 OK. So, welcome, welcome everybody to this event, and we are very pleased to have this night's visit when joining the organiser with ActionAid. This is an event which is part of a serious event that the economics department saw as it has been organising on many of these themes. Last week we were discussing which is to do after the end of this year. This week we are moving to the Southeast Asia. We are very pleased also because we had some discussion around the theme of this presentation of this report and the work that ActionAid has been doing in Bangladesh over the last months. I had the pleasure actually to collaborate with Lila in the review of this report. We thought that actually this is going to be the launching event of this specific report, the Diversified Conqueror. We got a copy of the case from outside, but we thought we want to start with this report and move the discussion forward in terms of the work that ActionAid is doing at the moment on the ground, and our speakers are going to give us an idea of that, and those involved in other academics are very active on research related to the main themes of this report, which is really focusing on industrialisation, structural transformation and the role of jobs, creation of jobs, good quality jobs and so on. This is really, for many of you following the current development debate, is really one of the main key areas of investigation. Let me remind you that just the last human development report 2015, published last December, was around work for human development. This was the first human development report addressing in a so explicit way the importance of productive transformation and creation of works. This night we are going to have a number of very distinguished scholars who have been working a lot on this area. I will give a brief introduction, and then I will pass the floor to ActionAid to start with the first introduction, and then we will have a first round of reaction, and then we will open the discussion. We have a small room because we want it for the more interactive type of session. So the presentation from ActionAid is going to be given by the co-authors of this report, Lina Caballero and Mr Kaziak, who is actually arriving at the moment, so don't worry, we are going to vote on them. Lina owns a PhD in Government from Low School of Economics, and she's a policy advisor for private sector and development finance at ActionAid UK, and she has been working directly on the ground on this specific report. She has a very good knowledge of what she's going to present. Mr Huck is a political economist, he's been working on urban environmental change and governance policies, civil society immigration, and he's currently an advisor for ActionAid Bangladesh on the national government strategy. Previously, he was involved and worked as a senior lecturer at the Institute of Government Studies at Brock University. Then we have some friends and colleagues from the UK. I will start from Dr Hinta Chopra, who is a research fellow at the Institute of Government Studies, one of the, as you know, living centres in the UK working on development issues, and she will bring the important social protection angle into the discussion, so we will start with her to comment this report. Hinta is a social policy researcher with a post on rights-based policies and programming. She's been working extensively in policy analysis, bringing lots of political issues into that analysis, and in particular she's been working on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the food rights in India. Then we will link up this discussion with Professor Jeff Kenner from University of Nottingham. He's actually going to bring a legal perspective into this discussion. He's a professor and chair of European Law at the University of Nottingham at the Faculty of Social Science, and he's made expertise in the field of European Union Employment Law. He's been involved in various projects, European projects related to these themes. And finally, we have Professor Burshtak Khan, he's a professor of economics at SOS, he's one of the world-leading institutional economists himself from Bangladesh, working for over the three decades on issues related to institutional change, governance, corruption and decorruption, industrialisation, rent-seeking, and you might be interested in some of his more recent work specifically on Bangladesh, working also with Nobel prizes like Douglas North and Joseph Stiglitz. He's involved in the task force on industrial policy in the Columbia University Initiative for Policy Dialogue, and he's been consulting various international organisations on these themes. I will leave Burshtak to give the last set of comments because I think that would open the discussion to the broader situation of Bangladesh today and the political economy challenges that this country is facing in relation to these themes. We are going to have, as I said, around 10 minutes each, and to start with, you want to wait for your... It's actually okay because I start a presentation, so hopefully Kazi will magically appear when it's his turn to come in. Yes, we plan this all along. I'm going to stand up because I realise that you will only hear my voice and not see me if I sit down. So first of all, I want to thank all of you for being here, and I want to thank Antonio Dita, Burshtak, and Jeff for joining the panel. It's really, really great to see that there's actually interest for this work because we think it's a topic that's really important. Just to give you a background, so this publication, Diversify and Conquer, and the new one, What a Way to Make a Living, is part of a project that I've actually been developing since last year, actually 2014. I keep forgetting where it was in 2016, and it's a project about calling for economic transformations that create more and better jobs in developing countries. Of course, this transformation, we think, should be led by developing countries themselves, but necessarily there needs to be policy support from the global north, from international actors. Today, as I was saying, we released What a Way to Make a Living, which reflects more broadly on the project, which is a three-country pilot so far, which is Bangladesh, which is what we will be discussing today. But we have also been working with chambers of commerce and businesses in Uganda and Vietnam. So this report, What a Way to Make a Living reflects on our work in all three countries. So do have a look, keep in touch, because we will be holding a series of events this year around What a Way to Make a Living. This is a longer piece of work that Action A is engaged in. But today we're here to talk about Bangladesh. Bangladesh, in its efforts to industrialize and to grow, has pushed the manufacturing industry or has championed as its manufacturing industry garments, ready-made garments industry. They have created, so the industry was first established in the 1950s, but it didn't take off until the 1970s, but it didn't really take off until the mid-1980s. So far, or up until the latest reliable statistics, which was 2013, four million jobs have been created, garments represent 84% of the country's exports, and roughly they make up 10% of the national GDP. So they have put all their eggs in the garment basket when it comes to manufacturing. But we all know that garment jobs are pretty exploitative. The majority of garment workers are women, and they earn very little money. And the industry, as other export-led industries that have existed in the past, replicates a side to discrimination against women, which holds women back from thriving and being able to access decent and dignified jobs. Now post-Ranaf Plaza, some improvements were made. Action Aid has been working with garment workers for a very long time. One of the ways we work with them is we set up rights cafes around factories or in locations where garment workers work, et cetera, where the factories are located. And we spoke to some of the garment workers we've been working with last August when I joined my colleague Kazi to do some on-the-ground testimonial work, or key informant interviews in DACA. We spoke to a few of these women, and they were saying, I mean, yes, things have changed a little bit. Yes, they have built canteens. Yes, we now get our salaries paid in time. But there's a long way to go. Our salaries are still not a living wage. So even though the minimum wage was raised, it's still not a living wage. And the reality is that they have nowhere else to go. There are no other job opportunities for them, and so they're a bit stuck. And that's the case with job creation in general in Bangladesh. There isn't really the capacity for the vast amounts of job creation that the country needs, even less for these jobs to be decent, dignified, and really to produce the income, the human capital, that the country needs. So what we're suggesting, what we're recommending, is that Bangladesh transforms its economy and develops a diversified, high value added manufacturing sector. And we can get more into that in detail in the discussion if you want. But what we're saying is that, first of all, it's no longer a good idea to put all the ads in one basket, because if you rely, if you're at the bottom of the global value chain and you rely on foreign dynamics, you need to have a backup in case things really go wrong. Secondly, what we're saying is that Bangladesh needs to invest in emerging manufacturing sectors that are of higher value added. What does this mean? It means that of the total value of the finished product, a higher percentage or proportion of it should be created in country in Bangladesh, rather than just assembling pieces where very, very little value is added. So therefore, if we look into higher value added, this means bigger profit from more profits for the business owners, which then allows them to pay higher wages for the workers. I'm not saying this is automatic, right? You do need to create a whole system legally, but also of monitoring on behalf of civil society of unions to make sure that workers' rights are respected, that living wages are paid. So it requires a larger effort. But if Bangladesh can compete on something else than cheap labour, which is what it's been competing on for the garments industry, then it has a better chance, a little bit more leeway to do this. So this is something similar to what Taiwan and Korea did in the 1950s to 1970s, which was create a long-term industrial policy to start investing in these emerging sectors. Now, it's not that easy, and I'm sure Kazi will tell you why it's not that easy, but we will get to that in a minute. And then we're saying that this is actually possible, so we don't think this is just a fairytale or a wish list. There are two emerging sectors that have already been identified by government planners in Bangladesh, and the last five-year plan, which is a national development strategy, two sectors were identified, which is light engineering, which is light manufacturing. It's normally smaller to medium, but growing businesses. This is a picture of, you can see that we were actually there, because you can see Kazi and myself in the picture that we were there. These are businesses that are located both in the old part of the city of Dhaka, but they have also larger production sites out of the city. They produce anything and everything from the parts for a ceiling fan to agricultural machinery. They meet currently 90% of the local needs, so there is potential. There definitely is potential. The second sector that has been identified is electronics. Again, we were there. These are actually pictures taken by us. This industry at the moment is more of an assembly industry. There's a lot to be done to improve, of course, the conditions of the workers. We're not championing these two sectors. We're just saying that there are options and Bangladesh needs to explore these options, but it's not going to be that easy. So during this field trip, we talked to businesses in these two sectors, particularly in the light engineering, the light manufacturing, and we wanted them to tell us the opportunities and the challenges they themselves see as key stakeholders in this transformation, and I'm hoping that Kazi can talk to you a little bit more about that. So if you'd like to come over here. Sorry, I was almost too early for the next workshop. We plan this naturally. I think he's here in time. You know, the Malays are quite reputed