Can Asia still deliver the development dream? | Philip Schellekens

You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Bannick. Asia is often described as the great success story of development. It is the region of economic miracles, expanding cities, rising aspirations and some of the most dramatic reductions in poverty the world has ever seen. And there is truth in that story. Over the past half a century or so, Asia and the Pacific have helped transform the global economy, with the region's share of world GDP rising from 13% in 1960 to 31% in 2023. The region has thus become one of the central engines of global growth. But that is only one part of the picture. Because Asia is not one story. It is a region of immense contrasts. It is home to some of the world's richest and most technologically advanced societies, but also to countries still characterized by fragility, exclusion and deprivation. It is a region of glittering financial centers and vast informal economies, of expanding opportunity, but also persistent vulnerability. And despite enormous gains, major inequalities in health, education and human development remain deeply entrenched. That is why Asia matters so much to any proper discussion of development. It is not simply because the region has succeeded. It is because it reveals both the promise and the unfinished business of development itself. It shows us what growth can do, but it also shows us what growth alone cannot do. Indeed, it forces us to confront the distance between aggregate progress and lived experience and between major transformation and everyday insecurity. That gap between achievement and vulnerability also speaks to a wider reality. The development landscape, as you're aware, is becoming more turbulent. And the language of multiple crises, while often accurate, can also narrow our field of vision. It can make us see only threat, where there is also possibility. It can trap us in diagnosis when what is needed is imagination, political commitment, a fuller appreciation of agency, new strategies and a clearer theory of change. So how should we think about Asia today? As a model, as a warning, as a laboratory of what comes next? Perhaps it's all three and more? To help us explore these questions, I'm joined by Philip Skellikens, chief economist for Asia Pacific at UNDP. Before joining UNDP, Philip worked for over two decades at the World Bank and the IMF. He now works across 34 countries in the Asia Pacific region on how to turn development strategy into practical and future-oriented action. In our conversation, we discuss how to think about Asia beyond the familiar binaries of miracle and crisis. We discuss growth and distribution, jobs and insecurity, aging and opportunity, globalization and resilience, and why development needs to be understood in a more holistic and a more human-centered way. We also explore a larger question that runs through the season of the show. How should we think about development in a world that is undoubtedly more fragmented and more anxious, but still very much alive with possibility? If you find conversations like this thoughtful and worthwhile, I hope you will share the episode and its links with friends, colleagues and others in your networks. That kind of support really helps the show travel further and reach more listeners around the world who care deeply about development and the questions shaping our common future. You are listening to In Pursuit of Development and I am Dan Banik. Lovely to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan. Nice to see you as well. I want to start with Asia. If you think about global development in the past few decades, if there's one place where we often talk about the successes, what works, it's East Asia, South Asia, Asia seem to be where the middle class is growing. There's a lot of positive news, unlike other regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where we often talk about the problems. But the picture is actually more nuanced than that. So Asia is very heterogeneous. We have Singapore and we have Afghanistan. Huge disparities. So give us a little sense about how is Asia doing now? Yeah, indeed. Asia is really a continent of many, many countries. The diversity is enormous. It spans low-income countries all the way to high-income countries. It also spans countries across the spectrum of demographics from what we call pre-dividend countries all the way to post-dividend countries. So it's extremely diverse also in terms of political systems. And we need to take that into account when we look at the accomplishments and the challenges of Asia. I always characterize the region in terms of three characteristics. It's been a story of long-term progress, which, by the way, also applies to Sub-Saharan Africa. The mumes about Africa might sometimes be collared by negative developments. And indeed, extreme poverty remains at high levels there and the poverty is deep. But Africa also has made massive progress. So let's not forget that. The same for Asia. Now, having said that, despite the long-term progress, not only in monetary dimensions, that's mostly apparent in the convergence of particularly East Asia to what I would call the Western offshoot. Actually, that's not me calling them like that, but that's Agnes Madison calling them like that, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. East Asia is one of the few exceptions, one of the few regions where