 Thank you very much Martin. This was quite a overview. I think we still should try to have this interaction between you and Martin, which a question and answer session involves. Now, in order to facilitate the mics and so on and so forth, I'm going to start from over here and then sort of move this way. And if you just briefly say who you are and then state your question, try to be succinct with sort of a view to time. So who wants to start? Okay, up front. Thanks so much for such a fantastic journey through history. I am Amelia Santos from Geneva and XY their stuff. My question is about trade and poverty, which is my area of work. And I basically, if we look at the work of economic historians like Peter Linder, Williamson, as you mentioned, we can see that the current economic order has been in the making for over 200 years. And still the same questions remain whether it is the patterns of poverty are explained by the specializations and volatility in the terms of trade or whether we should focus on the structure of policies ex ante and ex post. So do we have to look at a balance here between policy, the policymaking and the specialization patterns or is one of the two that outweighs the other? What are the two? Well, basically the policymaking, whether it is protectionist or whether it is the pattern of specialization and then affecting countries in terms of trade, for example. That's what let's say economic historians are arguing now. Actually, maybe since we don't have a lot of time we can collect a bunch of questions. I'm just worried that that one would stand a taking about a while. Sure, okay. Tony, you indicated? Tony Addison from WIDA. This is fascinating material. A brief question though is does history show that ultimately, and I use the word ultimately, democratization is essential to meaningful poverty reduction? I think it's particularly relevant for Africa. Okay, anybody else here on this side? Okay, there's one hand down there. Alan Thomas from the IMF. One question, Professor Varian, on your protection and promotion policies, given there are budget constraints in the world, let's suppose, which is something we've been thinking a little bit about, if you have to choose between let's say a cash transfer and fertilizer subsidies, you can't sort of do them both on a wide scale. Given your background, how would you sort of think about making that choice? Given one, of course, is the first one. The second one is more on the promotion side. Okay, anybody else here? Here? In this? Okay, yeah, one there. Yeah, I'm Darryl Sequera, environmental consultant. Concerning the history of poverty, I wondered if you could also consider the two Mughal emperors in India, Akbar the Great and Ashoka. Off-hand, I can't tell you the details, but I know that one of them, for example, had instituted controls through his own officials of the distribution of irrigation water, and that ensured that people didn't starve, or there weren't sections of the population that starved, for example. And there are other accounts of how he managed. So, at that time, maybe you could say that if you sought the American dream, go to Akbar's kingdom, or Ashoka's kingdom, and not to Sweden. The other aspect is that it seems as if you've just glossed over the question of Africa. And one hypothesis here can be that poverty started in Africa at the time of colonization. In sub-Saharan Africa, I mean, and Western Africa, at a time of colonization because if you look at the traditional African societies, although they had kingdoms and so on, there was a kind of social agreement among the different age groups and so on to share essential requirements such as food, land for cultivation, et cetera. And in that way, I believe that there was a certain amount of equality and egalitarianism, although this might not be actually recorded. So these are the two thoughts that I might introduce here. Thank you very much. Okay. Anybody else in this center? Okay. Martin, you want to take a turn? Sure. Put on your mic, please. Still on? I don't have a strong position on Amelia's question on trade. I don't know that you mean Peter Linden, but it's more Jeff Williamson, but I don't think Peter has a view on this. And I guess I've never thought, I'm not one of those who thinks trade policy is the most important thing in development and so on and country comparative advantage and ability. I'm sympathetic, but I tend to think that there are deeper, deeper problems to which trade policy is endogenous. I'm not particularly fond of protectionism. I'm not so pretty skeptical of most efforts in that area in industrial policy, direct interventions through industrial policy rather than indirect forms of intervention. I tend to be fairly unsympathetic, but I hear people like Justin Lin arguing these, making quite sensible arguments against my views on that and I remain open. I think the point I would make with trade policy, industrial policy, I think just don't be ideological about those sorts of policies. I mean, you just look at what works and what doesn't in particular contexts. Trade policy is a huge horizontal impact that we largely ignore through our apparel. Horizontal impact's