 Good morning, welcome to all of you to this plenary session on the over-all-encompassing subject of jobs and growth. I think our friends at the World Economic Forum thought rightly to put this plenary session towards the end of the programme, partly because the last two days had focused on many of the component issues related to the quest for jobs and growth. After all, in light of the fragile global environment, fiscal austerity, demographic shifts, revolutions, social unrest, job creation, economic growth, restoration of prosperity must be on the top of every agenda for every government. And I would argue not just governments but the business community, social actors and the world community at large. This session is meant to be an opportunity where we bring all of the pieces together that have been looked at in the last two days. We have a fantastic group of panellists, I would argue the dream team that you might want to have in any discussion of job creation and growth, representing a spectrum of policymaking, civil society, the business community, old and young, within government, out of government, all with perspectives and all with contributions to this ongoing debate. I will not go through the exercise of introducing everyone, but very quickly I'll just call on the various panellists to my left immediately. It's Mr. Ibrahim Dabdub. Many of you know him as the group chief executive of the National Bank of Kuwait. He is in many ways what I would refer to as the elder statesman from the Arab world who's been observing and looking at all of these issues over the past four to five decades. Immediately to his left is Mr. Joe Saadi, who's the chairman of Booze and Company, familiar to many of you from the work that his group has been engaged in, in looking at the broader ecosystem of entrepreneurship and education. To his left is Zaynab Dagli, founder and chief executive of Momento. She's a global shaper from the world economic community. She is in many ways the member of the youth community who's going to be articulating the vision from the bottom up in how we look at these issues. To her left is Mr. Nizar Barkha, his excellency, is the minister of economy and finance from Morocco, the country possibly with the best prospects and the best chance of realizing the fruits of the transition and of achieving many of the demands of the Arab Spring political movements, specifically job creation, prosperity and economic growth. To his left is someone familiar to all of our friends here, not just in Turkey but certainly within the region at large, Mr. Mustafa Koch, who's the chairman of the group. He is a larger than life figure who has been around, contributed both as a philanthropist, business leader and an advisor to the policy-making community. Last but not least, our dear friend John Evans from the OECD, who's the head of the trade union advisory looking at broader issues of labor markets, flexibility, regulations and how the OECD looking and tracking some of the biggest economies of the world is seeing through the current dislocation and the opportunities for reform but also for thinking anew about these issues. This is the group of panelists, I promise you and this is not just the instructions of the World Economic Forum but also the desire of the panelists that we will have hopefully a very interactive session. After the first interventions from the speakers, we will go immediately to the floor and try to create a flow of discussion and engagements around many of the issues we will touch upon. But just to get us going, I will pose a question to each of the panelists and very briefly they will respond hopefully to this question. I will start with our dear friend, Ibrahim Dabdub. So at this moment, Ibrahim, as we're thinking about jobs and growth, unfortunately for the first time in about five years, it's not just the Arab world where we are worried about these questions. This has now become a global concern. There has been a lot of concerns about jobs, unemployment, employability, a dislocation that is being felt across all of the labor markets in the Arab world but also in Europe and growingly in some of the advanced countries. One immediate question that often arises in any discussion about jobs and growth is the role of the private sector versus the public sector. Now this was the same question we posed ten years ago. Public versus private and I guess the question to you is, are we framing the question wrong? At this moment after 2011, specifically, especially in the Arab world, are we creating an artificial dichotomy between the public sector and the private sector? So from your perspective as someone who is observing these discussions in the region and elsewhere, should the public sector and the private sector perhaps be conceiving of a different way of thinking through the problem, perhaps together, perhaps more cooperatively? And what specifically will be the position of the business community and its responsibilities to the societies? Thank you, Akhtara. I'll speak about the MENA countries, of course. I will not speak about Europe and Spain and Italy but basically I'm going to speak about MENA and I will exclude Turkey out of that because I do not want to challenge my friend Mustafa Koch. He will cover Turkey very well. As far as the Arab world is concerned, as you know, there are the rich Arabs and the poor Arabs and the Arabs in the middle. When we talk about the public sector, this is not really the only problem, this is not really the only problem because the Arab world has started with the public sector and when we talk about privatizations, in other words, opening up the private sector and working on the public sector, this is not really just one solution, it's one of many solutions. Basically we have to start working on structural reforms in the economies of the Arab world. Many of the Arab world are really, are really in such a bad shape that the public sector is dominant. The public sector is dominant and when we say privatized, they don't even afford to privatize. But let's take the rich countries versus the poor countries. I have been a proponent of what I call the Marshall Plan and I have said that many, many, many conferences. There is a group of Arab countries who are rich and when I talk about rich, I'm talking about the oil countries. They have the means and they have the reserves. I think, and again, that's not a very accurate number, but between Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, the UAE actually, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the reserves that they have now are in the region of 1.2, 1.3 trillion dollars. A Marshall Plan, if it is executed well, this is the only way really to help the poor Arab countries with conditionalities. In other words, I'm not going to give you money just like Germany is doing with Greece. All you have to do is really to show me that you are being very responsible and that you will be able to execute the structural reforms that I will request from you. In other words, a combination of the IMF and the World Bank together. And I think this is an idea that will start a lot of reforms in the Arab world. Beyond that, we can keep talking about reforms and things like that, but these are dreams. We need the money and nobody is going to give you the money. The IMF will not really help you a lot. And the World Bank really is not going to help you a lot. Or the United States. Actually, the United States need help now. They need help. So I received a lot of Twitter, which I am going to read a couple of funny ones for you, but it tells you about how the young people are thinking. One of them says, parents struggling to keep up with the fast-moving world, 18 years from now, half of the jobs will no longer exist. That's a young girl. Underdeveloped talents in the MENA, current education system is outdated and does nothing to recognize and develop. And this is one of the problems that we have. Education is outdated in the Arab world. It's really outdated. It goes back to the first centuries, because we still go after quantity rather than quality. I'm very much involved in education. I'm on the board of the American University of Beirut and Georgetown and so on. But education is lousy in the Arab world. This is the first thing that we should work on, reform of the education. That's all I have to say. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brahim. I think the Marshall Plan idea is something we're going to take up after we go through the first round. It is a particular proposal that's been put on the table, debated. I personally happen to have mixed feelings about it, but I'd like to learn more today. Joe, Brahim just evoked the issue of education. And I think you're in a position to talk about perhaps concrete measures that can be taken in the education space, in the entrepreneurship space, in the microenterprise space. What are some of the concrete measures from your vantage points that perhaps can address problems associated with education and all the other connected challenges that they give rise to in labor markets and elsewhere? First of all, on education, there is the basic stuff that needs to be done in terms of reforming, modernizing the education sector. But this is a long-term endeavor in it to take a generation or two to action, and I think none of the countries in the region has the luxury to wait for that to happen. So I think you're spot on to ask about concretely in the short term what can be done. And fortunately, there are a few things that are being experimented as we speak that have the potential to move the needle on education and employment, for that matter. So one is a very close collaboration between private sector or large employers, for instance, with government entities and top universities of the region to rescale some of the graduating students of the last couple of years or incoming students into the labor force by basically identifying what specific technical skills are needed and having programs by which companies collaborate with universities to identify the most promising students, with a commitment to hire them when they graduate at the top of their class, where government kicks in as basically they provide the funding for the training, and we've seen programs in Saudi Arabia, for instance, for the first year or two, government will also pay part of the salary of these incoming students, or rather, pay people just to stay at home and wait until the job clears, there are concrete ways to channel them into the workforce in a very specialized area. So these are some of the experiments that are happening, and again, we need to continue the long-term process of modernizing the whole education system, but I think that will take a bit of time. On entrepreneurship, the region lacks any other region of the world quite dramatically, and I think in the conference, we've discussed the root causes of that, but when you think about what kind of ecosystem do we need to encourage entrepreneurship, as you asked the question, we've done a good job so far of tackling the hardware part of the question. So if you think about we need technology parks, we need incubators, frankly, we've seen a lot of that happened all over the Middle East over the last couple of years, where we still need to do some work to unleash entrepreneurs as on the soft areas. So for instance, bring entrepreneurship to the classroom. Something that we need to reflect on is there are roughly 400 universities in the region, only 40 have entrepreneurship courses. Only 400 out of 400 have entrepreneurship centers. And so we need to bring back entrepreneurship at the heart of what students, whether it's high school or university, are exposed to and gradually learn to feel comfortable with. And that's one aspect of it. The second major obstacle is financing. And as we know, there is almost no venture capital industry to speak of in the Middle East. There are a couple of, you know, VCs that have started, but nothing close to what is needed. So again, there are some specific programs, you know, that can be thought of either funded by the state or by the private sector to start creating some of those VCs, you know, to allow access to financing. Thirdly, there is, we've run a number of public opinion surveys, there is still discomfort with entrepreneurship in many classes of society in the Middle East. We've noticed that in various countries, a government job is seen as socially more acceptable and a safer way to go for young people as encouraged by their parents. And we need a society to celebrate much more entrepreneurs. And just to give you again a concrete example, in Taiwan, there is a program to bring back to Taiwan every year 10 or 15 successful Taiwanese entrepreneurs who've made it in the U.S. and to showcase them around the country to ask them to mentor some entrepreneurs, to share their experience and basically celebrate the fact that being an entrepreneur is a good thing for society and we're in bad need of this. And finally, we need to remove the stigma from the failure when it comes to entrepreneurship. In many countries of the region, you know, you go into bankruptcy, that's the one way to get to jail, whereas, you know, you should be able to try, fail and not end up in jail. Now, some countries are trying to reform it, I think we're still quite far from where we need to be on the bankruptcy fronts. Thank you. Continuing with the micro, I guess, Zaynab, I'll come to you. How do you feel about these issues? You're a young entrepreneur in many ways, you're a social innovator, you represent the generation about whom this discussion is taking place. Yeah, exactly. I actually represent three different groups here. I represent youth, I represent women, and I represent entrepreneurs, being a young female entrepreneur and a global shaper. So I hope that gives me the right to be a bit daring, given the lack of gray hair. But I think I would like to bring the discussion back to virtual offices and that we actually had in many sessions throughout the meeting. What's very important is that we are actually operating in a time where things change at extreme volatility. Mr. Dabud has also mentioned that he can understand now how the youth is feeling in the sense that half of the jobs are no longer going to be there very soon, and that nowadays we're doing different jobs. There's something called a social media expert now, which never would have been the case if Facebook never had started. Now, the type of jobs that we're doing, and where jobs are going to come in the future, is really going to change dramatically. And it's very important to be really in touch and at the forefront of these changes. So if I may just give an example about myself, I run a startup company where I work with people from India, China, Turkey, whoever is giving me the best services at the time. And I then can service individuals throughout my country. Now, this means that we're elevating borders, we're faster at working, and we're creating opportunities for many individuals throughout the world. So I think it's very important to draw the attention to virtual jobs and where the future can go, especially when we're talking about the fact that 75% of the women in the region are not engaged in formal economy, that we're facing such serious issues in youth unemployment. So we really need to think about these issues as well. And I think another issue that is going to play a key role here is digital literacy. Because let's imagine a newborn baby, Aisha, she's born in Istanbul and she starts playing with her mother's iPad in the first year of her life. And then let's imagine Ahmed who's living in a more rural area of the region, who's maybe never going to have access to internet in his lifetime. So how do we actually close these gaps? So when I think about the future and where the future jobs are going to come from, this is really going to be an important factor. So promoting entrepreneurship is very important. Being in touch with youth and being in touch with technology is very important. And I would make a prediction that not very long from now, we will actually start discussing social protection of these new jobs and where that is going to go in these meetings. Thank you, Zeynep. I couldn't help but notice that Minister Nizar was shaking his nodding as you were speaking. He's had a chance to listen to three speakers already. Perhaps he can frame where Morocco is heading, how he's looking at these issues of job creation, entrepreneurship and youth empowerment, having listened to the three speakers and their vantage points. Well, thank you very much. I would like first of all to say, as you said before, that Morocco could maintain the rate of growth about 5%. But the most important thing within the crisis, as you know, Morocco is very close to Europe. We reduced unemployment, the rate of unemployment, from 10% in 2007 to 8.9% in 2011. How we did it? First of all, I think one key point is stability. Political stability, as you know, Morocco did an evolution, not a revolution. And thanks to that, we have new constitution, new governments. And then we can manage and we have the very important stability for our country. The second thing, and I'm talking about political stability, but I have to talk about the stability of our macroeconomic framework. And as you know, Morocco has the investment grade from Standard and Poor's and feature rating and they maintain it within what is happening in all the regions. Second thing, it's visibility. We work together with the private sector to define the sectoral strategies for the future. What