we have seen actually a convergence to the income levels, per capita income levels of those frontier income. But also, more recently, we've seen South Asia doing better, but still lagging behind. But besides from the monetary dimension, lots of progress on the non-monetary dimension in terms of longer life expectancy, better educational outcomes, and all of that. So if you take a long perspective, it's a positive story for the entire region. In all countries, we have seen progress. But Asia remains a story of massive disparity, both inequality within countries and inequality between countries. And those disparities are not going away very quickly. I always like to refer to a couple of statistics. Just two years ago, I think, when we looked at the latest extreme poverty data, it still had 200 million people. Now it's a bit less. It's around 150 million, who are extremely poor. So oftentimes, we say we look at the map of extreme poverty rates around the world, and then we see Asia very low and Africa very high. Well, let's not forget that the population size of Asia is a lot higher than Africa. So in the absolute, there are still many, many people who live in extreme poverty in Asia, well above 100 million. And then if you look at multidimensional poverty, so the first figure was extreme income or consumption poverty. If you look at multidimensional poverty, which refers to deprivations in multiple dimensions of development, we have about half a billion people who are still multidimensionally deprived. We have about 800 million women who are out of the labor force in Asia, Asia Pacific. And we have 1.3 billion people who are out of the formal sector, surviving from day to day through activities in the informal sector. So I say Asia is a story of structural exclusion, unfortunately. Now we've also seen, and that's a third characteristic I would say in addition to long-term progress and persistent disparity, we've seen massive disruptions recently in the context of the pandemic. But there are also other shocks that are slowly manifesting themselves in terms of demographic headwinds, in terms of the impacts of slowing globalization, in terms of the impact of the realization of disaster risks, and democratic backsliding. So that's sort of a nuanced picture of Asia. It's a very diverse region. On balance, we can say that there's been long-term progress, but the disparities have been very hard to get rid of, and it remains a region that is very exposed to disruptions. Let me give you one final statistic here. If you look at the data right before the pandemic, and I think that's valuable because the data is not going to be polluted by what happened during the pandemic, even right before the pandemic, if you look at all the countries we have data on in the World Values Survey, we see that the level of job insecurity is at super high levels. Between 50 and 75% of the adult population reports being highly concerned about losing their job and not finding a similarly good one. And that's true for all the countries except a few. I think it was Australia, New Zealand, and either Japan or Korea, I forgot. But all the developing countries, if we can call them like that, in the region are suffering from very high levels of job insecurity. You know, when I think about Asia and the success that many of the countries have experienced, particularly the East Asian miracle, you think about economic growth, redistribution, and eradication of extreme poverty. So you have the developmental state that has become very important in the literature, and in many parts of the African continent, the dream is to emulate that developmental state. That is what Ethiopia was doing. But I sometimes feel there's also this obsession with growth. There is this competition about, oh, they're the latest figures, you know, IMF World Bank figures, who's growing, who's growing faster? It's the growth of the economy. So there is an obsession with growth. But the distribution in many other countries hasn't been nearly as impressive as in some of the East Asian miracle countries. So that's one aspect I'd like you to reflect on. You know, even though there may be a focus on inclusive growth, but maybe that hasn't translated into inclusive development. So that's one thing. The other thing I'm thinking about, Philip, is the demographic transition and the very fact that, say, China is growing older, people are living longer, economic development, better health care has led to longer life expectancy. The population perhaps in Asia isn't as young as on the African continent. We see life expectancy increasing, but that also brings with it several other challenges. And the final thing I wanted to point out, and that goes to your point about the diversity, is I agree that, you know, this one-sided focus on the success in Asia masks many other problems such as under nutrition, hunger. You know, we think about Sub-Saharan Africa as the home of the hungry child. It turns out it's South Asia. You know, so those disparities intrigue me. I do believe that growth is absolutely important. It's necessary. But as far as from sufficient growth can come with many disadvantages. Growth can be jobless. It can be futureless. It can be ruthless in terms of conflicting with cultural preservation. It can be ruthless in terms of not caring at all about the bottom end of the distribution. So growth can come with many side effects. But nevertheless, there is no country