to be late, so I thought late. Actually, I'm coming outside from London, and so far, since I'm not that familiar going around London, it seems crazier than Dhaka. Of course, that's not the case. Not quite. So why do you want me to start from here? Yeah, so maybe if we can share with colleagues some of the experiences that we've heard from the businessmen that we talked about, that we talked to? I mean, when it comes to economic policies, I mean, there are so many experts sitting here, one definitely from my country, and we're proud of him. So it's really a bit scary to speak in front of them, but of course they're always there to correct me. What we felt as part of our India's research over the last one and a half years, and of course, as part of this study, there is the kind of sort of economic fundamentalism, so to speak, about macroeconomic policies and hands off government with respect to economy in the country. And definitely, when it comes to industrial policy, that is very, very apparent, and you can always see that. So, and it seems, I mean, since I mean, as part of this study and the overall study that I'm part of, so we wanted to take more of a political economy approach. And it seems that if you see, I mean, of course, there is this huge love affair with governments nowadays in the last 20, 30 years. Professor Khan has some interesting writings about how actually governments came up and was kind of taken up by the political elites, whom I always call political economic elites, because I think Bangladesh at current stage of its capitalist development. So, I mean, you cannot be just political elite and economic elite. I mean, it's so kind of mixed up. And you are a big business, and you are an MP, and you are a minister, and it's like that. So, it seems that one or the other sector is picked up. So, now it's done. Just say 30, 40 years back it was true. So, it seems like just one or maybe few, but it's never more than that. It's usually one, and maybe few more sectors who are actually not at equal level of attention with it. Are picked up. And they are to keep political economic elite satisfied. I mean, if you see governments now definitely, I mean, people who have been benefited from governments were very close to power of various stages. And that's how they became benefited of this. And governments was also sort of a, was a kind of government project. I mean, it was never the way World Bank promotes. I mean, how they did so good in terms of it because it was open economic policies and market trade and free market policies. It's never that simple as we see in Professor Chan's writing that I was referring to. So, that is a big drawback, we think. And when this thing happens, they are giving attention to one sector. So, now it's governments, it was true before that. That is not only just prioritising that sector, but it is often done at the cost of other possible sectors. For example, I mean, governments, I think hardly few countries will find that it is separately treated as a sector. I mean, common sense and also the way sectors are kind of, of course, they are different explorations, but the way they are understood in general, I mean, it is supposed to be part of largely the textile sector. But in Bangladesh, governments kind of thrived at the cost of textiles. For example, I mean, we have this conditionalities that certain percentages of your inputs in governments have to be domestically sourced. And there was a huge fight over the years between the governments industry leaders and the textile industry leaders to bring it down. I mean, the textile industry leaders, they didn't want this ratio to go down, that how much you actually domestically sourcing. And the governments were bent on to like get away with all these kinds of requirements and let us, you know, it's hurting our business and it's hurting employment, it's hurting women's employment, blah, blah, blah. Of course, I mean, they wanted to get rich very good. And often, I mean, we also felt that these sectors, I mean, this kind of, this prioritising just one sector, this is often linked to this global value chain. And of course, it's always, and it seems historically, it's always at the low end. I mean, now we said the low end of the government value chain. Maybe before it was due, I mean, I don't know that detail. So, yeah, but at least for governments, it's more because I mean, despite the fact that we are kind of like, I heard that we see in the documents, we are one of the largest governments producers, I think, just off the channel. But then when you saw this very low end, and we consistently have been in the low end, it's not just that we are not only diversifying across the sectors, but even within the sector, we are not diversifying. So that's a big thing. And when it comes to this, again, going back to these policies, as I said when I started, I mean, it is so much about economic fundamentals and very little about what businesses actually need or demand. And in that cases, definitely, I mean, if you are a business who are outside governments and maybe few other sectors that are even at the mission of that, we are told to give policy priorities like labor and seafood. So, if you are not part of, say for example, if you are an electronics sector guy, if you are an electronics businessman or an engineering businessman, definitely you are really kind of at one margin of the power map if we come up with that of the different sectors. And also how big you are. I mean, even between the governments, I mean, if you are really a big government business, definitely you get much out of the policy and government support than if you are a small government's firm, like subcontracting firm, who are really struggling to stay in the game. So going back to, I mean, I think there has to be much more to be done by government and in terms of, I mean, that is not just in terms of policies, like macroeconomic policies, but you also have to go to different set of policies and not just policies, like programmes, services and institutions. I mean, we think, I mean, to operationalise policies, I mean, these three things are kind of necessary ingredients. I mean, short of them, I mean, your policies are just policies. They are in paper, they look very good. You come up with them in every five, 10 years as happening with industrial policy. And we could see it from very close, since we were part of it this time. And so even there are a lot of aspirations this time that, okay, so we will do something different and we will do actually do something this time. And one manifestation of that is that beforehand, in the previous industrial policies, there never used to be an action plan. That's quite strange. How come it happened? But this time, I mean, they are coming up with this action plan. But still, even in this process, there is continuous discussion that, I mean, at the end of the day actually, nothing much will be done. It will remain as another policy and then we get back to it like in 2020, I mean, when five years is over for this policy. And in relation to that, I mean, the experiences that the businesses have, I mean, and when we are talking about the businesses here, of course, I mean, this is more in terms of the electronics and the engineering sectors because I mean, it's really difficult to actually take so many sectors as cases. So we more like focused on these two. And also there were other reasons. I mean, we wanted sectors, they were like more value-adding, more technological intensive and the sectors where you fight in them, you become more like, more, yeah, more technology and more innovation capacities. And also in the sectors who employ a lot, who can employ a lot and more like their intensive and also where there are a lot of these two sectors. As you know, like the kind of focus action it has. So definitely, there were the reasons. And what happened, what are the moments or what are the areas in which they have interface with government, these businesses, these estimates that some of which we visited or like some of the leaders of which we interact with quite often. So one big interface is when they have to pay tax, be it income tax, be it business tax, so the revenue people. That's the most, I mean, the group of people of government agencies that they interact with. And from that experience and compared to their interface with revenue people and then what they are getting from government in other terms, in terms of policy support or program services, they have a feeling that all the government machinery cares about is how much they can extract from them. You see, not much change from the polynomial times. Although maybe it's a cross-stake, but I mean back then it was like how much we can extract stereo, like how much we can extract from business. But never, at least as far as their experience goes, how much they can be given back. So when it comes to industrial policy, we have been fortunate to or unfortunate to interact with a lot of businesses, business representatives of the chamber sector representatives in the committee and also outside the committee. So they say that, well, we have this nice industrial policy and the previous ones were also good. And so you have something in the industrial policy. So this will be given or this cross-stake will be given or whatever. And that is not necessarily translated or coordinated with your tax policy or revenue policy. And so when the test group comes and says, okay, so now we have to give this engine give. And they say, well, according to industrial policy, and this is okay, then go and pay your tax to the industrial ministry people. To us, I mean, all we care about is the circular and this tax policy document. So I mean, so it was also a discussion there and we also failed and as part of our way said, because we are again going to work actually going on another paper kind of extension of this and that would be more like recommendation oriented. That is, you don't have this integration and coordination and combination between the policies. I mean, you have this separate policies were going like on their own. And because because I mean, when it comes to industrial policy in particular, of course, economic policy in general, I mean, you have to have this coordination. But when you don't have the coordination, you don't have integration far from that, you often have the, what should I say, like sometimes I mean, many of this policies are actually undercutting each other. I mean, you have something in industrial policy is undercut by tax policy. And you have something in the tax policy in the environmental policy and there is undercut by the industrial policy, for example. So that's a big problem when it comes to like this policy attention, even. And then, yeah, going back to my discussion about that one or the other sector is picked up. Just stop me when I'm like, run out. So I stop. Maybe they talk too much. Yeah, so I just read about, say, five minutes or like, listen that. So, I mean, when you have this, I mean, one, one sector disproportionately, even priority, or like preferred. So you have a huge powerful beneficiaries group coming up, definitely. And they try to kind of hang on to that sector. For example, now, I mean, it's sort of a heresy if you even raise any question about governance. There are many viable questions, not only the ones we are raising, but there are also many other versions. You can raise, but you can't raise it. I mean, it's a heresy. I mean, if you're doing that, these people are against the development of the country and conspiracy and nowadays everything goes back to the integration conspiracy. So, I mean, everything is like that. So that's a big problem at this point of time. And we felt and we continue to feel and particularly the kind of mandate we have in action. That you also need an extensive socio-economic infrastructure for any kind of industrial development. Because, I mean, it's not just, okay, so you take policies, programmes, services and institutions for the businesses, but also the people who work in the business at the labour. They are families, new. I mean, I think, I think Lilla already told about this FGD that we had with the government workers. So, some of the concerns, I mean, of course, wage, depressed wage is a great concern. But then some other concerns like education of their children. I mean, they often can't actually educate them. I mean, they can't send them to good schools