Arquivo diário: 08/04/2015

Lectures / Readings

Education and Susteinable Development I

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Life-Cycle Approach to Human Development

Economic development, we know, depends on investment. Countries achieve economic growth when they have the roads, the ports, the rail. The fiber optics, the power grids that give them the basis for, developing industry and expanding the economy. We know that investments in infrastructure are crucial. Investments in factory and machinery.

In transport equipment. Crucial. But the most important kind of investment that an economy makes is in its own people. And especially the investment in its children. Economists have come to use the language of investment when talking about education, healthcare, nutrition And the other inputs to a healthy, productive life. It’s a bit of a strange language. The idea of human capitol. Because we talk about accumulating the capitol of a person in the same way that we. Talk about a society accumulating more paved roads or more kilometers of fiber for its communication system. But the idea of human capital has turned out to be a, a very, very useful and productive idea. It conveys one thing very important. And that is that the abilities of an individual and the health of an individual depend on a cumulative process. A cumulative process of good health and access to healthcare. Cumulatively living in a safe environment. The accumulation of education step by step and the building of skills. The accumulation of on the job experience and so the evidence is quite strong that as individuals accumulate. More education, more on the job, training, more work experience. Their productivity in the labor force, as indicated for example most directly by earning, also rise. And similarly investments in health, cumulate. Investments in a child’s health help to provide the basis for health as an adult. And indeed, in this process of accumulating human capital, certain periods of life are most crucial. Of course, staying alive. A safe child birth. Neonatal survival within the first few weeks of life are crucial. But many parts of our lifetime that have absolutely determinative effects on all of our lives and our Capacities, the early childhood extraordinarily important because that’s the time, not only when we learn many of the social and human skills that will be needed through life, but the time of the formation of the brain itself, and, the health that we can enjoy. Physical health and In mental health throughout a lifetime. So the concept of human development includes two related ideas. One is the cumulative investments in human capital in the health, the nutrition, and the skills of an individual through education, training, and experience. And the second is the idea of the life cycle, the idea of thinking for each of us of a whole life span, and of how our capacities, our health, our productivity in terms of the economy, depend on the choices that are made at earlier stages of. That life cycle, and how each stage sets up the conditions for the stage that follows. The more we learn, the more the scientists delve into these matters, the more that the very early stages of life matter. Indeed, even the health of our parents before conception, before we even exist as an embryo, as a fetus much less as a newborn are very important. Bad health, poor nutrition can actually transmit across generations even aside from. Genetics. This is a, a finding that has surprised many, many scientists, but is now becoming part of the scientific research findings. Of course, the safety of a mother in, in pregnancy the Intrauterine development as I mentioned earlier of a fetus. The healthy childbirth and a very good start in life with nutrition and freedom from multiple infections say from worm infections or infections from malaria or other. Childhood diseases is extraordinarily important for survival and also for subsequent development. From those early ages, a more formal kind of investment in human capital takes hold, and that is the education system. We know tend to think of that as starting even before the formal primary education, because more and more children around the world, fortunately, are gaining access to a formal pre-k, as we would say in the United States, pre-kindergarten education. A pre-school even before primary education. But then, of course, there is primary education. A core target of the millennium development goals which calls for universal primary completion. That is followed, presumably and desirably, by secondary education. From there, there are many tracks of course, many Children in the world still don’t finish secondary education. Those that do may go on to a kind of vocational training to learn particular skills craftsman type skills. Others may go on to a two year degree, which in the United States we call an associates degree. Or may go on to a four year university degree which we call a Bachelor’s degree in the United States. In other countries it may be a three year degree and then from there to further professional training or a PhD degree or other kinds of higher education. From there it doesn’t stop because there is, of course a training for specific jobs, on the job training. And I hope for, most of us, adult learning because we have a lot of learning to all through our lives. This is the entire life cycle. That we need to keep in mind in thinking about the role of our public institutions in health, and especially in education, in training and job skills that are so essential for individual human development and for the success of an economy. In achieving, inclusive, and, sustained economic growth. We have seen, some progress. And the big progress has come at least, in raising to. At near universality, the access to the primary education system. The data show that as of 2010, the enrollment rates at the primary level, that is taking the number of children in primary education divided by the primary school age population Has reached close to 100%. It doesn’t mean by any stretch that all children are in school still, or that they’re completing primary education, but you’ll see from this graph that there has been a very, very notable improvement of the situation. Back in 1970, you see that the low-income countries were. Still at about 50% gross enrollment rate. And by, 2000, that had increased to around 80%. With the extra push of the millennium development goals, that has increased to more than 100% What does it mean to have an enrollment rate of greater than 100%? That’s a special feature of this kind of measure. We’re measuring the number of children of any age attending primary education decided by the population size of the primary school age – Group. 811And since some older kids are in primary school, maybe they started late or were held back, that can give a ratio of more than 100%. In any event, what this graph shows is that at least at the primary level education has become Nearly universal. And another aspect of this that’s extremely important, from millennium development goal two on education to millennium development goal three on gender equality, it’s also the case that at the primary level, at least, not at the higher levels of education. That 100% signifies a essential closing of the gap of enrollment rates of boys and girls. Girls throughout the world at the primary school age are now by and large going to school. Of course, with important exceptions, still millions, tens of millions of kids, not in school, often in conflict zones. Preventing them from access to education. But have a look at how big the improvement has been in the in the, in the gender equality. recently as the 1990, while probably around 90% plus of boys were enrolled at the primary level. For girls it was just 60%. As we can see as of 2010 the gender gap has essentially closed. When we look across the life cycle however Maybe it’s at the primary level, where the most important progress has been made and in a life cycle perspective, where we would like to see all societies investing at all ages in the human capital of their citizens.