been, you're not hearing? Okay, I'll use this one. That I won't repeat because I don't have time, but I'm sorry. The trade policy is, there are huge horizontal issues in trade policy that we tend to ignore, and I don't have a strong view on that. Tony's point about democratization, I have a stronger view on that. I don't think classic electoral democracy is all that important to poverty reduction as a generalization, and the reason is you've got so much. What's the country that has had the most success against poverty and human history? It's obviously China. But I emphasize electoral democracy. When I compare China and India, I often ask myself, working in villages in both countries at different times, if I was in classic Hindu style, if I was reborn, would I rather be in an Indian village or Chinese village? And my answer is, well, not knowing which village we're talking about, I'm just randomly placed in a village in one of the two countries, you'd better to be a Chinese village because I'd be freer. Despite the fact that India is a robust electoral democracy in the classic Indian villages I know, I'd feel quite unfree. In the Chinese villages I know, I'd be protesting, I'd be asserting my rights. So there are a lot of nuances here in what we mean by democracy. The importance of being able to search your rights, the importance of political voice, totally agree. But the form that takes and how it's articulated and whether it involves electoral democracy, I'm open to that. I think that evolves in time and in places. I think it also can be a problem at other times, in other places. You know, cash transfers versus fertilizer subsidy, I mean, I'm not going to tell you which is better, obviously. I mean, we can think about evaluation, we know about the tools of evaluation. That's an answerable question by standard methods of economic analysis. We'd look at the costs and benefits and how they're distributed of each policy. But as a little comment, I wouldn't think about conditional cash transfers as purely being protection. Conditional cash transfers are both protection and promotion. And you look at the new wave of progressive social policies in developing countries, they all have that feature. They try to combine protection and promotion. Now, if we talk in terms of where we're talking about, obviously, fertilizer subsidies in India, from what I know, it would be hard to convince me and many people that fertilizer subsidies in India are a great idea from the point of view of poverty reduction and certainly power subsidies, which totally dwarf fertilizer subsidies. I'd argue there are better ways to spend that money. But if we're talking about, say, Malawi in Africa, I could give you a different answer. The comments about colonialization, I've heard those arguments, I find them so passe, about colonialization causing all these problems in Africa. I think it's a much more complex reading of history. The African sharing economy seems to be going surviving well. In Africa today, a classic, I mean, I'm generalizing across 52 countries or something, but I still hear repeatedly about the importance of the sharing economy, the fact that people will hide their money because otherwise they will have to share it with their friends and relatives. Those things in African culture are still throughout the subcontinent, not everywhere, but they're still there. Clearly, colonialization, post-colonial society, didn't get rid of them. They seem to persist despite colonialization, despite independence. Okay, so now we move over to this side. There was one in the middle of my, I think. Yeah, and then one just in front. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Martin, for the wonderful paper. I just have one question. From your reading, it seems that it's only when the elite realizes that they need to stamp out poverty that you're going to have anti-poverty measures put in place. I'm thinking here of the paper that Deswan wrote in the mid-60s about the movement towards the welfare state. And then on the base of that paper, Elisa Rice, who looked at elite in Brazil and South Africa, my own country, I'm from South Africa, and saying that the elite actually see the dangers from poverty only in individual terms, in terms of crime and so forth, and not so much in terms of riots and revolutions. Thank you. Just in front, yeah. Yeah, my name is Philip Baumgartner from the Center for Development Research in Bonn. Thanks for the presentation, and I'm delighted as an economist to be taught about the last 300 years of what we're trying to do today. I think that's very insightful. My question goes to its solutions for Africa. You highlighted that East Asia has been quite successful in the sequencing of some of their policy measures. And then in your concluding slide, you said, okay, what we can do is technology, knowledge, and social, like a political voice. How would you sequence those for Africa? Okay, Surab, yeah. In the front. Thank you. My name is S. Subramanian from the Madras Institute of Development Studies in India. This was an extremely instructive review. I'd just make a couple of very quick observations on the one possible gaps in the