 Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, depending on where you are situated on the globe. In this short video, I just want to share with you some couple ideas about trade issues. And I will base this discussion on the video, which I hope you all will have seen, which is called Black Gold. And this video is about production and trade of coffee, looking at the case of Ethiopia. But I want to assure you that what you see taking place in terms of production and trade of coffee in Ethiopia is quite common to other primary commodity producers, whether it is coffee, cotton, tea, and other agricultural products. In trade theory, you will have learned that trade is necessarily beneficial to both parties, to all parties in the trade, because everybody gets out of it more than they would have received if they did not trade, and trade therefore generates benefits for the buyer and the seller. What is the reality, though, is that the gains from trade are not equal. In this particular video, you will have seen that producers of coffee in Ethiopia get a very, very small fraction of the market value of coffee, the kind of coffee that we are buying at the coffee shops here in our cities, Starbucks, or any other coffee traders in our area. So the farmers get a very, very small fraction of the market value of the coffee, which means that the intermediaries who are trading coffee along the value chain are the ones who are pocketing a large share of the value added of coffee, because Ethiopia, like other developing countries, is basically specializing in exporting raw material, nearly raw material. But this is the raw material that is going to generate the foreign exchange that the country will need to buy the finished products from the US, from Europe, which are buying the raw material, raw products, including coffee. So what you see now is that Ethiopia is selling coffee at a very cheap price, and buying finished manufactured products at a very high price. So you have basically what we call terms of trade disadvantage, which is unfavorable for Ethiopia, in the sense that it sells cheap exports to buy expensive imports. Now the other thing that you will see from this video is the critical role of the exchange rate, because Ethiopia has its own currency. It's selling to other countries that have different currencies. So the currency of Ethiopia is called the Ethiopian bear, B-I-R-R. So Ethiopian producers produce coffee, sell the coffee, get the price in bear. The coffee is sold to, say, the US, where we buy it with US dollars. So the country, Ethiopia, gets the export revenue in US dollars. That's very, very important, because that's where they will generate the foreign exchange that they need to buy the processed manufactured products that they're buying from abroad. Therefore, the value of the national currency vis-à-vis the foreign currency is very, very critical, because if the national currency has high value, it has advantages and disadvantages. A strong national currency, of course, means that you can buy more of the foreign currency, foreign goods, means that your national currency buys you more foreign goods. It basically means that Ethiopian goods buy a lot in terms of foreign goods, which is good. But the problem is that, at the same time, it means that foreign consumers will find your products more expensive. So a strong national currency is problematic in the sense that it makes exports less competitive to the rest of the world. And if you have been following the economic news, you have heard about these ongoing negotiations between the US and China regarding the exchange rate policy in China, where observers see that the Chinese currency is undervalued, which means that the Chinese products are going to be cheap on international markets, whereas foreign products are going to be expensive for the Chinese, which means that China has an advantage in that it is going to export more and import less, which is quite consistent with what we have been seeing, which is a high and rising trade surplus for China. For the US, in contrast, if in fact the Chinese currency is undervalued vis-a-vis the US currency, that means that the US currency is strong vis-a-vis the Chinese currency, which means that US consumers find it easy to buy Chinese goods. So imports of Chinese goods is going to increase in the US, whereas US goods are going to be seen as expensive by the Chinese consumers. So US exports are going to decline. And that will be consistent again with the trade deficit that we see between the US and China. So it may sound a little contradictory to say that a strong national currency is a bad thing. It all depends. If the country is an export-oriented country, if the country is trying to promote its exports, then a strong currency is really a constraint to competitiveness of national products. But of course, a strong currency allows you to buy foreign goods at a cheaper price. So if you are a country, an economy that depends on imported inputs for production, then of course, a strong currency is good. So it's a balancing game that policymakers have to play to keep the currency competitive, but also to keep the currency so that it encourages exports of national products abroad. Thank you. Good afternoon.