 So now we have, okay, why don't you come up? So now we have some time for questions and comments. Any questions? Thoughts, yes, go there. So my question is mostly to the project, like I want to hear about the project more. I understand like the big picture, like the soap and tar, like the elephant's trunk, but Finn and Rachel and Ines and all the others, can you tell me more about what you are doing? Like I hear exciting things coming on board, but do you want to give a sneak peek? So that's not a question, but that's more of a curiosity. Thanks. Do you want to respond or shall we? Shall we get some other questions? Okay. So now I'm putting the audience on the spot. Thanks. I mean, I think it's pretty clear from what we try to present here that, I mean, one first extremely important kind of point is that you really have to be very careful. I mean, that a lot of the debates that are influencing and informing policy, I mean, if I were a pure policymaker in quote, I would actually end up being pretty confused. So that's sort of at least one first from the sort of, if you wish background type work we have been doing. But there are also other papers coming in terms of trying to tease out and David's paper is one concrete example and there's much more coming on that. In addition to that, we have been doing work on inequality in Mozambique. Some of you may have participated in the session on that and it's very clear that Mozambique is a very interesting case of this and that country level evidence will very much be going hand in hand with the kinds of things that David has been uncovering. And interestingly, when we then look to Vietnam, there are quite distinct differences between Vietnam and Mozambique in this regard. And this does seem to reflect a number of factors that we then also could discuss in more detail. When it comes to the experimental work, I mean, I try to highlight that it's not just sort of some very sort of small standard lap in the field. I mean, we're talking about, oh, how many is it? More than a thousand, one thousand and twenty, if I remember correctly, individuals in each of these two countries. So we and it will be that they will be participating in a number of experiments where we will be then both doing it in rural areas and urban areas. And it will basically be tracking the perceptions of inequality and what that means for your willingness to redistribute your perceptions of what is fair, is that influenced by whether differences in income, whether they seem to be reflecting merit or they are pure lock determined. So I mean, and this is where we obviously cannot say yet what's going to be the results of this. But I mean, we're talking about preparatory work that has now been going on for a year and a half in order to do this at this scale. But I mean, if you do want to sort of have in quote a modern world illustration of this type of work, you should look at the work of the Bergen group, I mean with, what's his name? I forget his name right now, but it's the Bergen group that are doing the experimental work in this kind. So yeah, I think that's approximately where we are right now. I guess I can just add briefly on the experimental work. I mean, I've written a bit about being a bit critical about experimental work in terms of the generalizability of the findings, right? So you've done this lab in the field in this one context and how do you know that what you've found applies anywhere else. So that's something we really try to look at a bit more directly through this work. So we look at urban and rural areas in two very different countries and do we find the same thing and how do the macro structural context, how does that influence what you find differently across the cases? Hello, thank you. So yeah, I find it really interesting. I really liked the sort of the beginning and actually it made me go, I think maybe in a different direction from what I expected. But I think the part that I find really, really interesting is that I think when we think about the effects of inequality and we look at the theoretical literature on that, I think sometimes the sort of, the papers are a bit sloppy in terms of how the analytical part, what part of inequality is responsible for the mechanism and the fact that in the conclusion they say there's inequality, right? And I think that this is really interesting to know what you are doing in the review but to really carefully look what is it really that is supposed to be driving the mechanism when they say inequality, right? So in the capital market imperfections type of story, I think that most of the action comes from actually the amount of people that is below some threshold. So it looks more like, in some sense, like poverty type of thing, right? So looking at the bottom 40. When you look at political economy mechanism, there's a lot about subjective inequality, right? How people perceive it or not. People talk about whatever the Trump stuff that you had said, like some people talk about, I mean, the evidence is not very clear, but I mean, it could be that could be that is about earnings inequality and not income inequality, right? That has to do with precisely, like, whatever issues of shame or whatever it is, right? Status and stuff and that's, so if you receive, like, exactly, like transfer, like, government transfer that doesn't help so much and so I think this would be, and the absolute versus relative stuff. So it could be like some mechanism are about absolute and others are about relative and I think that would be really extremely valuable kind of that you guys have