in the world that has managed to make sizable improvements in more holistic concepts of development without economic growth. And economic growth provides the fiscal space to invest and make social investments. So the story is well known. So we should be careful. We should criticize growth, but we should be careful that the pendulum doesn't swing too much. You mean towards degrowth because there's a lot of activism on that. Yeah, degrowth in my view is a complete nonsense. It's a bit like de-globalization, which in my view is nonsense. Maybe I can briefly speak to de-globalization. What we are seeing right now is this globalization, a slowing rate in the pace of economic integration across countries. It's still plenty of opportunity to globalize further in different markets, in different areas, because globalization so far has been confined to particular regions. Many parts of the world, and I'm thinking especially about parts of South Asia, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and a lot of Latin America. I have not taken part in the globalization story. So I don't buy the story on degrowth. Growth remains essential, but we need to think differently about it. I always like to talk about the Kaia identity, which is a way to look at CO2 emissions growth, because when we think of degrowth, one reason why we speak about degrowth is that we care about the carrying capacity of the earth for the population, but also importantly for the income levels of that population. And emissions growth can be decomposed into population growth multiplied by per capita income growth multiplied by energy intensity of GDP and multiplied by the carbon intensity of energy. And those first two factors, population growth, which has been coming down, but it's still significant, and especially per capita income growth, have been the two main reasons why emissions continue to grow, whereas greater energy efficiency and a lower carbon intensity of energy are contributing to lowering. Now, is the solution in this context degrowth? I don't think so, because who are we, as in the high income countries, to say that countries that have been lagging somewhat in climbing up the income ladder should be deprived from the opportunity to afford a similar living standard? I think that is not correct. But obviously the earth has a finite resource capacity. So the challenge is really to combine economic growth with new growth models that are environmentally more sustainable. So that is a bit my philosophy on growth. I always say that the level and the distribution of income are jointly determined. You cannot look separately at the level of income or economic growth in the average and then the distribution. It's always jointly determined. And when we look at what's happened in Asia, it's been a member homie talking about this. It's not been a story of trickle down economics. It's not trickling down. It was flooding down. If you look at the massive reduction in extreme poverty and other types of poverty in China, that was very much facilitated by almost indiscriminate growth. Now, you're totally right that we need to shift in our growth model, our development model. China is aiming to do that by shifting from a focus, a very strong focus on the rate of economic expansion to the quality of a moralistic concept of development. And that is a transition. But we cannot criticize, again, developing countries between quotation marks for taking their time. The countries that industrialized during the industrial revolution took decades, if not more than a century or much more than a century to get where they were. So we should recognize that it takes time to build institutions. And so that's not your first question. I really believe that growth remains essential. At the same time, we need to look beyond growth. That's the beyond GDP argument. I think beyond GDP cannot mean instead of GDP. It's a compliment. And by the way, we need to look much more at the dream GDP. Yeah, what is happening, not just distributionally at the level of the country looking one aggregation lower and what's happening, you know, sub-nationally in between households. But also we should look at what's happening underneath GDP at a global level, between countries, much more, especially in the era of AI. And we can talk about it because we believe that AI could well be contributing to greater between country inequality. But while we need to remain focused on growth, we need to focus much more on beyond growth. And I would say that the SDG agenda is a reflection of that. If you look at global development progress under the Millennium Development Goal area, so that is between 2000 and 2015. MDG won. Remember, we will go half extreme poverty between 1990. So we started 10 years before the monitoring framework started in 2000. And we reached that objective five years ahead of time. But what happened with all the other MDGs? We failed them more or less miserably. Progress was highly incomplete and highly heterogeneous. Then came the SDGs. And we decided that we need to have a more holistic compact for global development, not just towards South interactions, but we need to tackle together the global public goods and the sustainability agenda came to the fore much more. And the SDGs are much stronger on the non-monetary dimensions of development than the MDGs were. Under the MDGs, as I said, MDG1 was the only monetary objective to reduce to half extreme income