are the more competitive sectors we have and how we have to do, what we have to do to develop these sectors in our country. And in this idea, the most important thing is diversification. We have now new sectors. We will talk about three sectors, important sector. One of them is offshoring. We began with 3,000 employers, jobs created. Now we have 40,000 jobs in offshoring and we have 40% of the world market in French call centers. I will talk about a second important thing, it's aeronautics. We begin with preparing the scaling for that. We work with skills. We have an academy in aeronautics. Now we have Bombardier who is now investing in Morocco. That means it's a new sector for our country. And third, it's about automotive. We have Renault who will export 400,000 vehicles a year. And thanks to that, we have the most important thing is that we prepare a strategy, integrate a strategy with an academy specific to prepare skills to work in automotive, in aeronautics, in all the new sectors I said before. The third thing, it's very important for the investors is, of course, to work on climate for investments. Because we think that one key point is to facilitate the investments in our country. And at the end, we have a strategy to develop SMEs. Because it's important to create an SME, but the most important is to make these SMEs growing. We have 96% of our companies are SMEs, but 90% are small businesses. That means that we have to develop and to help them to be more competitive and to grow. And of course, to develop what you said before, culture of entrepreneurship in our country. And we have in curpature specific for women to develop their enterprise. Thank you. Your Excellency. Mr. Coach, I'm coming to you right now for what I hope is not a surprise question. We're in Istanbul. We heard Prime Minister Erdogan yesterday speak of the phenomenal economic achievements of Turkey in the last 10 years. Some of this achievement, perhaps a significant segment required a close cooperation between the business community and the government. So I guess to relate again to the ongoing debate on whether Turkey is a model for the region, perhaps Turkey is a model for a lot of neighboring countries, including the Arab world. What is it about the role of the private sector? What is it about the close collaboration between the public sector and the private sector in Turkey in the last 10 years that has made Turkey's achievement possible and can perhaps be one interpretation of how Turkey can help inspire others? Thank you. I'm sure everyone realizes that there are many lessons to be learned from the case of our country. I'm going to go back to 2001, when we experienced the worst economic crisis of the country's history and when the country was led by a three-party coalition. When we hit the ground, everyone realized that now it's time that something very radical had to be done. It was very difficult to realize something like that in a three-party government, but all segments of the society, as well as the politicians, have realized that we need a great commitment and in order to realize that, the public sector, the private sector, the labor unions, the workers, and the government officials, they came all together and launched the most extensive austerity program. After two years, we had elections and we elected a single-party government who came to office in 2003, made the biggest, wisest move to adhere the fiscal discipline and the IMF program. And with the good collaboration of the private sector together, the country has realized about $35 billion to $40 billion of private station in the last 10 years. The SMEs, as the minister has mentioned, is still very much of the backbone of our industry, has been prospering since even though they have problems working under a regulated environment and we suffer also a little bit from unregistered economy, therefore, but we're battling with that. 70% of the stock exchange, some of the stock exchange is owned by international investors, that were by foreign investors, which is a very interesting statistics. Now, when we come to some of the disadvantages what Turkey has is that we are unfortunately energy dependent and if we grow 6%, 7% a year, we always have to battle with a certain current account deficit that has to be financed properly. And for that, the entire production base has to be changed in the mid to long term. And for that, you need to have educated labor force in order to produce high-edit value products. And in terms of education, I would like to touch upon that in the next round, what we do as a group in terms of philanthropy to enhance education further in this country, which I think is the biggest problem that we have. Thank you, Mustafa. Last but not least, John, have we forgotten the basics? Labor market regulations, flexibility, social protection, the debate, the future of all of this in the middle of social unrest, revolutions? Well, Tarik, perhaps I should explain in the beginning that my job is to represent unions to the OECD, not the OECD to unions, so I don't want to be accused of impersonating an OECD official. I agree with a lot of what the panel has been saying, but it could have been taking place in a rather benign environment without the crisis we've seen over the last three years. And I think it's worth putting some of these issues of structural changes, some of which are very positive, some of which you need to look at what is the detail, in a context of where we are now, where I think we have a job's emergency on our hand. And I think some of the action now can't wait until we have some benign framework and policy in the medium term. I mean, your question on labor markets, just to give an example, when I go and talk to groups of workers in different parts of the world, there's a fundamental sense of injustice. The crisis did not start in labor markets, it started in financial markets with failures in the banking system, with failure of regulation, failures of corporate governance. And the sense of injustice that actually it's now ordinary people, workers having to pick up the bill and being asked to give up things to make sacrifices. So it's a breakdown of social trust, a breakdown of the social contract. And I think centre stage is what can be done now to try to reconstruct that. So I'd say just one or two examples. I mean, firstly, we've been discussing here, I think rightly, the issue of youth. Could we scale up some of the ideas which have been put on the panel? I mean, the suggestion of trying to look at how you can put young people into jobs now, if necessary, with some public support. Could we get a region wide and maybe a global wide youth jobs pact on the ground where after six months young people are offered either a quality internship or an apprenticeship or a training place or a subsidized employment place? Not as exploitation, not as cheap labor where somebody has to work for six months unpaid before you can even get to look at a job, but as a real way of giving them a channel into activity and avoiding some of the hopelessness of youth unemployment. A second argument, if we're talking of a Marshall plan, where can we get the maximum value of trying to increase infrastructure investment at the moment? Instead of talking up austerity, certainly we need medium term, long term fiscal discipline. Money needs to be well spent. But where can we get action now which I think has to come from governments in the areas of infrastructure investment which can also bring about structural transformation towards a greener economy and create jobs now? Thirdly, I think we have to fundamentally look at our model of the sort of development we had for the decade before. If I start talking about labor market flexibility or structural change, in my audience is people to say, what do you mean? Are we talking about an opportunity or are we talking just about giving out protection now? So I think we have to stop looking at people trying to seek security against change and give them security in their change process. The example of how do we get a better adjusted social safety net, social fraud for the future which covers a broader part of the workforce I think is a key part of discussion which came out of G20 discussions last year which shouldn't be forgotten, it's part of it. But also we have to look at well functioning labor market institutions. I mean the model we had for 20 years produced growing inequality. That is non-sustainable. We can't go on where it's the top 1% in the US which is taking 16 to 20% of wealth and the rest are really stagnating. We have to move to a fairer model of growth and that means actually putting some confidence on the ground, some concrete ideas now, not just the question of some of the structural changes to the medium term. Thank you, John. I promise to make the