812We see that we now have to branch out from the primary level Earlier, into the preschool ages and, safe childbirth and safe pregnancy and even before. And then move forward to a more satisfactory situation at secondary school level tertiary education and beyond. Have a look at the map, for example, of secondary education. You can see that much of the world now has relatively high secondary school enrollments. But in tropical Africa and in parts of Asia, places where we know extreme poverty persists, we see that the secondary education levels remain Absolutely insufficient. While the millennium development goals focused on universal primary education, my hope is that the sustainable development goals for the period 2015 to 2030 Will focus on achieving universal, secondary eduction so when we look at a world map like this one, we’ll see a near-uniformity of success in a near-universal enrollment rate around the world. When we look at higher levels of education, the situation, of course, is even more disparate. The poorest countries in the world still have very, very low tertiary education levels, and this is becoming a major impediment To their economic progress. It used to be thought by some, erroneously that a poor country should universalize its primary education and not too worry much about higher education. Then move on to secondary education. Then move on to tertiary education. We now know how limited and naive that perspective is. Every economy at any level of development needs a significant presence of secondary and higher-level institutions. 813The higher-level institutions, if nothing else, are necessary to ensure that their teachers that are qualified in the country. But of course, it’s more than that, as I will emphasize. Tertiary institutions  have an enormous role to play in many different aspects of sustainable development. And of course, secondary institutions high schools and the equivalent, are extraordinarily important, not only for producing high school graduates, but also for producing that throughput of young people and talented youngsters who will go on to higher education. So the millennium development goals has focused on one part of the life cycle, but now we have to branch out to the earlier years, with the focus on early childhood development, and then absolutely with a, a tremendous focus, branch out into The later years, secondary education, tertiary education, the extraordinarily challenging and crucial transition from schools to employment, an unsolved problem in many parts of the world.

 

Lectures / Readings

Education and Sustainable Developement IV

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Social Mobility

Education is a pathway for all of us to productive lives as citizens and as members of the economy. And it’s a life cycle challenge for all of us to develop our capacities, our skills, our potentials from the earliest days possible where our parents and society crucially can help give that safe environment and the health and the nutrition needed for a good start in life, to the choices that each of us make throughout our lives to continue to accumulate knowledge to gain skills to go through programs of formal education. On the job training. And continuous lifetime learning.

We’ve seen that while education is a pathway, it can also be a filter, and a rather painful one. If higher education is expensive, meaning that only children from affluent families are able to pursue higher degrees and if the returns to higher degrees are themselves quite high, then that filter, the costs of higher education can mean that education becomes a bottleneck for the poor, an amplifier of incomes for the wealthy and yet, another source for widening inequalities. This unfortunately is the situation in the United States today, which once was seen and, and felt by itself to be the great land of opportunity. The land of the highest possible social mobility.

The place where Americans compared themselves with what was taken to be the stogy class based hierarchical, aristocratic societies of Europe. The U.S in its mythos views itself as the land of opportunity but because of the great inequalities now of returns to education, the widening inequalities that our political system has produced, the high costs of education, the mountains of student debt for young people especially from working class and poor families. We now face a low level of social mobility in the United States compared to many, many other high income countries. In general, there is a relationship, that is a rather stunning one and a rather sobering one for countries of high inequality, like the United States. 841Have a look at this very, very important graph. And let’s consider it in a little bit of detail to understand what it’s showing us. On the horizontal axis, no mystery, that’s the Gini coefficient for this group of high-income countries. And we know that the higher the Gini coefficient, a number between zero and one. The higher is the inequality in the society. The low inequality countries in this graph are Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark. At the high end of the genie coefficient our The United States with the greatest inequality among this sample of countries followed by the United Kingdom. So far so clear.Now on the vertical axis, what are we looking at?

Each country is rated by a statistic which measures the relationship of a child’s income to the parent’s income. So this is looking at how closely a parental income translates into the income of the child. So it’s a measure of inter-generational income mobility. If the correlation is quite high at the high end of the vertical axis, that means that parental income and children’s income are highly related. Have a poor parent, you end up poor. Have a wealthy parent you end up having a high income. If the correlation is low on the low side of this vertical axis that means that no matter what the parental income.