or consumption poverty. It's a monetary metric of development. The other ones where we failed were non-monetary dimensions. And now what are we seeing with the SDGs? Exactly the same thing, the same failure. We seem to be trapped in a cycle of failed development goals. We need to get out of this. We need to reframe development. We need to rethink how we do development. Otherwise, the next framework for global development goals is going to be again a failure. Right now, we've only achieved globally the same for the Asia Pacific region. About 18% of the targets we set out to achieve in 2015 and we are well beyond halfway mark. So we need to rethink how we see development, how we imagine development, how we shape development, how we practice it, because otherwise we're going to be trapped in coming up with the same outcomes. Now, on the demographic transition and European point at Asia, but actually there are other developing regions where obviously demographics are taking a turn. I mean globally, we have seen something truly remarkable. If we go 50 years back, the global population growth rate was 2%. Right now it's around 1%. And 50 years from now, it will be 0%. So the world is contracting demographically and we are fully going to reach as per the medium variance scenario of the UN, a global population of 10.4 billion. Now aging, how to look at aging in the context of Asia Pacific? Well, first of all, it's a very heterogeneous story. On the one hand, you got South Korea with a fertility rate around 0.8, the lowest in the world, although I think that the consider will be even lower and maybe more like or two. But I think Korea is actually the lowest in the world in terms of a country of significant science. And then we have the Afghanistan and other countries where fertility rates are still well above the replacement rate. So it's a very heterogeneous story. Now I used to manage at the World Bank, the second global flagship report that came out after Nancy Bertzwell's population change, a world development report. The report that we wrote was the global monitoring report on demography and development where we launch a new demographic typology. And I do take a positive view on aging. Look at aging as an opportunity, not as a funeral. Many people are looking at it that way. For me, aging, and this again betrays a little bit also the transition that I went through having worked at the IMF and then go to the World Bank and I'm at UNEP and I must say to the credit of my current employer without criticizing any of the previous ones, I find that UNEP is truly, truly a progressive development institution in terms of approaching a development challenge holistically. And that's how I like to look at aging. For me, aging is an opportunity for people at the population level to live longer and healthier lives, full with vitality, full with purpose, full with connection. That should be the challenge. The challenge should not be economic growth. Yet, it was just at an IMF conference here two weeks ago called Asia 2050. You would think that such a conference would start with an articulation of what does it mean? Asia 2050, what are the metrics against which we would evaluate success? The first session was an economic growth, which made me think perhaps the objective for Asia by 2050 is to have high economic growth. The second session was on demographics where the overriding story was demographics will overproductivity grow. It may well be. That's not the objective. We need to look at it differently. So I do think a more positive view. I don't think China will follow the path of Japan. Now, the two big questions in Asia right now are, is China going to become an honor Japan between quotation marks, of course, and with that, I mean, respecting, of course, the huge differences between those two countries. What I mean simply is, is China going to follow the path of stagnation, economic stagnation that Japan has suffered and is still suffering? And the second question is, can India become another China? Also with big quotation marks, of course, because the countries couldn't be more different. And the answer to both questions in my view is both tentative, no, but a conditional, no conditional upon policies. And in both cases, it has to do with demographics. I think that China will not fall into the trap of Japan because of its innovation ecosystem, which is much more outward oriented. But the issue here is that the way China will avoid becoming an honor Japan, which will hinge on its ability to boost productivity and to boost innovation ecosystem will slower, will slow its transition out of the lower cost activities that has already happened to a large extent. But it's happening not very quickly. And China, thanks to by replacing the demographic dividend by a robotic dividend is able somehow to slow down the labor intensive part of the value chain, the outmigration of that to other countries. And that will affect India. I was mentioning the East Asian success stories earlier, but I also do mention, you know, I have a what works module in development, promising practices. And the big story is how one country, China can lift half a billion people out of poverty in 20 years. I mean, that really is unprecedented. And and that goes to that argument you're making about growth, you know, being important, but also on the degrowth aspect, my initial criticism was precisely what you said is that who are we to preach