second round shorter in terms of the time it will consume from the discussion but you've given us plenty of issues, you've put them on the table and I think I'll try to kind of involve others in this discussion. I'm gonna go back to Ibrahim Dabdub and sort of borrow the phrase action now from John and ask the question. Rather than go down the path of imagining a martial plan that's gonna be led by, I don't know, which countries that's gonna require establishing some sort of a structure, modality, procedures, conditionality and might require a long period of time to institutionalize and implement such a plan. Why don't the business groups, the corporate sector, in the region take action now in the areas where they exert immediate influence, where they can make commitments and help have results on the ground. Why shift the discussion and the responsibility to governments and to the international community? Tarek, you were a professor before Josemond for being a research. I used to be. Echna and the business were not charities. I am in the banking business for 51 years unless you can prove to me that you are worthy of borrowing, I will not lend you. So we're not charities. This is not the responsibility of the businesses. We can talk about it's nice. Social responsibility is nice. But this is the responsibility of the governments. Let the governments first make structural changes to create the right atmosphere and the right environment for business to create jobs. At the end, it's nice to talk about business. I can write you books about our social corporate responsibilities and how much we help hospitals and things like that. This is not the real world. The real world is going down to the streets and see how to create jobs. Really, this is the real world. And the only way to do it is for the governments to make structural changes. For example, privatization. We are assuming that public companies are not well managed, they are not efficient. And that if we privatize them, we will have better management and as such we create jobs. That's probably the way to do it. And that's the ultimate goal really of privatizing is to create jobs and to get rid of inefficient companies by the government because it's not well run. And this is how I look at it. As I said, I am a man of the street. I am deep in the business. I cannot say more than that. I'm sorry. Thank you, Brian. I'm just trying to sort of unpack the issues a bit and I think Joe had given a hint earlier about maybe a newer way of thinking about this rather than thinking of public and private and the responsibilities of each. He said closer collaboration between some components of the public sector and maybe some of the large employers. Maybe that is the right entry point. Can you expand on this a bit more, Joe? What do you mean? And how does this create action? First of all, I would agree that it is the solution does not lie in the private sector alone. I mean, they have their own imperatives and constraints. And it is really the collaborative effort of the three worlds of academia, government, and private sector that will prove fruitful. But in the research that we've done and the work that we're doing with some of our clients, what some large employers can do is basically create the space for entrepreneurs of small, medium businesses to flourish. So for instance, for historical reasons in the GCC, some of the large state-owned companies have gone into the housing business, the medical business, the transportation business because at the time they were created, there was none of this and they had to do it themselves. Well, today there is some thinking going on that, hey, we don't need to be in this. Let us leave our own employees to basically, for instance, spin off these activities and start serving the market and grow these. And some of the work that we've done shows that this will create service industries, which is the way to go. On another front, on the education side, there are, as I mentioned earlier, experiments going on in terms of training. We've highlighted in our report, the case of SABIC or Saudi Aramco, for instance, who are collaborating with universities with funding from the state to train hundreds of graduating students with a view to providing the best of them with a job once they come out of this. Thank you, Joe. Just staying with the theme of action and what can be done practically. Mr. Nizar, are you waiting for a martial plan or are you hoping for a slightly more modest set of goals or enrolls from the private sectors, both in the region and outside? Well, I think that the private sector can play a very important role now. And for that, we have to say that there is two things. I would like first of all to say that I agree with Mr. Evans when he said that it's very important to change our economic model. Why? Because it's very important to have a new distribution of jobs in the world. And I think that now with the crisis we all know it's a good momentum to do it. I will say here that it's very important for us and for all to have development of industries in our countries. And it's very important to have a co-localization. That means that some industries can begin to work with the Moroccan, with Turkey to have better competitivity and to create jobs. The second very important thing, of course, we, as you said about the private sector, I think it's very important to distinguish three things. First, what I said before, small and medium businesses. The government has to help to assist them to grow and that's why we developed a guarantee fund to let them have the access to finance because it's a big challenge for them. It's very important to have on stock exchange a component specific for small and medium businesses. We developed at the same time, we reduce the tax companies from 30% to 15% for small and medium businesses. That's what the governments can do. And of course we give technical assistance from the beginning to for the first years to let them be maintained their jobs and maintain, of course, their work. I have to talk about big companies. Big companies can play, I'm talking about foreign direct investment and big companies can play very important things. First of all, develop process. In our countries it's very important to have these kinds of process to be more productive, to have more productivity and at the same time to create new kinds of jobs. Second thing, I think that we, as you said Mr. Said, we are talking about social responsibility but it's better to talk about development responsibility because big companies can play very good, important thing on how to develop the country and there is responsibility now with the crisis to create new kinds of jobs. And the third thing and I think it's very important too is to have a roadmap to know exactly what kinds of skills we need for the future and to prepare these kinds of skills and to give the orientation and it's very important for our country as you know for our countries, you have to change mentality, we have to change the culture to develop entrepreneurship, these kinds of culture of entrepreneurship. That's why it's very important to develop models. As Mr. Zainab, it's very important to see her talking about how she did and then people would like to do the same. Zainab, on the same models, the role of technology, how much is technology going to play in terms of a role and perhaps dealing with some of these issues that the minister has just outlined? What do you see? What are some things that perhaps we're missing out on that can help us? I mean, I think governments and corporations play a big role in job creation and there's a lot that companies can do in the sense that I'm sure a lot of companies are happy of my startup's existence. So, fostering that is actually also giving them a financial benefit as well. So, if they don't have time to discuss anything outside of financials, we are giving them financial benefits. So, it can be interesting for corporations to support entrepreneurship as well. And models are, I think, also very, very important. Okay, let's go back in how governments and corporates go hand in hand. If I wasn't experiencing political stability in Turkey, political and economic stability in Turkey, maybe I never would have left my studies in the UK to come back and start up my own company. So, I need that groundwork to have been done already. So, that's a very critical role that governments play there. But the more case studies there are, the more models there are about successful entrepreneurship, people are more daring to actually try themselves. Because if we're constantly talking about entrepreneurship and how we should do it, and the culture of entrepreneurship, that it shouldn't be shameful to fail and that you can start again, then you should see models where people have been successful and models where people have failed and started again and have been successful. So, it's extremely important to have models and the case studies. Mustafa, I think this is the right opportunity to invite you to discuss the role of philanthropists, corporate leaders as philanthropists, and the specific role that you're playing in education. Yes, I'm going to give an example from the industry. We have the biggest problem that we face in terms of unemployment in the industry is the mismatch between supply and demand. That is, by saying that we mean there's nine to ten percent unemployment in this country, but you have vast difficulties finding skilled workforce for factories and for production. So, in realizing that, we also studied some statistics and the statistics show that a vocational educated student has always a better chance to find a job than an average college graduate. When we saw that, we have decided to work with the Minister of Education and launch a vocational school program about five years ago, 2007, with a $50 million budget. 