome some of the challenges we've had in broader negotiations where we can't even get to the concept that we should have high standards agreements. But I think the jury's still out onto a lot of those hard decisions about sensitivities have yet to been taken. But I am sensitive that this isn't an agreement that's gonna get better with age. So I do think we should capitalize on some of the momentum to make those big political decisions. I agree with Sarah, but I'll also add to that. I didn't maybe make it explicit when I was speaking a moment earlier, but data flows are a really interesting part of what's going on in TPP. They really haven't been addressed in this manner in the past, but to think about the amount of data that is necessary for any organization to exist these days, especially organizations that have hundreds, thousands, millions of customers that they're trying to serve, it's enormous. And to protect that data, to ensure that it's secure, that the people who need to have it do have it when they need it, to make sure you're not duplicating efforts by having to put servers in every single country in which you operate, things of that nature, I think are something to watch. I think it's gonna be a hot topic for years to come. And it's something that we're excited about seeing where it goes at dear. And I would just reinforce the importance of a high standards agreement. And particularly in the intellectual property area, it represents an opportunity to advance that. The US Chamber just issued a very helpful paper on trade secrets and the TPP discussion, which I would recommend for those of you that are interested. And this issue of state-owned enterprises, it's critically important in this next chapter of trade that the rules apply to all the players. And so how that issue is advanced is very important. Just one point on the digital economy. I'm more and more convinced that if you care about small business, you want strong disciplines in the digital economy. Because that's how small businesses reach consumers. This is really different. 20 years ago, the NAFTA was concluded, there was no commercial use of the internet. The NAFTA was a wonderful agreement. But nobody thought about what's going on today 20 years ago. And so this is an opportunity to get it right. But if you think about ways of actually attracting and reaching customers like eBay or the business to business platforms, similar, ways to get goods to customers that didn't exist through express package delivery services, you don't have to hire a customs broker or a freight forwarder. There are firms like UPS and FedEx who would do that for you. And third, global payment systems. Once again, digitally supported. You can actually get paid for something, which is small business. One of the reasons you didn't do business outside the United States is you had to set up a whole lot of things to be able to get paid for your services. So there are some things in this agreement that are potentially breakthrough that will help a wide range of businesses, most importantly, small businesses who are looking for ways to reach global consumers. If we dial back and come up with a low standard, we're not gonna get there. Hi, HK Park from the Cohen Group. Ms. Nath, you mentioned corruption. I'm kind of curious if you're aware of any initiatives at APEC or other institutions that are addressing corruption in Asia, or if that's even possible to address it from an institutional or regional level. I've not worked on any of the corruption aspects in APEC. I believe there is a working group on that, but I think it's absolutely something you can address at an institutional level. I think we have to start a conversation somewhere that's as good a start as any, and frankly, I think that's been happening, if not just through APEC, but through several different fora. I think corruption, it's partly cultural and it's all over the world. I don't wanna single out APEC economies by any stretch. It happens in the US just as much as it might in other areas, but it's also a symptom sometimes of the policies that are put in place. How do you compensate, customs official, do you compensate him or her based on the amount of revenue he brings in or on doing their job, just getting stuff across the border that's supposed to go across the border? Things like that I think aren't always well understood by economies that all of a sudden are being exposed to trade like they've never experienced before, and so it's a conversation I think worth having. I'll just add that there's a great deal of activity happening on anti-corruption, both within the APEC framework and Monica can talk more specifically about it, but in fact there's a working group next week meeting on this, and what the APEC framework is so helpful on is bringing government and business together and the sharing of best practices both in the business context and in the government context. And what we've seen over just the last few years is a number of APEC members have actually implemented anti-corruption laws. We see that in China, we see that in Mexico, we've seen that in Taiwan, so there's a lot of momentum behind it. So in many ways, there's an opportunity for APEC to take this to the next level. The OECD is doing very important work here, the World Economic Forum, Transparency International, many organizations, but what's critical is that the APEC leaders bring a spotlight to this, and I was thrilled to hear from Bob Wong that he wants to help working with the Chinese hosts of the 2014 year to advance this issue even more. And I agree with him that it's ripe. The interest in the Asia Pacific region has grown quite a bit. Everybody sees this in their own self-interest to advance this issue in their own country and in the region. Yes, sir. Hello, Michael Müssmer, I'm an exchange student from Germany. You talked a lot about how governments should work together to fight against, for example, an industrious espionage and introduce, for example, international studies or race capacities of law enforcement. But how do you deal with situations where governments themselves are responsible for industrious espionage? Because in Germany, recent studies show that companies start getting more and more afraid, especially of foreign intelligence services who might use their power to collect data about their private informations and give them to their own companies to support them. So what do you, how do you deal with this situation? Well, in the last many months, there's been quite a bit of visibility to what governments do, what companies do, what individuals do. And I think having this visibility is making everybody more aware of what's happening. There's more government to government discussions, both bilaterally and multilaterally. I expect there will be even more over the next coming months. The reality is, there's a lot that companies can do to protect themselves, both from an information technology infrastructure perspective, but also in implementing processes and policies inside of their company. Very significant threat of trade secret losses from your own employees, from your business partners, from those companies in your value chain and your supply chain. And there's a great deal that companies can do by implementing business processes and secure information technology systems to better protect themselves. Yes, sir, final question. Yeah, my name is Frank Barone. I'm a private international venture capitalist. And my job is to start at the very bottom of your supply chain and make sure it works and feeds into you. Recently I've been investing a significant amount of money with myself and others like myself in the very low end with microfinance and microinsurance and a lot of the countries that you're talking about. We have found that we have had significant success in being able to circumnavigate corruption, circumnavigate slow food chains and feed chains and make significant progress. We look for dramatic increases in capability as a venture capitalist, not incremental, but dramatic. We've seen dramatic in several countries already. We're bringing a lot more of it. We are in fact bringing back some of it to the United States itself. I'd like to ask you the question, does APEC have on its agenda, microinsurance and finance? Do you know? If not, I would... I think the answer is yes, but Monica might know. For those of you, if anybody's still watching the webcast and needs amplification, we believe there is a process in the APEC finance ministers. But thank you for the question. And thank you all for your attendance here today. We welcome comments on the report and feedback of any sort. Thank you for joining us here at CSIS. Have a good day.