 My name is Sean Turnel. I'm a Professor of Economics from Sydney, Australia. I'm here in the US to talk about Myanmar. I spent much of the last three years in prison in Myanmar. I'm now very happy to be here in the United States and at USIP in particular, talking about Myanmar and how we might be able to help. Complete devastation in two simple words. So the military coup, which took place on the 1st of February 2021, destroyed the economy, basically. I had been in Myanmar as an economic advisor to the then leader, Dorang Sung Soo Chi. We were putting in place a raft of economic reforms which were really getting traction. Economic growth rates were tipping up, but more importantly we were establishing the institutions the country would need to develop and grow. And these are the higher order things. In any country you can have subsistence, produce enough food to live, but what we were trying to do was to create those higher level institutions of trust, proper monetary system, fiscal system, all property rights, all the things you need for a complex economy. We were trying to create those. The coup unfortunately has destroyed all of that. All of those trust networks have been swept away by the extreme violence that is really just about all that the military have been able to bring in. So it's a very sad story, unfortunately, but that's the reality. And in terms of just some of the firm data, the economy is a third down from where it was before the coup. And of course in a country like Myanmar that really matters. People are very, very poor. They can't afford to lose a third of their income and yet that's exactly what's happened. So it's an incredibly serious problem made worse by the fact that the military of course themselves don't bear any of this cost. They're doing fine. They make sure that the resources come to them. But for the average person in Myanmar, the economy is a disaster. Their living standards have fallen and life is miserable and oppressive. In the end there's only one simple answer to one simple awful problem. And that is military rule. It needs to come to an end. It's impossible to imagine frankly that any local or even more international investors would ever go near Myanmar. The place is a disaster at the moment. It's engulfed in war. And when I say war of course it's actually perpetrated by the military against their own people. There's a resistance to it. But the country is just not in a fit place to create the institutions the economy needs. It's not in a fit place for which foreign investors and others would want to put their money in. So it's not really possible to imagine anything in the way of major improvement absence the complete removal of that military regime. So the politics and economics which are always connected anywhere, every country all the time, above all is connected in Myanmar. So unfortunately until there is some change to the political situation, until the military moves aside, we're not likely to see any real improvement in Myanmar's economy. So the major thing that other countries can do is to do all that they can to bring to an end military rule in Myanmar. That's good for the people. It's good for issues of ending human rights abuses and so on. But that's also the necessary thing to improve the economy. So as much pressure as possible, as much international devices if you like to try and reduce the capacities and the capabilities of the military regime. The military regime desperately need foreign exchange. They need that to buy weapons, they need that to buy ammunition, they need that to buy fuel etc. So anything that can be done to reduce the military's capability through restricting the regime's access to cash, to foreign exchange, that is really the best avenue for international action.