because it costs a lot. And then the schools they can afford actually are not good. Many of these government or local government schools. Healthcare, I mean, they already, they really survive on the wage. It's really strange how they survive. That can be another episode or huge programme of survival, I think, this reality show. This will be much more interesting how they survive on that wage. Cassie, we will do different rounds. So, I think if you don't go up from the main points. Yeah. So, yeah, that's another thing. I mean, this, you have to have this programme, services and institutions for socio-economic infrastructure in relation to industrial policy. And there is a huge, the way neoliberalism, so to speak, neoliberal perspective is mainstreamed in the government system. So, any discussion about government involvement or government investment or facilitation of businesses, even from within the government, it's said, no, no, no, that will destroy the business, that will destroy the economy, that will bring bad government intervention. So, I think that is another important point. I mean, to kind of see government role in new life that you're already doing in Europe or USA. So, I think I stopped here for a moment. Okay, thanks a lot. Thanks for this initial presentation, which both gave lots of put for thought in terms of number of challenges and complex issues and how they are interdependent and difficult to disentangle. So, our three distinguished speakers are going to try to help us disentangle them and put them in order, in a sense, according to their different perspectives. So, main point, this has to start from a social protection, social rights angle. I think Kaz has been mentioning these issues and already we've been discussing about specific work conditions and standard. Ditta would like to, we should like to actually show a video to start and then she will give some remarks on it. Can I just introduce the views? Of course, sure. Okay, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to this. Just a bit in the background on the video, I thought of this video only because one of the main things in this report really is that of unpaid care work and women's double discrimination in terms of both the discrimination in the labour market for then also in terms of the entry into the labour market. And just to say that weird ideas produced this video, but this was in partnership actually with ActionAid. We've been working very closely with ActionAid on their women's rights programme and this was one of the outcomes that we did and so if you look at this video and then I'll come back to my talk that will be great. So, in four minutes. I'm just hoping that it's actually... So, coming back to the report by Wersifine Conker, one of the main themes that comes out again and again. Again and again, in the report is that of gender dynamics that are going on within the garment sector. I mean garments are talked about as an industry that creates jobs for women but it's recognised and recognises that there are positive effects. There are some positive effects that are mentioned in the report through interviews, things like rate of freedom and autonomy, ability to send remittances home. Women are able to exercise choice in when they get married, perhaps get married a bit later. Those kinds of positive effects. But the negative effects are quite large as well. The report mentions firstly a huge amount of discrimination in the labour market. Women are paid less than men, something that we call the gender wage gap. They're dismissed when they're about to start a family and most of these jobs are, as Lila already said, that the wages that they get is definitely not a living wage and sometimes not even minimum wage. I think it is the lack of organisation and the lack of realisation in the sector. Then there's these undercurrents in the report that one has to tease out a little bit more and I'd like to reflect a little bit on those. For example, the report talks at one point about garments being seen as women's work as it's come naturally and we need to explore the fact that this is quite discriminatory because one of the reasons perhaps of why women or rather these jobs attract such low wages is not just because it is the garment sector, not just because prices are being competitively reduced by other sectors but because it's seen as women's work and therefore seen as undervalued and underpaid. So there is a there's a direct connection in that sense. The other thing that I found really alarming was this whole idea of the fact that the industrial sector, the garment sector is now adapting what we call a lifecycle approach to social protection to actually suit their benefits. Younger women are preferred over because they have fewer care responsibilities and the report talks about the garment sector providing maximum of 10 to 15 years of employment for women. It's interesting that this is an approach that at least we in the people who work in the social protection industry or in the social protection sector have been arguing that governments should take a lifecycle approach to understanding that women face certain disadvantages and then it was quite alarming for me to see that the industrial sector actually takes that and inverts it and says well we can use this lifecycle disadvantage to our advantage and that was really concerning. The report also talks about this interconnectedness between the nature of the labour force participation and the unequal burden of care work and that's what I'd really like to focus on the last few minutes of my talk. We talk about industrial transformation, we talk about economic transformation, creating better jobs, creating decent and dignified jobs but we also talk about economic empowerment of women. What is economic empowerment of women? Is it just labour force participation? Is it just making sure that women increase their labour force participation in large numbers? I don't think so. I think it's probably a lot more than that and we need to be cognisant of the fact that when we talk about economic transformation or economic empowerment we are also talking about not only the increase in the opportunities that say new sectors like the engineering sector can or the electronic sector can provide to women but also the choices. What are the choices that they have in the type of sector that women want to work in? In the kinds of locations that they want to work in perhaps they want to work in home based work or perhaps they want flexible jobs and I think this is also not just about women working. I think that unless and until we change the working culture where it's considered that people can put in long working hours ultimately we're not going to be able to change the distribution of care work within the household because if the man is expected to work for long hours because he's outside etc and is not allowed the flexible working conditions that say women are then how are they going to take on some of that care work. So I would like to end with two key terms that I would like to introduce to this to this discussion. One is the idea of a double boon. How about creating paid work that not only empowers women and empowers in the true sense of empowerment but not just creating opportunities with all these discriminations of various levels etc but also actually creates paid work that empowers women but at the same time provides support for their unpaid care work opportunities. I think that when this report talks about promotion of small and medium-term enterprises my concern is that we not forget the role that the public sector has to play in ensuring essential public services. Small and medium enterprises cannot pay those level of taxes, cannot take on those risks that we want them to take on and if SMEs have to be at the forefront of this economic transformation then they definitely need the government to support them in terms of taking on the responsibility of provision of essential public services of small infrastructure of childcare facilities. So I think that the idea of double boon is really important in terms of understanding the economic transformation and the other word that I'd like to leave you with is optimizing. In economics we talk about optimizing participation, optimizing economic participation in the labour market or whatever and I think optimization needs to be really a bit again more than that and the idea is that we need to optimize economic participation without deepening the time poverty of women but also without increasing their worry about both the quantity and also the quality of care that their families are receiving. Women don't want to necessarily subject and leave their families, they're driven to work in sectors which are low-paid and exploitative and I think we need to allow them to choose better pay and more empowering types of work and that can only come about when we talk about the role of women as an integral part of these new and emerging sectors and not as an afterthought. Great, thanks. That's the floor now for Jeff. Thank you, thank you very much Antonia and colleagues. I was very interested listening to and Lila Wink has a few minutes ago and I know you've come from Dakar, I've come from Nottingham which I suppose is the second furthest away here but I was just thinking that it's strange to think that during the first globalization what 150-200 years ago Nottingham was the garment sector of the Midlands. You know just look at the street names particularly Lace Market and the whole lace industry, you know the engine of the empire at the time and then of course going beyond garments and so one needs to look at the maybe the approach of the European Union or trade organization governments and so on must be to think beyond where we are now just occur to me really but if I could just say where I'm coming from the Human Rights Law Center at the University of Nottingham were one of 19 partner institutions would you mind putting up this? Yeah 19 partner institutions worldwide which is conducting research for the European Commission on the scoping effectiveness of the EU's human rights policies it's known as frame that's the acronym anyway. Our main research at Nottingham focuses on the effectiveness of the EU's engagement with human rights actors institutions the UN the ILO the WTO and states as well as non-state actors social partners civil society and groups representing indigenous peoples women human rights defenders. Our outputs are available through the website www.fb7-frame.eu and you can see behind you some of the various activities that that are coming up and more importantly that all of the reports including the one I'm talking about will be available to download and already you know on the website and I'm currently co-offering a frame report on the nexus as we might call it between the European Union's policies on trade development and human rights and part of that report is a case study to be published later this year on the EU's policies towards Bangladesh post in particular post Rhino Plaza and the way in which the EU's general system of trade preferences the GSP as a trade policy towards Bangladesh and alongside other initiatives notably the EU's very active involvement in the Bangladesh sustainability compact is having an influence an influence which is very much focused on garments as it says to promote continuous improvement in labour rights and factory safety in the garment and knitwear sectors in Bangladesh and my interest as a lawyer is in looking at this sustainability compact and wondering what exactly it is is what we would call soft law or perhaps reflexive law an instrument or a process which might at some stage through a constant monitoring approach and surveillance lead towards hard labour laws and social rights of the kind that Deepak's talking about but there's no guarantee that it will lead to that and it is focused on garments and therefore our study is looking primarily at the garment sector and I found it very enlightening to to read both of the action aid reports stressing the need for diversification beyond garments as the means to transform Bangladesh to move away from this dependence that we've been hearing about particularly bearing in mind and this interests me again as a as a labour lawyer in the way in which in the export processing zones the EPZs which are special zones where wages are low where labour law doesn't touch or not touch in the same way and provide