8,000 students were addressed and there were 264 vocational schools involved with this. We have been 28 laboratories in 28 schools to enhance skills of the students, and 350 people were engaged from our own group from different, as much as 20 companies, as coaches to coach and mentor these students. Now, here, the biggest aim that we envisaged was gender equality, because in Turkey, right now, high school education rate is 51 percent boys to 39 percent girls, compared to Europe's rates, 75 percent boys and 81 percent girls. So, 50-50 gender equality boys and girls were utmost of importance to us. And this program addresses issues as important as skills development, social development, employability, and gender equality. And I'm very proud to say that this year, this program was chosen as the region's best program as youth employment by international labour organization. So, this is maybe a drop in the ocean, but I hope it will be a positive outcome and I hope it will be a pioneer and a role model for other companies to address this program as well. Thank you, Mustafa. John, finally. I thought you were going to ask me a question. Just a comment, Tarek. I mean, the private sector globally, in the G20 countries at the moment, is sitting on a lot of money. The profits are at their record level. The Fortune 500 companies are making record returns. And everybody is frightened about the future. There's no demand. There's no growth. Employment doesn't seem to be coming. So, the issue of confidence, I think, is key. I mean, I worry certainly the financial sector and bankers have to be responsible about money. But financial markets are also sheep. I mean, when things were going wonderfully in the U.S. in the speculative period, they were lending money out as if there was no tomorrow. Now, nobody wants to lend money. Everybody has to restore their balance sheets. So, how to break into that circle to get the money going into different areas? And I think that is a key factor. Certainly, what's been put on the table on the question of skills is a crucial issue. The situation does vary between different countries. At the moment in the European community, there are nearly 25 million people unemployed. There are about four million uninfilled vacancies. Obviously, there's measurement problems, but nevertheless, you've got six people looking for every job. So, you have to get investment in skills and upgrade, but at the same time, you have to have jobs. There's no good just having better trained and more educated people in a more of a rat race actually looking for jobs. So, you have to intervene on both areas. Now, in the B20 and the L20, in 10 days' time in Los Cabos, I think you'll see that business and labour are going to be presenting ideas like how do we scale up quality apprenticeships? How do we get a better approach to some of these ideas on a youth pact and the question of quality internships? There are certain things which need to be done, but there has to be a breakthrough on that question of confidence. And I think what's been put on the table, I wouldn't necessarily call it philanthropy. I would call it enlightened self-interest of the private sector wanting to ensure educational institutions. But I know nothing, and excuse my migrants here in Turkey, but leaving these gleaming spires of the hotels where we're having these meetings or staying, if you walk up the hill to the Istanbul Technical University, you've got a crumbling edifice. Now, how do you change that allocation of resources where the real investment is in educational systems, not in luxury hotels, or maybe both? But I think symbolism here is quite significant about what could be done if you can try and harness public and private resources together. Thank you, John. We've got bad news and good news for you. The bad news is we have another 45 minutes to go before we close this session. The good news, it's really going to be all about an interactive discussion between you and the panellists. So the floor is open for people to make comments or raise questions, and perhaps we'll try to take two to three questions at a time, and we'll start with the gentleman to my left. Please identify yourself. Thank you, Tarek. My name is Mohammed Lassas from the American University in Beirut. The issues we agree on, the issues you've identified, the financial inclusion, the economic restructuring, labor market regulation, everything we've said are perhaps the same issues we could have identified 10 years ago. And as we've just heard, the private sector doesn't think, and perhaps rightly so, it's their job to lead this transformation. The government bureaucracy is not interested, incapable, unwilling, and strongly, I don't think it can lead this reform. How do you break this deadlock so that 10 years from now we're not identifying the same exact issues again? Thank you, Mohammed. Cornelia Meyer, I have sort of two question comments, very short. One is where the private sector and business can really, and government can work very well together, is if you want to create the entrepreneurs, it's not just about access to capital, it's also about the framework, obviously the bankruptcy laws and so on, it's also about access to skills. And if one could set up skills center where big companies team up with the government so a young budding entrepreneur can go and have his legal issues addressed and his accounting issues addressed, they exist, but there needs many, many more of them. Then the other one is vocational training, and Turkey has done a great job, and certainly culture industries has done a great job about really going about it in terms of looking at this framework, because it's not just, oh, we need vocational training, there needs to be a whole structure around how do you create apprenticeships and how do you make them work. But there's another issue, and that is an attitudinal issue, less so in Turkey, but in lots of the MENA region, there is no status to working with your hands. Try and find a wife if you're a plumber in Cairo, nobody will marry their daughter off to you. So there is again where government can't come in and where media can't come in, and where role models can't come in, giving, making it hip, making it in to be working with your hands, to being a plumber, being a carpenter, and having that vocational training so you can slowly, this is a journey of many, many steps, you can slowly change the attitudes. Thank you. Take one question from the side of the room. Thank you, Tarek. Selim Ede, I work for SAP software company, and I would like just to, on the issue of the role of technology, if I suggest that it's not only about technology here, if we look at what has happened in the Arab Spring, it is this blurring of the social media with mainstream media that created a new force to be reckoned with, and that is probably the force power, it used to be called the force power, because the new media has made the impossible possible. So the question is, we're faced with an impossible task here, which is growth and jobs. How can this very same power of the social media backed by technology and connecting various stakeholders, how can all this be leveraged to solve this monumental challenge we're facing? And there is a multiplier effect here between the social media and the mainstream media. That's one multiplier effect. But the bigger multiplier effect is if the citizen and the youth are connected to the back offices of the government that have a huge amount of data, and to the back offices of the banks and the enterprises that actually will create the new jobs. So the value proposition here is to have all these stakeholders meet on a new platform, meet to collaborate, innovate and create. Thank you, Salim. Maybe we'll just get some