to other countries, not to do as we have done. But I do see that and not that I agree with the degrowth people all the time, but I do see that they have somehow changed the narrative. They are now claiming it is we that need to reduce our consumption, you know, the kind of emissions per capita in Norway far exceeds anything that Asian countries are experiencing. So something about it's more us and not them. But what I do think they underestimate is how linked we are in this world, how globalization has made us all dependent. It's not like we can reduce our consumption without there being an effect on jobs in other parts of the world. So that brings me to this issue of jobs and AI and robotics that you also touched upon briefly. One of the things I've noticed, Philip, in the last maybe three, four, five years, particularly the Indian China that I've been visiting is this growth in new types of jobs, you know, it's Uber ride, the hailing services, you know, that has given a lot of people freedom to pursue, you know, an independent kind of lifestyle, get some extra money. It could be shopping malls, people working in the retail sector, but also these delivery services, food delivery services, you know, six minutes, something called Blinkett in India, six minute grocery delivery. It's just unbelievable. But this has also led to dissatisfaction. I think a few months ago in India, there were strikes, you know, these people, they were saying we are we are being squeezed on all fronts, you know, there's this enormous pressure. So it's not like these jobs have led to some sort of satisfaction or, or, or, you know, decent living. It is still stressful. So staying on jobs and particularly because in Africa, I know most Afrobarometer service say it's jobs. That's the first thing the citizens want. What is the current discussion in this huge continent of Asia on jobs? Is it now not just increased jobs, but, but better paying and more comfortable, more decent work related jobs? No, absolutely. Look, I cover a region going from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Rabati and from Mongolia to New Zealand. So we cover Asia Pacific as a whole, including South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific. And in virtually all the countries that have visited so far, economic growth and especially jobs is the number one priority. And just to give you an example, a year and a half or so ago, Prime Minister of Bhutan asked us to develop a new economic development strategy for Bhutan. Remember Bhutan, the country of cross national happiness. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. The country that cares very much about cultural preservation, about the environment's sustainability and rightly so. It has been actually a fantastic role model for many other countries in this respect, but as Prime Minister Topge has realized, jobs need to be created in Bhutan. First of all, Bhutan itself does not score particularly high on its indicators of national happiness. I think liver cirrhosis is a cause of that that is extremely prevalent. Aspirations of youth are not met and about 10% of the population over the last 10 years have left the country. Yeah. So, so we then were asked to develop Bhutan 10X. What would it take for Bhutan for its economy to grow by a multiple of 10? Of course, that will take a long time. So we develop a strategy for Bhutan to follow for the next three decades. And you see this everywhere. Yeah. Also in China, of course, China is extremely worried as it transition to slower growth within many ways is actually expected than normal. But it is very worried about not producing the jobs that its population, and particularly the youth want. The youth unemployment is at high levels. So we see this across the income spectrum. And that's absolutely critical. And the right hailing apps, the new economy jobs, as you mentioned, are both a blessing and a curse. You know, they are blessing because relative to the counterfactual, people have a job and they are their own master to some extent, even though the apps might dictate where they have to go and so on. So there's a bit of agency being lost there. But at the same time, it is associated also with high levels of insecurity. These are precarious jobs. These are not stable jobs. And you see that in Indonesia and Bangladesh, it's all around the region. You see that this is a massive sector. And it is basically an elastic sector that exists in part because the formal economy is not producing enough good jobs. I very much think that the reason why Asia is not generating enough jobs is mainly related. Well, it's a complicated story. I don't know if I can generalize, but I see oftentimes that the jobs agenda is reduced to a story of the supply of labor side. We don't have the right skills, you know, the education systems are not turning out the right profiles for the jobs of the future. But I think basically people in general are smart and have the incentives to improve their lives and to take on education. The issue in many countries is on the demand for labor side. And the demand for labor is a derived demand for labor, depending on the product market. And we need to look much more at that. For example, Thailand, SME sector. Yeah, we talk about why is the SME sector not growing? Why is it not becoming more productive? Well, I tell you the reasons why I have probably nothing to do with the SMEs has to do with oligopolistic