rights to people where those seeking to organise labour are as the report highlights often subjected to human rights abuses and I found it as a staggering statistic to reading the report the one you cited earlier that 84 percent of exports come from garments making Bangladesh the second largest exporter of garments after China and global trade policy particularly as pursued enthusiastically by the EU in a very ahead of you like of human rights human rights follows in the slipstream but trade policy has played a large part in contributing towards this dependency on garments the EU grants Bangladesh the most favourable trade preferences that sounds good it means that under the what is called the the GSP everything but arms arrangements the EBA there is duty three quota three access to the in the EU's internal market for these garments it and that applies in respect of all goods except arms that's why it's called everything but arms now Bangladesh only qualifies for this most favourable status because it is an LDC qualifying as one of the least developed countries under the UN measurements its relative poverty effectively accentuates under the way trade policy works this emphasis because of the the benefits that come with this free trade environment and this acts as a vector for the global value chains the brands and retailers in the garment sector to exploit the so-called comparative advantage that comes with low wages and minimal regulation of factory standards yes the everything but arms arrangement does require ratification of ILO labor conventions but it is passive it is unilateral from the EU it's not a partnership and this is these requirements to comply with labor standards is part of a conditionality without engagement with government or civil society now that was very much the situation before the the sustainability compact came in and certainly prior to Ryan Applaza monitoring was under resourced the prospects of the GSP being withdrawn by the EU because of labour rights violations on the ground was miniscule now post Ryan Applaza the EU had a choice keep the GSP and start to engage with the Bangladesh government and civil society and trade unions and other social partners or withdraw the GSP until such time as the ILO and other actors including NGOs were satisfied that Bangladesh was complying with its international obligations the EU chose the former interestingly the US chose the latter I'm happy to sort of develop the reasons why it's a highly politicized issue in the US but the EU took the very unusual step of suspending its system of preferences for brief to Bangladesh for breaching labour conditionality provisions and it's kept this policy under review but I think I'm correct to say in saying that three years on the US GSP remains suspended so it's a form of trade sanction of course the downside of that is that many people could lose their jobs and mainly women and this is why even some of the EU's main critics such as the international trade union confederation the ITUC have not supported withdrawal of the EU's GSP although I note that in the latest report there is some mention that this should be considered by action aid that this should be considered as an option now one of the questions that we're looking at in our report is is engagement through the sustainability compact alongside maintaining the GSP a better approach to addressing these issues of labour and social rights and promoting what the EU calls responsible business conduct now in our case study we evaluate this compact as a novel model of deep in going ongoing engagement with stakeholders that can lead as I said to a process towards stricter laws that are more effective now there are three pillars to the compact one respect for labour rights two a structural integrity of buildings and occupational safety and health and three this idea of responsible business conduct fitting in with the global idea of corporate social responsibility and so forth now the partners were originally the EU the ILO and the Bangladesh government but later on the US joined and now Canada is also in the compact alongside local social partners the ITUC and NGOs including Human Rights Watch I don't think action aid is formally part of it as such it was initially so so that's just how it's organised but you can see straight away that it is an idea based on a broader approach than the conventional and a top-down idea the basic idea as expressed by the director general of the ILO guy rider is to have a single coherent endeavour in order to avoid a fragmentation of efforts through multiple initiatives which contradict each other and so on now there are in fact despite that statement many other initiatives but I'll confine my comments to the BSC and I'll try to be brief because I've probably used up almost all my time already now it seems to me that this idea in many ways has a potential to be transformative if it is implemented in good faith because of this emphasis on deep engagement and wide participation it is an external externalisation of the EU's new governance concept that has been experimented on internally in areas like employment policy and social or social rights this idea of experimentalist government is one that involves strict target setting which is the case under these each of these three pillars that I mentioned ongoing surveillance with the partners culminating in an annual technical status report most recently in January of this year and identifying continuous improvements through mutual learning or best practices so-called benchmarking and in this way it is hoped concerted pressure is placed on national and local authorities to improve standards and on the global brands to act responsibly and confidence it is hoped is given to local actors women's rights groups trade unions and others who feel that they are protected and have a voice under this system now the results have in fact been rather mixed but implementing rules of the amended labour act approved by the earlobe have eventually been adopted but this has taken three years and an implementing act isn't actually implementation it is just an act now this act does include freedom of association collective bargaining and workplace safety but there has to be this real implementation over 300 new government industry trade unions have been registered this number has doubled but the latest report highlights a slow registration process and a concern particularly highlighted by the itc that there is a tendency towards government approved or somewhat muted unions there have been safety audits of hundreds of factories under many hundreds of new inspectors but this is very much behind the schedule that was set in the previous report many brands and retailers have signed up to a uniform code of conduct for factory audits but it is only a code of conduct you know and one has to question again the enforcement and the obligations that go with it there's been a damning report however published by the itc emphasising the EU is sort of happy to sort of publicise these headline figures but if you just highlight three particular problems one trade unions remain banned in export processing zones two there remains a climate of impunity for anti trade union violence and three the labour inspection regime is inadequate the 2016 report does then set clear targets to address each of these problems including a commitment by the government to upgrade labour rights in EPZs so to be consistent with national law and ILO standards but we have to I think that will have to be watched very closely it also recognises the the need to complete recruitment of inspectors and to ensure effective inspection of all export-oriented garment factories including subcontracting factories to provide a safe working environment so I think there is some evidence that this process of ongoing engagement does force through change but it's it's it's slow and it's based upon the idea that there will be this continuing dependence on the garment sector it will improve think develop improve the garment sector to one what but it's interesting this thing particularly to what a DPAC and certain others what is missing from this list there is no mention of equal pay for women and equal access to job opportunities there is no mention to a living wage yes the minimum wage as you said and there is very difficult mention of secure contracts so the issue of dismissal of young women after 10 15 years is not addressed and there is no mention of including parental and sick leave and unemployment benefits in a really meaningful way so it's addressing the kind of technical issues which are important of course and lifesaving of factory inspection and basic labour rights you know the tick box of the ILO core labour standards but it doesn't go deeper than that and I think this is a really important concern so this is I think just highlighting what we are looking at here and just in conclusion I would say that this report has really I think for my point of view in the research that we're doing really opened my eyes to how much more we need to look beyond garments as you say and to say that all these act this is important we've really got to improve conditions in the garment sector and the fact that the EU has rather belatedly now seeking to address this is important but at the same time there's this inherent tension with the trade policy and with the demands of the European consumer within the EU's internal market to have this free flow of garments at the lowest possible price and this is still the driving motivation okay thanks this is another very interesting set of remarks and I think the two presentation really match very well in terms of understanding you know the complexity of the national level, the industry level, the firm level but also this international perspective that the older efforts and the innovation of the efforts that even ILO has been having over the last year even conceptualising the idea of decent work and this is being reflected in the current discussion of the SDG how we measure these things or many of these things I think resonate with many of the current issues. I think now we have opportunity to go deeper into understanding the number of political issues that actually make the situation even more complex than what we have done so far. So thank you. Thanks Antonio. Before I get to the political economy I'll talk a little bit about economics and then maybe come to the political economy. I really liked the two documents that Action Aid produced I think it's very important that we start talking about creating jobs and diversification and diversified economies because this is really what's been missing in certainly in the development discourse although not in the academic discourse but in the actual practice of development. It's important also to then locate all the good things we are talking about in terms of empowerment and wages and conditions and so on in the reality of a world which is incredibly competitive where you have retail giants and buying houses pushing down prices to the absolute bare minimum plus one cent right. They know exactly the cost of production in different countries. It says somewhere in one of the reports that Bangladesh is the lowest wage country it's not right so Ethiopia is trying to break into the government's industry it has even lower wages than I'm so I was actually advising the Ethiopian government on industrial policy and garments so we visited Ethiopia I visited garments factories in Ethiopia. There's an intensely competitive world right. The buyers know exactly what the cost of production is because they go and visit and they know the wages and they push the prices down to the bare bones. I think in understanding why Bangladesh is successful it's not just that it's got low wages it's not just that it has a competitive liberal economy with the limited trade union rights and all the rest of it. You have to look at the history and I think Tazi was referring to this how the garments industry was constructed because low wages aren't helping the electronics industry aren't helping the engineering industries aren't helping a million other things which could happen in other words low wages are not enough so why did the garments industry succeed it succeeded because it actually was extremely lucky in learning how to build the organizational structures and the global chains of suppliers and and buyers and learning how to do the inventories and the quality