already more or less going in that direction and to be more precise in that and then to maybe, if you can, like, use the actual measurement of inequality that actually relates to the point made instead of just, like, the Gini coefficient. I'll collect a couple questions. If you and then here. Oh, you can stop there. Yeah. Well, I'll take you first just because you're closer. Sure, sure, thanks. Thanks, Rachel. I think first to welcome the presentations and there's something, Fin, you said, which I'm quite interested in because I think we did have an extensive discussion about social protection, especially in Mozambique yesterday and I think you made a very interesting point that said if we really want to improve the distribution of incomes, especially to poor households, we need to think about what happens in the labor market. And I often find a lot of conceptual difficulty in how we think of work, especially in places like Mozambique and in many other places in the developing world. When we talk about labor in that sense, what does it look like? Is it just time used and spent in things that can bring in income or contribute to some livelihood? Or are we talking about work in the traditional sense where, yes, you are working, but you also have certain safeguards, be it provided by the employer or even outside of the employer-employee relationship, that can at least deal with some of the risks and shocks associated with work, especially for commodity-reliant economies like Mozambique, where if commodity prices shift sort of negative terms of trade, one might find themselves in precarious work, out of work, in work, in some instances, in the informal space. And how do we deal with this issue of shock absorbers as a way to deal with inequality? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thanks. Thank you very much. I have two questions. One is to Professor Thap. Now, you have emphasised the value of reporting the number of poor people, but we rarely report that. And actually I think maybe we should just be reporting that, the number of poor people, rather than just the anti-county ratio. I always say that we emphasise poverty measure, the one which we want to report as the anti-county ratio, ignoring the number of poor people. So that's one question. The other one is about up until now, we have been thinking about any level of inequality, any type anywhere, as a bad thing. But in this session, we seem to say maybe some level of inequality is good. Maybe not everywhere, maybe in some countries. Also, the location of the concentration of income also might be useful, depending on where it is in the income distribution, which means type of inequality might be a good thing. So actually, and we are the same people, we are the same group, same very different things. So now, is inequality something that we should eliminate? Or is something, some type we should promote? Some level we might tolerate? Actually, what's the policy message? Thank you. Any other questions? Let me turn to the panelists. Thank you. I take the first a little bit more to encourage us to continue. I should add that this is not a project for which I would have gone in and taken responsibility if I'd had different donors or funders. We have been extremely fortunate within NF that they have a completely hands-off. And this is why we have been trying to, how can you say, do some of these things, even if we are aware that it might not so quickly result in some policy recommendations as you otherwise might want and so on. But we do believe that we as an economics profession probably have been a bit sloppy of not paying attention to some of these issues, more heads on, because there are a couple of papers of theoretical nature but we as empirical economists, we haven't really, I mean, and it's that type of thing that we're trying to address. Now, on this about, I mean, what do I mean about the labor? I mean, I'm really just thinking about it in the following way. If I'm an extremely poor people who have absolutely very, very limited land and very limited other tools and so on, then really I'm left with the working power that I have myself in order to generate an income and that's why how the labor market is actually functioning and when I say the labor market I'm talking about both the formula and the informally, how they actually work and which are the income, incomes that this market generates and when I'm talking about market, I mean, I include informally the incomes that that generates. I mean, they are absolutely fundamental in terms of understanding what will then happen subsequently because then subsequently we will only have then possibilities either for doing transfers or taxes in terms of changing that original income distribution. So it's in that sense and this is where I have been trying to stress that we need to be very careful when we are then sort of saying social protection and then assuming that the state or the government has, I mean, almost unlimited possibilities for doing this. First of all, financial resources can be very scarce and secondly, you might not have the institution capability to get the money out there. I mean, we know now that this is improving because mobile money is now becoming a bit more possible and so on and so forth but I mean literally the ability for a government to get the funds, the support out there where it's required in terms of social protection is often extremely constrained when you are in poor environments. When it comes to the questions from Professor Moab, I mean, I tend to think that it's absolutely relevant