behavior of the large companies. So when you ask me what does Asia need to do in order to generate more jobs? And there are many institutions right now. The World Bank, for example, has focused, I remember when I was there during the last annual meetings, the focus became entirely the jobs agenda. If I remember correctly, poverty, even on World Poverty Day, which coincided with the annual meetings, there wasn't a single activity that had poverty in the title and also climate was put on the back burner. But it was all about jobs. I do think jobs are important, but they're not sufficient to deliver development. You need to think of social protection as well and many other things. But how do you generate jobs? I feel that we get it wrong most of the time. Good jobs are generated by good governance. We need to go deeper. We need to look at political will. We need to look at future-proving development strategy so it's not overturned by an extra administration. We need to think about the capacity of countries to deliver better. The solutions for faster development, faster human development, faster job creation are with the private sector, but government has a role to play in terms of governing better. If you look at the countries that have done well in the region and you talked about the Asian miracle, we talked about China. Why did China do so well? The first reason was effectively the shipping governance. So that is, I think, the culprit. The second thing I would say is that people have a narrow view on job creation. For example, insofar as it concerns the interaction with technology. There's this fantastic study by Timmer and Parle and others that looks at through the lens of national account data in Putahopu tables. It looks at what happens to job creation when a country joins global value chains and global value chains are typically more capital intensive, more technology intensive. So there are three effects. The first effect is your production becomes more technology intensive and therefore you substitute away from labor. So that's a negative effect. People only think about that when they think of technology. Same with AI. There are two other effects. Embracing technology actually allows you to be more competitive and to capture a greater share of global value chain income. And secondly, embracing technology allows you to access external markets more easily. So you can connect more easily to fast growing external end user markets. So it's not just technology. It's also competitiveness and scale. And that's where the secret of job creation lies. It lies not just in embracing technologies. That may actually be negative in the, if you look at it narrowly and in short term, but it's about expanding the range of goods and services you offer. So you capture a greater chunk of the value chain and then you connect to fast growing markets. So external orientation, which is the second reason why China did so well, is absolutely critical and we don't see enough of that across the region. I like the point you made about a focus on social protection. You know, when you think about human development, it is much more than just income. And that was the starting point of the human development report. Amartya Sen, Mapo-ul-Haks, you know, ideas that it is about education, but the quality of education is important. And I see this in many Asian countries. It's not just how many people, how many children are going to school, but the kind of education they're receiving at primary, secondary, university levels. It's also about health. It's not just accessing health care, but the quality of health care. There's a lot of focus on health insurance. You know, in India, there's the largest health insurance scheme has been launched. We're just starting a new study on the Aushman Bharat. So it's health education. Informality remains a big challenge. Right. How one addresses that. There are trade tensions with China and the US. Globalization, some people say, is in retreat. And then there is also the crisis of multilateralism. Your agency, the UN, is in financial crisis. A lot of member states are not paying their dues. And what we are seeing, Philip, is the idea of development being framed in terms of crises. And a very important theme of this season of my show has been nuancing that picture, not just talking about crises, but also talking about opportunities that we shouldn't just give up. There's a lot that we can do still. So I want to ask you in conclusion, when we think about development, you mentioned this briefly, we need to reframe development. We shouldn't be talking about maybe de-globalization, maybe a different type of world that we live in. How do you understand this reframing process? What should we be focusing more on? How have understandings of development in your view changed of late? What can we expect going forward? Well, this is a very fitting last question. It's actually a question we can talk about for another hour. I would say, first of all, we need to see development differently. Right? Just the way I describe it initially, the state of development. If you look at the short term news, we see crisis. Probably the worst concept that's been talked about recently is that concept of the poly crisis, which makes it look like, yes, indeed, the world is more connected, the risks that we face are more overlapping. But in all of these risks lies also opportunity. And I think we need to, this is a