control and the work management systems and there's a very interesting history of how they did that which I've written about and some of you have read it which is really about transferring that organizational knowledge from the South Koreans to Bangladesh at a critical moment when the incentives were aligned and the MFA gave the resources to pay for that to happen and that's how it happened now I don't have time to go into it but it's a very interesting story. If you want to raise competitiveness and productivity and conditions and so on and so on in the garments industry you have to ask yourself how do you raise how do you construct new organizations which can produce which can be more competitive and have higher productivity right which means investing in completely new organizational structures it's not the problem is not about buying the machines the problem is not about do you have workers with the appropriate levels of skills so we always think of it as a skills problem or as a financing problem right Bangladesh does not have a financing problem there are people with enough money to invest in lots of new industries and there are lots of people with enough skills and they're leaving the country right so that's not the issue is how do you put that all this together in an organization which is competitive right and competitive means you have to raise your productivity at least to Chinese levels right and that means a lot of learning about organizational building has to be done this is the basic point if you can't do that then all the stuff about putting pressure from the EU and so on and so on is just going to knock people out it's not actually going to raise wages it's not actually going to raise diversification or new industries or anything and this is the trap that you know you said about joined up thinking we need to also join up the thinking with how to raise productivity and diversification I think this is a first step but I think a lot more needs to be done so let me add some other thoughts which I have on exactly on the electronics and and engineering sectors because I've done some work over the last 20 years also on Thailand and Vietnam and Vietnam and Thailand are respectively I would say 20 years and 50 years ahead of Bangladesh in precisely those sectors so they're a very good model of where a country like Bangladesh needs to go okay now if you look at the electronics sector in Vietnam it's a sector which I have all machine tools in the 1990s Vietnam had a lot of investment in these small engineering type electronics type producers making components and making little bits of plastic and making wires and then what happened what happened is that when they opened up to global competition all of this collapsed the same thing happened in Thailand Thailand had very good components industries and electronics industries in the 1980s by 2000 it had all gone what replaced it were global multinationals so Samsung has come in in a big way into Vietnam and and Samsung says we would love to buy components from Vietnam but the stuff you're producing is just not good enough we are not going to put that into a Samsung phone right and there's no way your components producers are going to reach the Samsung phone components level anytime soon so actually we're going to import 95 percent of our components from Taiwan and Korea and so on and so on assemble this in Vietnam so what's happening in Vietnam Vietnam's electronics exports are shooting up it's their biggest export earner now but it's basically assembly right and they've missed the boat Thailand missed the boat if you look at the history of how countries actually successfully built components industries that survived and became components suppliers to OEMs which came and then there are very few examples now China is full of these examples because China has massive clustering but China is not an interesting country to look at in political economy terms because what they can do no one else can right so it's not a very good example by the way South Korea and Taiwan which are referred to in your are also not good examples right because of political economy reasons so what do we we have to look at how did successful components industries develop in countries where the state has very limited capacity to enforce anything where you have large scale political corruption where you have powerful elites which capture resources and they can't take them away from them and so there are very few examples but there are right so the Indian automobile sector and the components industries that developed they're a very good example right they survived they built up the capacity to produce globally competitive components which then the OEMs used and Indian OEMs are also using so if you want to really engage in in the electronics industry in Bangladesh and have a sustainable strategy which is not just a flash in the pan for two or three years you have to you have to start thinking okay how do we build an electronics how you take the Dholaikhaal and Jinjira people who are doing the engineering they are not producing anything which can fit into an OEM type activity right so you have to say which of these companies can we build up as a components producer okay of widgets whichever whatever the widget is and then say how do we take that to a globally competitive level what do we need to do that's a very different question from saying let's just support all kinds of people who want to do you know I want to build some spare parts for a phone or I want to do some refrigerator repairs I mean this is a different problem right if you want to have a sustainable industry which becomes like the garments industry in Bangladesh you have to ask yourself how do I construct a globally competitive components industry and that means I mean that means you have to say I want to study the global supply chain and I want to identify which bit of it in Bangladesh is likely to be globally competitive then you have to find another country which is moving out of that which is probably a country like China and then you have to go to China and say we want to shift this entire sector to Bangladesh and we just don't want to buy your machines we are going to we are going to give you incentives to come and set up that entire organization in Bangladesh with your supply chain and your markets and then if you succeed we'll give you a hefty price and the price has to come at the end not before right and that's how the garments industry succeeded that's how the automobile industry in India succeeded we need to replicate this we need to understand how these things work I think that would be my ideal you know where do you go from here kind of story those kinds of industries won't be your corner shop little mom and pop you know gingira types but but it might be some of the bigger ones there might be some bigger supply chains you are really talking of companies which employ 300 200 people at least which have a capitalization of several million dollars at least even as a starting so you're not talking of microcredit type stuff right and then you need to find links with the Chinese and others who are moving out of those things and move them lock stop and barrel over that can be done but I don't think this government's industrial policy plans have anything to do with that and and this is where I think outside influence and pressure and mobilization can help that's the only way to raise wages and conditions it's actually creating jobs which are not only higher wage but also competitive at that higher wage right you have to be able to sell against the Chinese and the Vietnamese and whoever else is in the market and perhaps then Bangladesh can empty some space for the Ethiopians to come in and and to the government but but unless we have that continuous upward movement it's not going to happen let me just end because I think a couple of minutes the political economy that Antonio talked about is the critical part of industrial policy how do you actually provide resources to your emerging electronics or engineering firms in a way that won't be captured won't be captured by powerful elites this so-called political economy elite that you referred to which is patently there which is extremely well organized which captures resources all the time and not just in Bangladesh but all developing countries or most of them if you look at the South Korean Taiwanese strategy which you really promote in this what a way to make a living booklet their strategy was to give lots of subsidies to companies as investment funds to build capabilities to build new organizations then they monitored what they were doing with it and then when they didn't perform they took it back and not only they took it back they punished those people by restructuring those companies and changing management and so on this is not remotely a possibility in in any Asian African country apart from the northeast Asian ones which had a very peculiar history of Japanese colonialism which created a very specific kind of society and a power structure this can't happen in Bangladesh right so those examples are not even starting points I think we need to find out ways of financing capability development in ways that can't be captured and and what I do in my own work is to make a distinction between x anti and x post prices right you can give the money x anti and then you need a very strong state which has capacity to this won't work right it's not not in Bangladesh so you have to think of x post ways of financing it that is you find a way of rewarding success after it is successful and make that very credible and that encourages the private sector to invest because they wouldn't invest it without that price but the price encourages them to invest and if you then find a way of using that investment to raise capabilities you're on the way to success and if you look at what made the automobile experiment in India work or actually the government's industry in Bangladesh take off it was basically x post prices it was the x post price of the MFA which was passed back to the Koreans who then invested it in transferring capabilities to Bangladesh that's the secret of the government's industry success and the same thing happened with the Indian auto industry right so I think we need to find out new creative and very innovative ways of creating incentives for financing that transfer of organizational knowledge how to run a factory in and and make globally competitive components in electronics or and these that knowledge is very specific to sector right so someone who runs a very successful garments industry has no clue how to produce a very successful widget for a for a phone because that has a different supply chain different quality control issues different inventory management issues different all kinds of issues which are not things you can learn in a book it's tacit knowledge is also learning by doing it needs to be financed you have to build those organizations that's the challenge of industrial policy challenge of industrial policy is identifying the right problem and then finding the right way of financing to solve the problem so that your money doesn't get captured by corrupt and politically connected people which is the norm in in the place like Bangladesh so I think I'll stop there. Thanks, you know thanks very much for this another big piece in the in the puzzle and if I may just start then I'm doing some work in Tanzania and other eastern Africa communities and relation to disaster is usually reaching the standard is a massive problem and they often lots of comments who are trying to exactly reach that level of competitiveness that allow them to be in international market require a number of testing facilities a number of type of production services that it's very difficult to find because for many of them there are important courses associated with that so the story of countries to be managed to do some of this catching up with the technology standards and so on have also benefited through this provision of quite a good technology services in different sectors so we learn quite a lot about how complex the the the whole situation is our complex even these industries I think you also were referring about how difficult this is and to understand the textile garments you know we are operating in a complex by the chain with very specific conditions so I would like to to open the floor because I think we have already a very