responses to this and we'll do a second round. Can I ask you the question, Ibrahim? The first question, how to break the gridlock, assuming there is gridlock? How do we break through this gridlock? I would like to repeat what I have said before, basically that the private sector is involved, but the private sector is bottom line oriented, and it's really up to the government now to make it in such a way through reforms and structural reforms that will meet the private sector's requirements. So that private sector, through privatization, for example, and things like that, so that the private sector can create jobs. But the private sector alone, out of, we have social corporate responsibility, and we donate, but this is not going to create jobs. To create jobs is basically when the government or the leadership takes charge and does structural reforms, macro-economic structural reforms so that we have new businesses. For example, when I was talking about the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan, most of the Arab countries have deficits, continuing deficits, year after year after year. Take Egypt, for example. Egypt, why should the IMF help Egypt? Why can't the Arab world help Egypt? Take, for example, now the reserves of the Central Bank of Egypt, and I was involved with that, with the governor. The reserves of the Central Bank of Egypt were going down day by day. Saudi Arabia came in and deposited deposits in the Central Bank. This is the kind of Arab relations that I would like to see, because suppose that Egypt goes into political and social upheaval. The whole Arab world is going to be affected, and this is what I think we are so definitely interrelated, definitely interrelated, and we can help each other in restructuring the economies. That's the idea of the Marshall Plan. Mustafa, do you want to react to the gridlock issue? Well, I completely agree what Ibrahim Bey has already said, but here the structural reforms are very, very important, and one other important thing is, of course, within the structural reforms that the government provides necessary investment climate where you can attract more foreign direct investment which are built as greenfield projects which will enhance unemployment, create more jobs, and also enhances growth. How can you do that? You can give tax breaks, you can widen the tax structure, tax base, and shifting to a more growth-friendly tax structure would be a very good way to start this to lure more foreign direct investment in Turkey and lessen the bureaucracy, of course. It's also very, very important. Thank you. Zeynep, on what Salim mentioned, the role of the interaction between social media and technology in helping the ecosystem, do you want to react to that? Well, social media is becoming extremely important. If we look at it today, there are even individuals with 2 million followers. They can write their own media, they can write their own press, and this is creating an incredibly different balance now. So I think it's going to be even more important in the future to follow the changes and what's happening in the world. So social media is important, technology is important in the way we act, and almost following up a bit on your question as well, what the entrepreneurs want, what we're trying to do with social media, everybody's trying to understand what the issues are and how we can really use that. So everything that is not understood completely yet provides an opportunity. So how can we think better to actually make something out of this? We'll go for another round of questions. We'll start in the back. Good morning, my name is Hussam Mahmoud. I'm the CEO of Aldahra Agriculture Company. We work on the security food program of GCC countries and mainly on UEE. I listened to what Mr. Ibrahim Dabdoub said about the Marshall Plan, about the rich and the poor and the medium Arab countries. I think an agriculture project for the security food program of GCC can be a very good Marshall Plan to start, to create jobs, to create this dynamics that we've talked about building this new economy. We already succeeded in creating jobs and grow crops in the desert of Egypt. Then I think we can do this anywhere else in the world. And this can create lots of jobs in agriculture, in finance, in logistics, in ports, in customs, everything. Then we need the agriculture ministers, we need the regulators, we need the GCC countries to sit all around one table and work together on this plan, and I think it can be a good success story. Thank you. Thank you. Gentlemen, on the front. My name is Guru Lalwani. I want to ask the panel, if there was a partnership between the governments and different countries and the private sector, whether government gave tax incentives to people for whatever percentage of employees they take on during the year, they get reduction in their corporation tax. I think this will give every business an incentive to take more people on. Because normally in England, you have to declare every year how many employees you've got. So if you've got 1,000 employees year-end and you've got 1,200, the following year you increase your employees by 20%. So you get some sort of tax incentive on your corporation tax. Then that's one way it will give incentives to companies to increase rather than reduce their workforce. Thank you. I'd like to have a comment from the panel. Yes. Let's power Zurich Sigorta Turkey. Being privileged, educated in Europe, in the European part of Eurasia and having cheap access to education, I'm a bit shocked about the cost of education, for example, here in Turkey. And I believe it's similar, probably in the Middle East as well. If really people want to get good education, they take one of our middle class, upper middle class employees, both working one income, only for education. And as I had a lot about importance of education and how can you provide it reasonably on a reasonable cost to a wider part of population. Thank you. Minister Nizar, tax incentives. Yeah. I heard it's very interesting what you said about how we can help and give incentives for companies to create jobs. And it can be interesting to learn and to study how we can do it, as you said. But I think that what we did in Morocco is given for companies, for example, for the period of training, the government pay the training and give wage for the young people during one year and after, if the company decides to create jobs for him or for her, the government pay one year of social charges, social costs. It's what we did about it. Yeah, we have it in Morocco now. Yeah. Yesterday, sir, we did not agree on Hong Kong and Singapore. Today I agree 120% with you. The more you create tax incentives, the more companies will be able to create more jobs. I totally agree with you. As far as the manual labor is concerned, the lady there, I agree, but the economies in the world are changing structurally. These are service economies. And the best example, for example, is the U.S. is not creating new jobs. Now it's not the old industrial age anymore. That's the problem. These are structural changes that will serve against creating jobs. Joe, on the education. As far as the Middle East is concerned, in particular the GCC, the issuiter is not so much the cost of education as it is the quality of education. If you look at long-term trends in terms of enrollment into various cycles of schooling or universities or in terms of spending on infrastructure, the region is where it needs to be. However, the issue is that there is no emphasis on the quality of the teaching. There is not enough emphasis on identifying like what's done in Morocco, the kind of specific skills we're training people to graduate with. And therefore people come out and you can't match the job market requirements with the skills. Again, take the GCC where you have this proportionately large expatriate population and yet you have substantial unemployment among the youth. And this is solely due to the fact that we're not equipping them with the skills that are needed. I would say the issue is much more with the quality and the type of education rather than the cost of education. John. I think there's one comment I'd make which I think is a response to a number of the questions which is how do you move to a system of more inclusive growth? And I mean, obviously education is a key and you've seen countries which have a virtuous circle of being able to get wide access. It is both quantity and quality. It's the high cost of getting access to quality education which has the problem, not any form of education. So prioritizing that I think has to be one key part of government policy but then should be in the interest of the private sector as well for areas of trying to get effective partnerships which work. And on the question of, I mean, the point, the