 Good evening. Welcome to the Médend de la Paix and to the Graduate Institute. I'm Hugo Panitz, I'm a professor here at the Graduate Institute and I'm the director of the Center for Finance and Development. I'll be very brief. I just want to thank you and you wider for deciding to have its 23rd annual lecture here at the Graduate Institute. And I'm especially excited because the speaker is Santiago Levy. Santiago has done many things in his career and he will be introduced in a minute. But one of the things that brought me close to Santiago that he was the president for knowledge of the Inter-American Development Bank and among the other things he was directing the research department where I worked for a long time and I always consider res, like we call it, like my second home. So it was great to have Santiago here. So now let me invite Kunal Sen who is the director of UNO Wider will introduce Santiago properly. Thank you Hugo so much for the introduction and also hosting us in this wonderful venue. So let me start by saying welcoming you to the Wider annual lecture 23. The Wider annual lecture is one of our Wider flagship events delivered by an eminent scholar or policymaker who's been a significant contribution in developing economics, social sciences, policy, all of these different areas. And the first lecture was given by Douglas C. North in 1997. Since then the lecture has been delivered by an impressive lineup of scholars such as Santiago and political actors four of whom have received Nobel Prizes in economics. UNO Wider is part of the United Nations University. It's based in Helsinki and we work on informing economic and social policies especially looking at the global south. In this next four years, 2019 to 2023, our research focus will be on transformation in terms of economies, states, and societies and how can we transform economic states and societies to try and achieve the SDGs, the agenda 2030 which is a very important part of the United Nations mission itself. This year's lecture fits perfectly in the research agenda of our research program for the next few years. How would states and economies especially Latin America need to transform the social insurance systems to deliver inclusive economic growth and to reduce informality particularly a very important goal in the SDGs, SDG decent work, SDG8 and this lecture really addresses that in a very central manner. And that's very exciting for us. We know that Latin America and particularly what we see in Chile, they're incredible, they're really significant protests now of social inequality which reminds us the importance of trying to think about the questions that Santiago's going to talk about later today. So we are very pleased to have Santiago here and we're very pleased to have a lecture in Geneva. We've chosen this location for many different reasons. One is that we have a fantastic host here grab the get-in-sit of Geneva but also because we think that arguments we're going to hear from Santiago tonight are really important in the discussion, the conversations happening, the different institutions that are here in Geneva. And we really feel that this particular discussion we'll have tonight is very important, the wider discussion on informality, social protection, inclusive growth, decent work. That's very important to UNIWIRD's own mission itself. We're going to also stream this lecture live and be available to watch online for many months and years to come. And so it's not only going to be having the lecture if you're going to be listening to the lecture here today but many others are going to watch us over in the next couple of hours. I wanted to also thank Lugo Panitza and Jean-Louis Arconne, the gratitude for accepting a suggestion to partner this particular for the annual lecture. It's a very difficult thing for a better partner for this annual lecture, for this topic, for the lecturer and for us. And we're really happy that we could do this together. Now I'm delighted to introduce Santiago Levy who will deliver the 23rd UNIWIRD annual lecture. Santiago is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the president of the Latin American Caribbean Economic Association. From 2008 to 2018, he was the vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank. In 1994 to 2000, he served as deputy minister at the Ministry of Finance in Mexico. At the Ministry of Finance, Santiago was the main architect of Progressive Office Studies, the iconic conditional cash transfer program that we had in Mexico at that time and since then. But to understand that Santiago was doing in Progressive, you need to go back in time. You don't need to go back to 1995 when Mexico was going through a very difficult time. At that time there was an economic crisis and there was a sharp rise in number of poor that led to almost an increase to a third of the population. In the aftermath of the crisis, the incoming administration of which Santiago was a part was faced with limited capacity to assist the poor. With a sharp economic downturn, there was little room to maneuver to increase social spending. At the same time, most anti-poverty policies in Mexico had considered generalised and targeted food and in-kind subsidies that just reached a fraction of the poor. Santiago became undersecretary of finance in 1995 and President Ernesto Zedillo put him in charge of a team that would draft a plan to address extreme poverty. Santiago launched a pilot project to this team in three cities. It consisted of direct monetary transfers instead of the subsidised milk and tortilla programs that were there in Mexico for a very long time previously. But the project succeeded in improving nutrition and the user health services. It did not involve education, which was seen as a key element in building human capital. And Santiago realized a particular problem in that particular, the pilot project itself. He was also considered with the challenge of reaching the poorest of the poor in Mexico where most are concentrated in rural areas. As a consequence, Progressive was launched in 1997 as a conditional cash transfer program. Progressive was innovative in at least four important respects. First, the program embraced by design a multi-dimensional approach to poverty. It linked transfers, income transfers with some of its interventions in health, education and nutrition, placing a strong emphasis on tackling the intergenerational transmission of poverty through into a human capital investment by education. Second, it was one of the most distinctive features of Progressive was its emphasis on the rural poor. Third, Progressive followed a clear rule-based system of identification, selection beneficiaries. So the program was not hostage to discretionary manipulation, associated with opportunity political behaviour that was often associated with previous anti-poverty programs and policies that was in Mexico previously. Fourth, and perhaps the most important, Progressive included an independent impact evaluation protocol that involved the academic research community right from the beginning, both nationally and internationally, that helped not only improving the program's effectiveness over time, but it also made the program legitimate in the eyes of successive governments whenever there was a change of government. And that's why Progressive survived for such a long time. That's a very important anti-poverty program. And thanks to the rigorous impact evaluation methods and, in fact, recognition that we have now seen this year in the Nobel Prize in economics, the three economists who work in the economics, it's a kind of a reflection of that, in my view. Thanks to this impact evaluation methods that were built into Progressive right from the start, what we have is a very rich evidence base that showed the program had very strong positive effects in reducing multidimensional deprivation and building the human capital of the poor. Progressive's human development approach became a precursor to other conditional cashier programs and country after country, in Latin America and then beyond, became, realized the importance of such programs and particularly providing social protection for the poor. Progressive, along with the other iconic Latin American program, Latin America, was a familiar, were the ones that had huge legacy effects and San Diego was very instrumental in popularizing programs in the developing world. But then, San Diego moved to a different area of research and in more recent writings, San Diego turned its attention to understanding the poor economic performance of Mexico, in spite, and particularly after the press of Christ in 1994, impressive macroeconomic stability and close integration of the world economy through and after. In his recent book, Under Rewarded Efforts, the elusive quest of prosperity in Mexico, San Diego uses very rich data meticulously done empirical analysis to show that different facets of Mexico's policy environment, social insurance mechanisms, tax policies, counter enforcement, led to poor microeconomic implications, incentives, that tax the hyperactivity formal segment of the economy and subsidize the low productivity in forms of the economy, leading to overall economic growth is very slow, particularly because of low productivity growth. Reading this book, I was struck by the fact that much of what San Diego had to say about Mexico's poor economic performance applies so well to other developing countries and including my own country of origin, India. So in his lecture today, San Diego will bring together his earlier interest in social protection and his most recent interest in informality. In his preface to San Diego's book, this most recent book that I mentioned, Danny Roderick Harvard University says, and I quote, when sound economics is combined with a practical pragmatic bent, it can be a potent force for good. There are very few people who are as good and living embodiment of this as San Diego led. We in the United United wider would hardly agree with Doni Roderick. And I'm so pleased to invite Don San Diego to help to provide the 23rd wider annual lecture. San Diego, thank you so much.