rich discussion and then we will have round of questions and potentially a final wrap up and a final impression from from our speakers may invite the two of you first questions you have one here I would suggest to collect three questions and then please and if you want to do the research that would be your choice. I would follow up what I've said about which I can't point which I've mostly agreed with except that I think that it probably isn't true that a clothing producer can't become a producer of something else but what we have seen in a monthly company is that successfully moved from one industry to another it's precisely that those who learned how to market their things create got to the right value chain and stayed in the same industry in the sense of the same sort of production the same sort of market in the sense that small manufacturers are the same value chain as clothing the textile certainly are not the same industry as clothing and these people can move from one. I mean the original producers in the government have been bang to that weren't people who introduced the government all their lives they moved into it with some foreign investment. There were even people who never produced anything in the government. They were not even in business. Which is fine they were equally moving to something else. So I think we need to ask exactly what it is that will make them move into it. Which brings me back to the point that government's word the diversification fragmented for Bangladesh. We must remember that. They were an excessively successful one but they were. We must be careful not to have 84% being in something else when we meet them 20 years time. But I think perhaps that's why it is that they were able to do it and it's partly the MFA of course the MFA lens but we can't we create the MFA of course and other industries. So what do you think could be done and I don't tell me government's assistance that isn't what created clothing and isn't what's going to create anything very much in Bangladesh at the moment. What's the thing which markets are similar use similar enough supply chains to garments that a reasonably enterprising producer of garments and get more of garments can lead them. I think in Colombia where garment producers move into paper and into flowers and these are all in a sense going to the same markets. So at least some imagination. Great thank you for your great kind of comment actually. I just have a question for my chef. Can you replicate that with the corporate structure? I think the idea is that you kind of put pressure from multinationals so that the local suppliers are doing better. I think you see that in Hongdae and Vietnam and you see that in elsewhere. But it's so rare that that happens and I think there's a real story told as well. Multinationals they're going to push it's more fair than government is to increase working conditions to give women childcare. One of these things is all of my story and it's great that I love the story. The idea that most nationalists can say they're reciprocal control actors and all that, the Korean national welfare used to find in Korea but it doesn't seem to happen anywhere in the world. So I don't know. Let's see one last one. My name is Moshe Ra Moshe. I am a Bangladesh citizen and I'm now working in London. So it's a very good presentation. I have very good ideas. So I think Bangladesh is now 60, 84% of the exposure. It's just very good and we are asking a lot of but where is the second cup because there's the limitation on the peak somewhere in the go down. So I think Bangladesh's policy makers should think just now so that we can start another cup that can take this international forward. And I don't think that that very much thinking is going on according to the policies that Ben has mentioned. In Bangladesh of context I think export rate in the city is more visible than in both substitutions. For you know two things is contributing on its garbage labor. Both are happening in foreign countries. So I think in like the light of entrepreneurship is there. But I very much agree with Mr Moshe that there's no one on this issue. So I don't think that that is much visible. And for electronics and light engineering we can produce a look at what can really compete with China in this production that's not possible. And unless we as, if we can that as Mr Moshe told that is join the market and create market there so that an organization that can become a good solution. But I have two questions that is yes we are optimizing the workforce but is it inclusive? But now sustainable development goal, a goal age goal about implementing employment decent work as an inclusive workforce. So disabled people are 15% of any of us in Bangladesh even need to be higher than that. So is that disabled people have access in the workforce without policies is creating employment policies? Unless those people are included in our economy or industry then disabled people will be late behind. So that is the big question how we can bring those people. And my last question is like now people are talking about technology. How panelist can take advantage of technology for the information and internet for things is big issues now going to happen in the next period. And UK is in the same lot take advantage and being the leader of that. How one of this can take it's a minimum portion of the whole canvas and can practice that in one of this and bring those things in globally. To that way I think that one of this can are more to explore the latest intervention than in the future. OK. Shall we have the first round of is it a brief question because or is it a comment is it a... It's a brief question. Please then raise that one in the first round. We've heard kind of a call for cultural change and a call for economic development. We've also heard that there's kind of a dearth of law. And my question is to what extent can the cultural and economic development arguments actually come to fruition without enabling legal framework? I guess this is more for John. Shall we start from that and then we keep... If there are issues that you want to address that are raised. There is one specific question to start and I think some of the others are pretty general. So if you want to address some of them. I'd just like to echo your point about inclusive employment. And I think that it really is important to understand that when we talk about inclusive growth and inclusive development and inclusive employment. Now we're talking about a large kind of straight struggle of the population which is and it's not just it's not just disabled. I mean you know like the idea that you know again you know going back to my you know the people or the sector that I work on you know like the idea that you kind of put one woman into employment. But then you actually disadvantage or exclude the other women in the household is really important because you know one woman goes out to work and who does the care work is the younger daughter or the or the elder woman in the household or the sister or somebody. You know and I think I think it's really important to understand that the dynamics are important to take into account that you can't just optimize. The net that you know like optimization is not about just labour force participation. It has to be about other things which includes inclusive development. Okay I think there are a couple of very interesting questions moving between sectors is happening all the time is happening in Bangladesh. So for example the garments industry is backward linking into fabrics dying all kinds of things. In fact it's I was looking for the latest figures but I couldn't find it but more than 60 percent of the fabrics and so on are domestically produced. In fact Bangladesh is the top three sometimes the number one raw cotton importer in the world. So it's huge importer of raw cotton. Where is this raw cotton going is going into spinning and weaving and also into knitwear. So it's happening. It's not just garments. There's a huge backward linkage going on into particularly into textiles but also into accessories of different sorts and so on. The question is the pace at which it is happening. Can anyone accelerate this as we saw there are incipient fridge makers and air conditioning and so on. It's not happening. What's the real constraint? The real constraint is that you need a working model which is which has certain characteristics. It should be easy to emulate for people with certain organizational skills already. But it should also be a complete model that you can copy. The reason why there was this explosive growth is that Desch garments produced a model which was completely linked to the global chain. So people could just copy it and they encouraged the copying because they didn't stop any of their managers going and setting up their own companies. 100 managers left within a couple of years set up 100 new companies and then there was this. So replication can be extremely rapid once the model exists. So the textile sector in Bangladesh for example can't even meet the local domestic demand. It's not that competitive. So there's a lot of imported fabric. It's not yet a sector in which there will be massive replication at a global scale. It has to go several steps beyond its current level of competitiveness to achieve that. Can this be done? It can be done. But that's where you need that investment. And so your question is the state won't do it. But what's the alternative? I think that the problem is that when you say the corporate sector will do it. In itself won't do it because the corporate sector is there to make money. So there are enough markets out there for the corporate sector to go into and MNCs go and look to set up their OEMs in places where the components producers are already close to global competitiveness. They are not going to invest hugely in that. It might be a little bit short and if you give them some incentives they will then build up the component suppliers. So you have this example of the Honda in Vietnam. But look at the history of the Vietnamese motorcycle sector before Honda comes in. So I had a PhD student who did a whole PhD on motorcycles and other sectors in Vietnam. It's a fascinating story. The reason why Honda, so initially Honda was just doing assembly. Honda then became committed to the local component suppliers because in between Vietnam basically broke out, opened the border to China and there was a China shock. And a huge number of relatively low quality Chinese motorcycles came in and those Chinese motorcycles were easy to copy. So the problem is that you need to have reached a certain stage before you can reach the next stage. The Chinese motorcycles were easy to copy and so Vietnamese component producers did backward engineering and copied it and the Chinese were copyrighted and patented and so on and so on. So they built up a lot of capacities during that China shock period. And then there was a huge anti-Chinese kind of movement within Vietnam because of all kinds of tensions with China and they started blocking the border. Then Honda came in and said actually we can save costs. MNC's interest is to save costs. So they shifted their supply chain or bits of it to Vietnam because it actually was cheaper suddenly to do that. Whereas if the gap is too big and if the wastage is too high and the productivity is too low, they won't do that. They will bring in their supplies from their home countries. So the trick is, so there are various strategies. You have some intermediate strategy bringing up your component supplies to a high enough plateau. The gap with international competitiveness is not very big. Then MNC's will do the trick and for simply economic calculations. But if the gap is too big, which is the case in the Bangladeshi electronics, no one is going to come and invest in Bangladesh. So at that intermediate level, you have to have this messy kind of strategy. We are going to do something with the state but keeping in mind that the state has flaws. So you shouldn't expect the state to do something which will definitely fail because it will definitely be captured. But if you can design some strategies of support which are less likely to be captured, it's worth trying it because actually we have no other way of doing it. Otherwise you just wait for the multinationals to come, they won't come. They have better places to go to. There are many other competing countries which have niches here