to use the different indicators that we are using when we are talking about progress and that we should use the whole battery but we should not forget the absolute numbers because the absolute numbers I mean, might lead to economic consequences that we need to address and that's of course why we are talking about population increase. I mean, that's an absolute thing right often. I mean, you can, and I'm scared about what's happening in Nigeria. I mean, it's going to be the world's largest country in 2050. I mean, and there it helps me at least to think about that when I add in the absolute numbers and I could have added in more numbers of the absolute but that's something that I think we do need to think about. The second part of your question let me just try to yeah, why don't you take that one? I try to go at the sort of inequality, good or bad, right? Let me try to be sort of pragmatic. So basically the point here is we should not aim at having no inequality whatsoever, no? I mean, there is a story of incentives I mean, we know that, we don't want all earn the same and then we kill the system that's why I said, so some inequality is fine, we know that, I mean, that's part of the system. The point here in the presentation was okay, but so when inequality increases, it's not only the level but also what's happening in the distribution, right? So again, to be pragmatic, you may want to have a genie of say 30, okay? As in many sort of relatively equal European countries, but what you don't want to have is that so keeping that genie level, that the concentration at the top increases. That's why, so it's not only the level but also the distribution, right? So say, okay, some genie of 30 is good, it means that some people are putting more effort in what they do, incentives, so on, right? But if within that genie you certainly have more concentration at the top than the data and I mean there are also theoretical insights, of course this suggests that this is not good, it actually kills the incentives. This guy is earning a lot, he's the owner of everything or the income goes to him and I'm putting the same effort, right? So when it's concentration at the top that you can see, the super reach and all of this story that we know, this goes against the positive role of inequality, it's actually killing incentives because we know this is associated with sort of political connections or I mean you know all of the story of the problem of concentration of income at the top at the super reach. If I could just add sort of one observation here also I think it's very important to keep in mind that if we take, and I'm not saying this is the truth and nothing but the truth but if we do take the standard two sector Lewis model and just think about how development happens in that context then is a definitional relationship that if you take poor people in the traditional rural sector and move them into the urban higher income then you are going to have increasing inequality up until the turning point and I mean in some ways if that were the only thing that happened then I could live with increasing inequality for some time because that would actually reflect that the structural transformation of the economy is taking place but the problem of course is that very often what happens and this is just to sort of stress what David is saying is that as that process then goes on it doesn't happen just like sort of an automatic machine that goes through this process that in that process then you are starting to have political, social other processes where the sort of automaticity of the process it gets interfered with I don't know if I can put it that way that may not be the best but and I mean and I think that underlying structural versus then the other things is sort of where one needs to be so that's why that I cannot go out and say that I'm against any kind of differences in terms of income among people I just can't do that because it depends Ines did you want to jump in? Maybe I can add just a comment on the experimental work we are also trying to get at this question of whether people tolerate some level of inequality so the type of games we do is that we assign people which a certain amount of money two players one gets more than the other and in some cases it's because they perform better or worse in one activity in other cases is because we gave it randomly by luck and we are interested in seeing whether people are averse, adverse to inequality in both cases or perhaps they think no but if the other player performed better in this task it's fair that he gets more than me so in this case we are perhaps also getting at this idea that some level of inequality is tolerated depending on the source of inequality so that was just my two cents Just to add this is also the story of market versus structural inequality or the story of opportunities that we were discussing before so we all have the same opportunities then from then on some inequality is okay if the problem is if the inequality is the outcome of some people having better opportunities than others We were talking about this at lunch the other day but so I think we're almost at time and I just want to thank all of you for joining us it's late in the day I think for some of it it's the middle of the night so that we're still speaking somewhat coherently is a good sign but please look at the website there's a bunch of papers posted there there will be more coming certainly from the experimental work and I think maybe some more papers from you so please do keep engaged with the project thanks very much