 Hello, I'm Razine Saleh, and I'm here to talk about the competitiveness of cities. The hundred biggest cities in the world account for about 40% of world output. We see ever tighter connections across borders through trade, through foreign investment and the movement of people. It's these global value chains with multinationals at the heart of them, located in and around cities, that are some of the biggest drivers of productivity, of jobs and of growth in the world economy. Cities are the repository of the middle class around the world, and of course the middle class is increasing hugely, and of course demanding more goods and services. There are going to be challenges in all these areas for cities, existing cities that are about to become bigger, as well as for new cities, so-called second or third tier cities, that are going to mushroom across the planet, mainly outside the West. 90% or more of the urbanization that we're going to see in this decade and the next is going to come from outside the West and overwhelmingly in Asia. By the end of this decade, about 60% of the Chinese population will be living in cities. A huge transformation, if you consider that China was a poor and rural society only three and a half decades ago. In the future, fiscal policy matters are going to become increasingly important at the level of cities, reflecting their economic clout. Hard infrastructure, roads, ports, airports, cities are going to become much more important there. Soft infrastructure, things like education, skills, technology, diffusion. Trade policy is going to be influenced much more by what cities do to attract trade in terms of both imports and exports, to attract foreign investment and let's not forget to attract people, foreign talent. Singapore and Hong Kong already figure at the top of all sorts of global indexes, so what are they getting right? Well, to begin with, they're free ports. They have zero tariffs on imports and exports. They're fully open to foreign investment. They don't discriminate between foreigners and locals when it comes to foreign investment. They have little red tape, so business is very easy to do. You can get your goods through customs in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days or weeks or months. Very good hard infrastructure and very good soft infrastructure as well. Low taxes, a simple tax structure, lean, small and clean government. A rule of law that again makes it easy for the foreigner to do business and indeed to live and work. And there are plenty of examples. You look at a number of cities along the Chinese coastline. Not only the ones that immediately come to mind like Shanghai and Shenzhen, but also other cities like Shiamen or Dalian are amazingly successful at attracting foreign investment and being nodes for trade and being parts of these global supply chains. There are new ones coming up in India. I would mention Surat and Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Hyderabad is another case in point. As this mega trend of urbanization proceeds of pace, we'll see more cities that will be in a position to emulate the likes of Hong Kong and Singapore. Countries, regions, if they're to gain from these trends of urbanization, they need to decentralize power and policy competence as much as possible to the municipal level. So that we have representation, accountability, taxation, expenditure and other things besides all in much better alignment. And I think the upshot for business leaders is to engage with city leaders not only on the traditionally local municipal policies I mentioned before, but much more so on policies that they would think in the first instance of engaging with policymakers at the national level and lobbying policymakers at the national level. They need to do that much more actively now at the city level on things like trade, on foreign investment, on workers, skilled workers in particular. There needs to be a much better interaction between the municipal level of policy and the leadership of business, including multinationals around the world.