question was raised earlier about skills and manual work and so on. I think the simple answer is you also need to raise wages at the bottom. You need to get the rewards for actually the jobs which are needed at the moment and at the same time work out some new social contract of how people use skills inside companies. People don't leave their brains behind when they walk into a factory or an office and that is an untapped skill. If we're going to invest in skills you need to unlock that potential in the future which is crucially important. One last comment on the remark that nothing has changed. I'm not from the MENA region but if I looked at one part of the world which seems to have changed enormously in the last 10 years, it is the MENA region. I mean, not that people have suddenly said out we want structural reform but they said we don't want kleptocracy. We don't want the heads of our ruling families on the boards of all the companies which move in here. We don't want bribery and corruption. We don't want non-functioning public institutions. Now, how do you tap that public demand for reform of public institutions and then a partnership with the private sector which actually creates trust again and I think that big picture issue is behind all of the things we've been discussing on the panel. Thank you, John. Our last final round of questions we have not taken a question from this side of the room before I call on somebody whose name I know. Okay, we'll come back. Go ahead. Great panel. Thanks a lot. My name is Sarah Akcholo. I'm from Turkey. An idea which I'd like to get your views on is trying to tackle three things at the same time which is an issue for the world. Education, specialized training at all levels, not just university and turning talent. What about the idea of having industry leaders by industry have formulated technical schools, not university level but maybe primary, secondary and high school level and having an automotive specialized, having construction specialized high schools having specialized so that's one idea which I'd love to get your views on. Second, the government putting an incentive program around this to promote the industries which actually are the ones the country wants to invest in. Thank you. So another hand here, right behind. Thank you. I'm Mark of the Economist at Nomura. Throughout the meetings yesterday and today I think there's been too much optimism on the eurozone crisis. It's interesting and right that John Evans has highlighted, there is a jobs crisis going on and we need to be aware of that. So in a sense I want to flip the question in the title of the panel on its head how do we prevent job losses in this environment in particular and is one of the ways particularly in Europe, a question for John to perhaps lower minimum wages in real terms to enable companies to keep on more more labor. Thank you. Joe, technical schools. On your question I would completely agree that this is a very important way to go. If I look back again at the Middle East, a lot of spending is going to be going into healthcare for instance. So we should definitely be training for more nurses and more doctors in various parts of the world. Take retail for instance which has a great opportunity to absorb some of the nationals in the Gulf state. Again retail institutes I was discussing yesterday with someone attending the conference I don't know if he's here they are thinking now they are an industry leader in retail in the Middle East they are thinking of creating a retail institute. There are examples of Mitsubishi with their local partner in Saudi creating a lifts mechanics institute that is definitely one way to go. Yes. I agree with you it's exactly what we are doing in Morocco we did it for automotive and the most important thing is first of all we take the best standards international standards and second thing we pay for the training the government pay for the training we did it for automotive we did it for aeronautics we did it for textile we did it for construction we did it for information and technology for information and that's specialization of course it's not open for all but the most important thing is to have all the supply we need their industry needs for the future and to invest in our country. On the what can be done to try to save jobs particularly in the Eurozone at the moment looking back to the period 2008-2009 what was quite interesting was that different economies performed very differently in terms of what happened to unemployment not just in Europe but more broadly and it wasn't necessarily the case with the economies which were so called flexible labor markets which did better I mean the US just saw it's unemployment surge whereas in Germany we now have unemployment which is the lowest and I think I mean two things I would argue were quite significant in achieving that result one was across the board an agreement both between companies and unions on the importance of maintaining skilled labor and then a government ability to back up and support that through schemes like short time working subsidies so that when companies were faced by downturns and demand they just didn't fire their skilled workforces they kept them there short time working the gap in demand was made up by the government and where possible there were also additional possibilities to retrain and reskill workers so I think there's lessons to be learnt there how you might look at that as being applicable obviously in countries which are in different situations I think the risk of cutting wages in a recession as we see now is that is part of the problem not part of the solution I mean obviously the question of the relationship between minimum wages and average wages is an issue which has to be looked at in a different context but we now see if you look at the European Commission spring report the bit of good news they express is that the fact there's been a fall in real wages in the Eurozone I mean I see that as a disaster we're seeing a collapse of demand we're seeing actually I don't think poverty growing poverty is going to get a confidence bank for growing demand so I think in a current circumstance we need to try to support demand support wages and put flaws into systems in the longer term it's crucially important I think it's been interesting there's been a talk about how you establish social safety nets and social flaws how you finance that what is the role of co-funded systems there's a lot of work going on in the ILO on this at the moment I think clearly there has to be some imaginative thinking on that a last point I'd make on the point about skilled labour my own personal view that the the dual systems which have actually relied upon industry often as in Germany working with a strong union input on apprenticeships and also then scaling that up to a nationwide system have worked rather well and that stood the test of time it's not always easy to take that model and transport it into another country but certainly on the labour side and this is what we hope to see happen coming out of this G20 meeting which may be a bit more lasting than a final communique by the heads of state in Los Cabos is some sort of template for at least the G20 countries between business and labour L20 and B20 of looking at exactly what is that sort of training system on apprenticeships so I'd like to hope that maybe if we're having this conversation a year from now we could come back and say look something has happened there which has moved a bit the barometer in the right direction we just didn't wait for somebody else to do it thank you John we're going to take the final sets of interventions from the speakers what have you heard today that excited you what possibly has everything is exciting but basically creating jobs in the Mina and in the Arab world and then depends a lot on the kind of the efficiency of the governments in those particular countries again I hate to repeat it but basically what we need is basic structural reforms which most of the Arab countries are not doing in terms of privatisation in terms of education in terms of creating the right environment for the private sector really to create jobs that is one point as far as I'm concerned I know you don't like it but basically the Arab Marshall Plan is a dream of mine and I am going to work on it until I die basically the Arab world especially the poor Arab countries need a lot of help and there is no need for the IMF or the World Bank to get involved we can do the work of the IMF and the World Bank together in a way that will be able to create growth in some of the poor Arab countries these are the two points Thank you, Brahim Joe the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and education synthesise the issues maybe trying to get it all together under one roof so