forward-looking statement, but if we just look at development in a backward-looking way, that's where we need to start. We need to see it more holistically and in a more balanced way. Just like I said, we, there's been long-term progress, but persistent disparities. But let's not forget the progress. At the same time, we also need to recognize that we live in an era where aspirations are unmet. The low progress rate on the SDGs is a good example. And where human insecurity is at high levels. And we also have to realize that we are facing a more turbulent development landscape. Existential risks are combining with new headwinds to growth and job creation. And as you say, there are the governance risks. So that is in a nutshell for me, the state of development. But we need to look at it in a more balanced way, I think. Now, what does it mean to shape, to them, imagine development differently? I used to manage a unit at the World Bank, that's a strategic foresight. The UNEP is very good at strategic foresight, but adopts a slightly different tradition. Not just looking at the future and then trying to predict it with scenarios or central forecasts, but to reimagine the future. Someone said once, the best way to predict the future is to shape it. And I think we need to reimagine development. And that involves a couple of things. One, let's look at all countries as developing countries. Every country is a developing country. High income countries too, they are still struggling with a moving frontier, whether it be inequality, homelessness, loneliness and contributions to the global public goods agenda. And I think we also need more imagination in terms of looking at this turbulent development landscape. As I said, I see demographics in part, I'm not denying the challenge, but in part, as an opportunity to live longer, healthy lives. I see massive opportunity on globalization. As a anecdote, Germany in 2007 was the same size as China. Right now, China is four times larger than Germany. In 2007, the growth rate of China that year was very high, around 13 or 14 percent. Right now, it's three times slower. Now, we are worried about China, but the absolute scale of the opportunity that China adds to the global economy is actually much larger than what it wants. The increment of 14 percent growth in 2007 was smaller than what it is now, three times lower. And China is adding from now into the next 10 years, even at slower growth of three, four percent, we predict that China will continue to add to the global economy every other year, more or less, an economy the size of current Brazil or South Korea. So don't tell me that we are seeing the globalization. We are seeing actually absolute opportunity expanding massively. And also AI. Now, AI is a little bit more tricky because it's both an existential opportunity to deal with other existential risks and an existential risk itself. But I think we need to move away from the hype and the hysteria and have a more balanced debate on AI and so on. I think generally there is a need for a shift from crisis language to more opportunity thinking. And then when it comes to shaping development differently, what I think is we need three transitions. We at the World Bank, I was involved in development strategy advisories at UNEP, we launched a new advisory program, which we call BOLD, B-O-L-D, Building Opportunities for Leadership in Development. And it's built on the idea that we need to be far more focused with our advice to countries. Countries like strategic big bets. They like to spend their political capital on a limited number of policy suggestions. Goal should be the days where we provide long laundry lists of policy solutions. And secondly, and most importantly, we need to put governance first. We need to think about the political economy of reform and the art of delivery. How do we nurture political will? How do we promote collaborative leadership, civic engagement? That's all in the space of trying to spark the interest and change. And then secondly, we need to future proof change better. When we design it, let's make sure it becomes less reversible by the next administration or by a vested interest in the future. And finally, let's make our civil services more competent, more anticipatory, more adaptable and more agile. That is needed. And that for me is fundamental, yet it is oftentimes still an afterthought. If you look at typical reports that are written on development, 50, 60% are of the page counters about diagnostics. Why are we here? What went well, what didn't go well? The next 30 to 40% is about the policy solutions. And 10% is about the actual implementation dimension. I would say let's turn it around. That spent 40, 50% on describing the space of implementability ex ante, designing policies so they're not reversed and thinking about the actual exposed implementation. That should be how we can shape development in the future and how we can break out of this never ending cycle of failed global development goals. Philip, there were so many interesting things here that we could really pursue deeper. We need to have a follow up conversation and continue many of these debates. It was great fun for me to have you on the show today. Thank you very much. It's very welcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Bannick from the University of Oslo. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to in pursuit of development at gmail.com.