literature, which you're probably familiar with, but in case you haven't addressed yourself to it. In the late 18th century, Tom Paine's book, Rights of Man, contains a fairly remarkable section on anti-poverty policy and social security, going into the minutiae of old age pension and addressing underneutrition among children, special provisions for widows and unwed mothers, schooling. And he also has an extraordinarily detailed scheme of redistributive taxation. He speaks of direct taxation in particular of land revenue, and it's interesting that the highest marginal rate which he prescribes is 100%. So I think Tom Paine's early work is of extremely crucial interest in the context of what you've dealt with. Secondly, on the other America, I think a fine piece of work which deserves mention is James A. Yee's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which as recently as the late 1930s was actually banned when it was published before it went on as often happens in these cases to become a classic. Now that's just with respect to the literature. At a more substantive level, the notion of poverty and of anti-poverty policy that you've invoked seems largely to be concerned with poverty as a matter of domestic concern. Whereas I believe we all know that the role which has been played in the poverty of nations by such a global phenomena as colonialism and unfair trade practices and strife and debt and the vagaries and inadequacies of international aid and structural adjustment and so on, which is a sort of stuff which people like Thomas Bogey have concentrated on a great deal, isn't it worth reviewing the whole question of poverty from these perspectives rather than to, because where England was placed in the late 19th century is surely not where say India was placed in the mid-1950s because England did not inherit a system of colonialism whereas India did and colonialism in one form or the other of economic imperialism continues to be a dominant reality of the world in which we live, so an account of poverty and anti-poverty policy which doesn't quite take stock of these global phenomena would appear to be curiously for want of a better world and since I'm in a hurry shall be said deficient. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Anybody else on this side? Okay, Martin? Sure, thank you for the comments and thank you for the early set of comments too. The role of the elites, I'm not certainly not saying that this was just a matter of what the elites decided was possible. It's also a matter of the elites are heterogeneous and the forming coalitions between cross-classes was actually crucial to this and those coalitions took a long time to form around progressive anti-poverty policies but they did form and the constraints on the elites that emerged out of a political voice for poor people were hugely important to this process so I don't quite see it in those terms but there's more we could say on that but we don't have a lot of time but your question about the sequencing that's a nice question I don't have a clear answer to that I think the sequencing of technical progress, knowledge and voice I think technical progress was actually crucial I'd say that it's hard to imagine getting very far on the other two without the conditions being right for technical progress but on the other two I think the historical sequencing has been probably technical progress voice and knowledge at the same time in terms of what, instead of history what should happen I have no view Thanks Supermining for the references I think I know Tom Payne but I'll go back to it I wasn't sure what the other one but you can tell me later James someone or other but it's not an accidental and I hope not superficial omission on my part I'm just not very sympathetic with any of those arguments frankly I think they've been arguments have been brought out to blame poor countries for staying poor blaming imperialism, blaming colonialism I had a lot of years working in development I've just come to the conclusion that so much depends on what countries do for themselves in particular settings and I'd say that was definitely true in India I think there's just a bit of truth of course and obviously there are constraints coming from the external sector no question, no doubt about that but I've become quite impatient with the arguments of blaming domestic policy failures on imperialism, colonialism, whatever I'm just going back to the earlier question I think it's a lazy answer frankly I think there's so many dimensions there's so much policy space for the domestic arena that I think I'm drawn away from those types of explanations okay okay thank you very much for the questions and Martin thank you very much for getting us off to a good start we will have two days where we can discuss all of those policies that we can actually suggest that countries and governments might want to pursue and I would like to say that since we are exactly ten minutes late we will start the next session at eleven ten okay and then we will basically take ten minutes off the lunch break so please reconvene in the relevant sessions at ten past eleven and thank you very much Martin