and niches there and that's where they're going. Multinationals go where the supply chain is already good or they go as pure assemblers and bring in all their components from their other multinationals. So even the component supply chain is now controlled by multinationals and this is the real problem. Even when you go to the components of this phone, the components are made by other multinationals. So you have to then insert yourself into that increasing very dense space and find niches where you can bring up your capability sufficiently that your little niche becomes globally competitive. That's not easy. It needs the kind of stuff that Antonio is talking about needs an analysis of supply chains and your existing levels of competitiveness and where you are and how you get up even close to being competitive. If I could try and address your point about the enabling legal framework. I'm coming from it as a standpoint primarily of being a European Union lawyer. The way I respond to that is partly what should the European Union do because it is after all an external actor but also what can it do. The answer is in terms of what can it do is constrained very much by the nature of global trade law. Because you know if we have to actually one of the main problems you could argue is that some 20 years ago at Seattle an attempt to kind of ensure that there was a balance between global economic governance through trade and global social governance or labour governance if you like was unsuccessful. And so you then had two different routes you had the global trade law moving in a particular direction. And then alongside that partly to try and achieve some balance some kind of calibration of labour rights and social rights was to have the ILO core labour standards. The point about the ILO core labour standards is that they just are a kind of checklist of five very specific standards particularly ending child labour, having freedom of association, the right then to the right to strike, very specific rights. Some of the main objectives to this kind of fusion of trade and social laws at the global level were governments like Bangladesh arguing that this was actually really about protectionism and there is some merit to this argument. It's actually about keeping jobs in places like the United States and Europe rather than having jobs in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Now the EU then tried to to some extent circumvent this you could argue to export this sort of EU social model through trade policy by saying that the general system of preferences that I've been talking about should have additional obligations labour conditionality. And it granted a particular preference to Pakistan. Not surprisingly that was then challenged by India because India didn't get the same preference as Pakistan before the WTO. And one consequence of that was that the EU was warned by the WTO bodies that it had to be very careful about this labour conditionality. And this then limits it. The EU's approach has then been to say we won't try and broaden labour standards to have a floor of rights go beyond these core labour standards into issues like for example a living wage which isn't one of the core labour standards. We'll limit it to these ILO core and then no one can accuse us of trying to export European social rights. And so there is this particular constraint and so whilst it is helpful for the EU through the sustainability compact to focus on the implementation of the labour laws things like bargaining and all these issues that I've mentioned. It doesn't address much of the enabling issues like access to justice, like places to get three rights and it's very interesting you have your rights cafes because you're actually feeling a need that isn't otherwise being filled. And organisations like the EU and others are not necessarily pushing for it because of the particular time we trade. Reporting, having a floor of rights that is broad. Now a floor of rights can mean that you have very basic levels of protection initially. So to extend the risk for example maternity leave that it may be only a relatively short period but there is at least a guarantee of a return to work. And from that you can build upwards. But there has to be I think a new thinking to trade and labour rights globally to really break this on pass. Otherwise trade policy is just perpetuating many of the problems that are already there as highlighted in your report. Well, so many questions. No, I think the maternity leave but I think we can't actually, I mean the state may not work, the state may not function in Bangladesh or as far as the sort of economic policies we want. But I think we then as part of say for example this work about development strategy and national policy, economic strategy. We also have to work on like coming up with a function of the state because there are some functions that actually still no one can do other than the state. For example this huge public investment that is required for this different services that actually not even big businesses can or will do. Not only the SMEs but even the big businesses can do well. I mean even there, even the big businesses in Bangladesh may be far from even the smallest multilaterals. But even for them I think it will be quite expensive. So definitely I mean there is a huge scope for the role of the state and then we actually have to as part of, I think at least as part of India's work. Actually that is a big area we are focusing, continuously focusing. That we have to come up with an innovative role of the state if not the traditional role of the state and it goes hand in hand. You can't actually afford without that sort of a state in Bangladesh and in countries like us. I would just add a couple of things. You understand that because I can just see this screen and I can't actually see you. So yeah, I mean completely point taken right. As Cassie was saying for us the role of the state is crucial because public services in the end need to be provided by the state. It's an obligation but that's the way we see it. What I should have said at the beginning is that this is just a start of a conversation. So we know perfectly well that the conditions under which both Taiwan and South Korea were able to industrialize and Japan were completely different. Many of the global rules, the WTO rules and bilateral and multilateral agreements were not there. So this is an extra layer of complexity. And I would just kind of draw a bit of caution in terms of the two words of caution here. So I think as Ruth was starting to read, I mean this over-reliens in multinationals and just expecting them to come in and do knowledge transfer and invest and increase the skills. I come from Mexico, that never happened right. We're still in the same pothole that we've been for decades. So I mean a word of caution there as a Mexican but also as a researcher. And then something that we've been quite keen on discussing and kind of the reason why we're approaching this from the point of view of smaller and medium but particularly medium and growing businesses is precisely because we want to find this to grow within the country so that it is more rooted, it's less footloose so that it can actually have a longer term solution. But also because we're hoping that this isn't just linked to global value chains like garments has been. But we're thinking that maybe there is some kind of regional trade opportunities. Some of the business people we spoke to were already looking towards India. And they were saying, well, we already have some kind of trade relationship with the other countries. It's helped us increase our standards, not just in terms of reverse engineering but there is something there. So these are some of the issues that we are exploring and this is very much a conversation that I think we would need to have for decades because an industrial policy is not just for two five years, it's for 20, 30, 50, 100 years. And that's hopefully a point that we will get to. I think it's just one thing that gentleman he was referring to. I mean that we have to have this export oriented strategy and that we have. The problem with it is that especially when I was looking at the current seven five year plan that we have, there was a background paper on export diversification in the current five year plan. We were discussing how can you have export diversification without economic diversification. I mean that perspective in this five year plan as far we can see is that export diversification without economic diversification. I mean you don't have a proper product basket outside garbans and a few other low end products. Then how come you, what do you get out of export diversification? What do you diversify your export with? Very, very limited export basket. So it's kind of like, you know, we had this saying in Bangladesh and I think there's also in English, that putting the card before the horse. So we're just confident that actually sometimes there are lots of opportunities in the internal market that have missed exactly because your products are at a quality, which is significantly lower than the one that comes from China than from other countries. So even in the internal market we prefer demand because we want these products, right? So if you don't reach that level, even your internal market could be massive, right? It could give lots of learning opportunities could go on. And of course there are issues that if our countries think about adopting export strategies, we have to understand we are going to buy all these things. And in fact not just one last thing, you know, we have mentioned these internal things and so on. I think we have to be very careful in these issues because there are, there is lots of discussion around technology so we don't know what the technologies are about, right? So the specific context I think would be much more interesting to try to talk about robotics. For example, China at the moment today is the first importer of robotics in the world. So, you know, imminent of things of this type of issues that have been capturing European discussion are really inappropriate for this country because this country has no manufacturing base, right? So the internet of things cannot work in a country without really apart from Germany, if you are a Japan, if you are a strong manufacturing system, make no sense. And unfortunately, the way in which it is presented in the European discussion is again the result of a certain type of political economy complex where the industrial policies are designed this way because certain countries push for certain type of ideas. Sorry, I've got a fashion thing to do. Please, we have some other 10-15 minutes. I would say 20 minutes, yeah? Are there questions? I would say to what extent you recommend that your work into the recommendation for industrial policy will also refer to your work for other wider enabling environment, especially maybe with regard to expanding housing policy and decentralising infrastructure with its foundation. I think a different problem with centralisation in Tata is rather than focusing on the other industrial city and also informal settlements so that the government is equal, like contradictory, on a given, to the story of Tata, where at least people will look to even provide the care in the first place when they need a place to live or something like that. So just your work around that. Any other questions? Please. First, I'll ask about other sectors that won't be just your part of the government sector or the part of the export and goods market team moving towards the industry as well. And what is the kind of development in those areas and what's the level of competitiveness on the next time with other countries? And a second question I'm going to ask about is about solar paneling light bulbs which are written, of course, in the easier for the educated women on developing the chips and the inner whiting. And they go back to new home countries and then build the sort of light bulbs and then set it within a community. Would you see that as a sort of sector that leaves the industry to both import and export? Please. I'll ask you. We've touched on the role of the state, especially in relation to women's unpaid care work, but I'm just interested to hear what people do think from your different perspectives the role of the state might be actually in the industrial world. OK. We're going to another conference. Let's move