to speak we've talked a lot about education and the main challenge there is how to better match the job market requirements with the skills that are being provided and the ways of doing it we've talked a lot about entrepreneurship and how you can create the right ecosystem so that startups and SMEs flourish and SMEs are badly underrepresented in the economic fabric of the Middle East unlike Turkey we've talked a lot about economic diversification the minister from Morocco mentioned those new sectors and aeronautics in Morocco but closer to home all the service related sector of healthcare, retail, hospitality and ample room for job creations and fourth another way to think about the Marshall plan is to think and that's another dream of mine which is to think more about moving the needle on economic integration step back for a moment and think about the Middle East here's a region where people for centuries and until World War I have been roaming around with no boundaries or no frontiers speak the same language generally share the same culture and yet are at the lowest point of economic integration of any other region in the world when you think about NAFTA when you think about Mercosur even about the early stages of European Union so another way to think about the Marshall plan is to think about just start with the way the six or nine members of the EU were in the 50s and 60s and 70s and at least get that minimum economic integration going someone asked very rightfully so the question on gridlock why would it be different now than it was 10 years ago and it is true we've been discussing this for the last 10 or 15 years I think the reason for hope is that all governments in the region frankly have been put on notice with the Arab Spring and there is no choice but to get going on some of this it is just a matter of getting everyone organized and everyone working together thank you Joe Zayna I think what I take away from these discussions is that youth women entrepreneurship is important and you can put an n slash or in between any of these three words and I think it's important for both governments and corporations if I tell you what we do as entrepreneurs as a species of humankind when we get together we sit and we constantly think ok what can we do what if there was a social app that did this and if we set an e-commerce site that did that so we're constantly thinking about how we actually merge technology, social media together and actually bring economy forward with that if I meet global shapers from around the world I can very easily talk to my friend from the Ramallah Hub and say ok how can we make our both e-commerce sites work together and I no longer need to be a huge corporation to be able to elevate borders and do that so I think it's important for both governments and corporates to foster entrepreneurship to foster youth women entrepreneurship and there's a role for everyone here thank you very much I would like to say that first of all it's very important to have a partnership with public and private sector we did it for strategy and we have now a council for climate for investments presided by the chief of the government it's a private and public council and thanks to that we know exactly what we have to do every year to have better environment for investments the second thing I agree what you said before economic integration into the MENA region and into Arab world I think it's very important now with crisis with Europe it's the key time to do it and I have to say that only fund for the Maghreb region we think that we can win two points of GDP if there is an integration in the Maghreb that means that we can create one million jobs in five years new jobs in our countries with opening of the border and doing economic integration and Morocco work for it in order to have a long and sustainable social peace we have to tackle unemployment and especially youth unemployment not only in Turkey in any country and for that private sector and government they have to work hand in hand together and government has to introduce necessary incentives to improve the investment environment for domestic and foreign investors to come to a country in order to create jobs and enhance further growth I think I think the old view of just looking at headline growth figures has gone you have to look at what sort of models of equitable growth well distributed gains of growth are now going to be sustainable in the future and look behind those growth figures other indicators so the model of equitable growth in the future I think has to stay here and that's part of the lesson that has to be translated also into the creation of decent employment and particularly for young people and women as a key at the start I think there are models and successes not just as we have been discussing here in Turkey but other countries even outside the industrialized countries have had some success I just mentioned one in the case of Brazil which has reduced the genico efficient by six and a half points in ten years at the same time of maintaining pretty fast growth so some of the solutions are out there it's a question of the political will to apply them thank you John I'm going to take this opportunity to invite Nick Davis from the World Economic Forum to share with us very briefly in the last few minutes we have a description and a progress on an important initiative that the World Economic Forum has been making in the space of thinking through job creation thinking through employment and thinking through growth the World Economic Forum as most of you know has made a very sustained commitment to developing thought leadership to convening and expanding the policy discussion and the programmatic discussion in the space of Nick Davis to come and share with us very briefly before we close thank you Tariq and thank you everyone I think we all agree both on this panel in the room that we are facing as John said a jobs emergency youth unemployment in the MENA region was estimated by the ILO at over 26% in 2011 that's twice the rate of the global youth unemployment average it's four times the rate of the unemployment rate for adults in the region and it's the highest youth unemployment rate of any region and this is something really that the forum and this panel and everyone here is thinking very seriously about part of the work that the World Economic Forum is doing in this area is as John said to work with the B20 by giving input into the G20 leaders forum which is happening in two weeks time in Los Cabos and we have through under the leadership of Jeffrey Geras from Manpower Group Crisco Palakrishnan from Infosys and other members of the task force such as John Evans Muhta Kent from Coke we have developed five sets of recommendations which are incredibly aligned with the conversation we've had here today and those are two spur strategic infrastructure investments that can create jobs particularly linked to the green economy to work on labour market reforms and adjustments that maintain social protection and increase the opportunity for activity for a wide range of society including people who are currently marginalised from the work force there's been a big push in the group to focus on how to support smaller medium size enterprises and innovative business models in recognising them as the drivers of employment creation and then finally a big piece on skills which has been a theme of today which is to look at how we can not only create closer connections between the private sector and academic institutions education departments but also to create connections between the society and the apprenticeships internships and employability skills that are required and then just a final note from us that in a jobs emergency as I think has come very clear from the discussion today you do need two things you need this cyclical intervention and urgency a pickup by the relevant actors to take action now to make sure that commitments are scalable to make sure that commitments are locally adapted and that they are also accountable and measurable over time but you also need at the same time these structural changes that fix skills mismatches so if anyone has any further ideas case studies or a willingness to get involved with the work that the forum is doing on this please do get in touch with me or anyone else in the forum because this is something that we are taking seriously and I really appreciate the firepower and insight and thinking of our great panellists today and Tarek for moderating it so beautifully so thank you very much and back to you to close Thank you, thanks to everyone for being with us today in this second and last day of this important meeting maybe the last few hours of it I'd like to invite everyone to join me in thanking the panellists for their engagement with us