it up. My role is on the role of the state. It almost feels like before you can get to any other stuff, particularly the picture you think of the Bangladesh State, that there will be an awful lot of work to be done with the Bangladesh State in terms of how it's going to play. And I'm just interested in terms of particularly given that those are engaging with the European state. And the European is essentially around and I could overtake Bangladesh in many ways at some point. I'm just interested in what type of message and how do you because I work with the state and we work obviously a lot with the state across the world with the state. And it's definitely one of these things that we're experiencing and how do you get to the state, particularly the industrial world with the state? OK. Let me start from here. I'll try to answer your question. I mean, that's again opening yet another map of kind of worms, right? But in terms of... So the answer is yes. So what we're saying is yes, an industrial policy, but as I was saying at the beginning, it needs to be accompanied by a series of other policies. Housing, for example, education, health, et cetera, that can help because what's the purpose of opening up new jobs if you can't have women and men that have managed to eat so that they can reach their workplace. So it needs to be a comprehensive and that's what I meant by seeing this as a longer term plan. Yes. To add with Lila, going back to what I was talking about, policy integration and co-ordination, so I think that is also an aspect that was in our mind because referring back to the AGD, the government workers, I mean, some of these areas are actually a huge concern for them, education, health, housing, of course, that also I mentioned, unpaid care, their care responsibilities. I mean, if referring back to Diptyl's movie, I mean, if we can actually take care of some of those areas, because those are also areas of expenditure for them so that they can sort of save a lot on their very minimum wage, if they survive on it. About your question of other sectors like T and leather, I mean, from us, I mean, as I mentioned, that we were actually interested in sectors that are more valuating, more technology intensive, more innovative. I don't think T or leather, actually, they're more like primary goods, I think the panel onwards can explain more. And I think there was something else on states at all, I think we've talked about that. There's not a great deal, I can say, about what more the state can do. Just from the perspective of the research that I've been doing with colleagues within our frame project, we are very interested in the way in which there's a kind of a new approach through the EU's human rights policies, and the EU says that human rights are a silver thread running through all policies, including trade and development. And one of the ideas behind that is that this point about decentralisation involving non-state actors, that actually one of the ways in which to get the state to do more is through empowering others and through pushing decentralisation. For example, human rights country strategies is the approach that is adopted. You look at the whole country approach and see ways in which you can have diffusions of power and you can provide support, and this is primarily a development policy rather than a trade policy, clearly. But it seems to me if you can address issues like how do you support human rights defenders and NGOs and indigenous groups, you can have more of this diffusion of power. And this often gets states to listen. The old approach was very much always talk to the state, persuade them to invest, persuade them to adopt certain laws, and everything else will follow. And I think it's much more important, in fact, to look at ways in which you can work locally, you can almost bypass the state and go direct to the people. But this is something that requires resources and I think this is where the EU is weak. I mean, just speaking to people in the EU trade and development director of generals of the commission, what they say to us is, well, at the moment, because Rana Plaza was like this big wake-up call, we're putting lots of resources into Bangladesh, but then maybe two or three years' time, something will happen in another country and there'll be a focus there. The EU actually doesn't have the central staff and resources to actually really follow through on a lot of these policies. But this is really where some of... I think there needs to be a bit of lateral thinking here, not just focusing on what the state should do. Now, when you start to... I cannot imagine anyone else talking about the role of the state. The problem is that that's another day. I think there was a question about competitive and potentially competitive sectors. There are many in Bangladesh which are actually quite promising. Pharmaceuticals, for example, are becoming pharmaceuticals. At the low end, again, it's assembly pharmaceuticals, it's importing the components from more advanced countries, but it's a very successful sector. You'd be surprised to know shipbuilding is a potentially competitive sector in Bangladesh. It makes ships. So there are a number of such sectors which can grow if you have a strategy of supporting and taking it up to a competitive level. Bangladesh already exports small ships. The role of the state... You can have an idea in your mind of what the state should be doing, and often that's not very useful. You have to start with what is your state in your context, and that reality is actually quite depressing often. And then you have to say, well, what is a feasible program of getting this state to do a little bit better? So what could the Bangladesh state do a little bit better? It could spend a little bit more on infrastructure, education, and health. It spends extremely little on health and education, and it gets very good results from this because of very successful delivery mechanisms with NGOs and so on, and so it does very well in global criteria, and it thinks that's the way of actually not spending anything. So we have to put a lot of pressure on the Bangladesh state to actually spend more on health and education. It can do that. This is achievable. What else can it do? And then you have to do something in terms of feasible industrial policy, which is not giving large subsidies to big sectors which will just be wasted, but doing these small experiments, and here international partners, donors, DFID, the World Bank, can partner up with the government in designing programs and saying this is the way we will fund capacity development provided the Bangladesh government puts in a little bit here as well and industry invests a little bit here as well, is by locking in co-investments that we can get the state to do things, by creating incentives for the state to do things. The most important problem for the state in Bangladesh now is a political crisis. I think that the crisis is... Shall I stop? No, I was just explaining the clock was slow, that was all. So the crisis is... I think the most important problem the state has to solve is the political crisis between the elites, which is possibly taking the country into a very serious conflict and potentially even civil strife in three to four to five years' time if you don't do something or even before that, if you don't do something. And it's basically the monopolisation of power by one party to the exclusion of all others. I don't have any answer to that, but I think that the powers and civil society people have to start thinking about what to do about this. Finally, I would say that a lot of well-meaning things about labour rights and so on, I completely support, but we have to be very careful about the instruments through which you are thinking that you will achieve this. People talk about trade unions and you have to understand that trade unions are located in a political context which sucks, right? So trade unions are not independent actors which represent workers, take dues from them and then represent their rights. Never in the history of Bangladesh has that happened. Trade unions basically are connected to political parties. They spend money, they don't take money from the workers. They spend money on the workers building up coalitions which can then be taken out on the streets in political conflicts between the parties. That history of trade unionism has been so destructive for Bangladesh in the past that, and simply to say, we want trade unions here, there and everywhere, isn't understanding the political economy of the country and what a trade union means in the context of a country like Bangladesh. So if you want to do something useful about labour rights and so on, think hard about the mechanisms and think how those mechanisms will work in the political economy context of the country that you are talking about, then we're going to make progress. Ethiopia looks like a very strong state, very industrial policy. Ethiopian state has many problems. It has huge problems. I mean, I've worked a lot in Ethiopia. A state might look like it's authoritarian and command and in control of industrial policy. It's actually driven with internal conflicts. It has a lot of secret companies no one knows anything about. A lot of the investments are happening with companies that are very strongly colluding and part of the political deal. It's not yet so sure that Ethiopia will be a big success stories. They are investing a lot in manufacturing, but that's a long shot away from that manufacturing becoming globally competitive. The test of Ethiopian success will be will these garments and textiles and other industries footwear that they're investing in, do they actually become globally competitive industries which can survive without the subsidies? That has to be proven. I think every state has a problem. All I'm saying is that it's not so clear that the Ethiopian state is so much better than the Bangladeshi state. They have different problems and they're completely differently constituted states which have different types of problems. After that? I would just say that when we're looking at industrial policies and the role of the state we should conceptualise women not just as workers but also as consumers and then as citizens who have an active decision making role to play in this process. Thanks. Great. I think we had a very good discussion and we touched on many, many of the issues that actually the report points to. I'm sure that we are going to have another occasion to go deeper into some of this. Thanks to all of you. I would like to give a round of applause to our speakers. Please follow up on the next events. We are going to have other events within this series and hopefully we are going to be again working with ActionAid to discuss this very important issue. Thanks all for the work. Sorry. I didn't need to. You looked at the clock and said we had 10 more minutes but actually the clock was 10 minutes slow. That was all. I have to get a train. I have to get a train. It's also I have to get a train and it probably won't be quite tight now. But there is another train after this. There is another train. Sorry, I interrupt you at the beginning but just because I want to have more rounds of what you have been doing. It's very interesting. Are you actually just visiting at the moment to go back for you at the moment? No, no. Actually I'm visiting. I've got some other problems. I was really lucky. I don't know who you'll be around. Actually I'm staying at Brighton. I'm going there to thank them for everything that they have done for me and for the time being. We can be in touch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just give me your card. I can give you. Sorry to Titan. Yeah. It could be a discussion with you maybe. It could be a discussion with you. We can use our reports and have them slides to the back to me when we are doing it. They'll be a bit of a question for them. Is there anything among the decision makers that you need to make about the reports? The EU and the United States? Is there anything about the EU and the United States? Is there anything about the EU and the United States? I've got to say of the European level. I'm very excited to see that. I've got to say of the European level. I have a different email. I will send you the name of the line. I have a different email. I will send you the name of the line. I have a different email. I will send you the name of the line.