The children’s income is fairly much independent of what kind of household background they come from, and, low and behold, looking at the vertical axis, those countries that have a low correlation of child and parental income are the Nordic countries, Finland, Norway, Denmark. And which countries have the highest correlation of parental and children’s income. Well, the same ones we just looked at.

The United States, the United Kingdom, add Italy to this mix. What you see is an upward sloping line, while it doesn’t prove causation, it has a rather sensible narrative, one that’s easy to understand, it says that unequal countries with a wide dispersion of household incomes, in other words, a high Gini coefficient are also countries of relatively low social mobility. If there’re big gaps between rich and poor then the process of education, the levels of educational attainment, the ability to get to good jobs is also highly filtered. It is a track for wealthier and richer kids it’s not a pathway that is, holds much promise for the poorer kids. The United States and the UK are examples of two rather unequal societies, with rather low social mobility. And the three Nordic countries in the lower left hand side of this chart, Finland, Norway, Denmark. And one would add in Sweden close by as a fourth part of the Nordic representation on this chart.

Are cases where the income inequality is quite small and in addition, the correlation of parental and children’s income is also characteristically small. In those rather equal societies where government spends massively to provide for pre-school. To provide for early childhood development. To provide for university education. On the public tab. The social mobility is quite high, the child’s background just doesn’t count for all that much, because there is such a high degree of mobility and such support from government.

842A similar kind of relationship is found in the upward sloping graph that you’re looking at. This also puts the Gini coefficient on the horizontal axis just the same way. The vertical axis is a different kind of wage persistence. It’s looking at the gap of earnings of young people depending on the education level of parents. High up on the axis are places of big inequality of income depending on the fathers education level. Places that are lower down are places where there is a small gap. Of children’s income depending on the father’s education level. The message is just the same as in the preceding chart. Places with high income inequality are places where there’s a high correlation across generations which we can interpret as places of low social mobility. And the lesson here is rather striking and rather important. We’re finding essentially that unequal societies are societies that replicate that inequality across generations.

They are societies that become societies of low social mobility and by many ethical systems, societies that are rather unfair because the future prospects of a child are not that child’s own determination. They depend more on to whom the child is born, than on what the child is able to accomplish on their own. And for myself as, as a U.S. citizen, a country that has prided itself on high social mobility, these kinds of findings are quite stunning. One more look at this evidence to finalize the point. 843In this kind of bar chart, we see a comparison of the United States and Canada. And what we see is a division of these households by decile and looking at the probability of a son falling into a low decile or a high decile depending on their fathers income status. So have a look at children born to poor fathers for example. Which is the graph that you’re looking at right now. And then you see which of these 10% categories, the son falls into, so of the sons in the United States whose father is in the poorest 10% of the population, you can see in the bar all the way to the left, that around 23% of those kids themselves end up in the bottom 10% of the income distribution. Another 18% or so end up in the second lowest decile of the population. And around 7% or so of those kids end up in the top decile.

For Canada, you can see that it’s a little bit more equal. Because Canadian children that are born to poor fathers don’t have the same very high proportion ending up in the poorest part of the income distribution. And they have a much higher chance of ending up in the high income part of the income distribution. 844This is consistent with the preceding two graphs that we looked at. It’s basically saying that since Canada is a more equal society, children are less likely to follow exactly the track of their parents. Now let’s look at the other end of the income distribution. Consider it, the kids born to high income fathers, what happens to them? Again we can compare the unequal U.S. with the relatively more equal Canadian situation. In the United States if a son was born to a top docile father, rich father, then you can see in about all the way to the right of the graph that around 27% or so of such kids end up. Also in the top decile the probability that a rich father will end up with a rich son is quite high. You see that in the case of Canada the bar just next to it, it’s a much lower rate of intergenerational transmission. A top decile father, one in the top 10% of the income distribution has, gives the son a, around of 20% a probability of ending up in the top as well. Look at the other side of the income distribution. What’s the chance that a son born to a top decile father ends up in the bottom 10% of the income distribution. Naturally, not all that large. But in the United States, around 3%. In Canada, around 8%. This is the flip side  of the same point. That in the U.S. under our current conditions where households track, successful households, largely through educational success, university attainment and are having kids who make it to good jobs and good earnings and poor kids not making it.

You see that there is the inter-generational replication of the income distribution, the more equalist the society, generally depending on a strong role of government in ensuring early childhood development in ensuring axis to quality education at all levels. Than that inter-generational mobility is enhanced, the inter-generational correlation within the household is greatly diminished. And for most of us, the meaning of that is that, poor kids have a chance in places where inequality is reduced. And where the government is playing that role of ensuring that every child has the chance of meeting his or her potential.

That after all, is the whole challenge and goal of an inclusive society. It’s one where individuals have responsibilities, but they need the help, especially the kids in poor households. That the help of government can make it possible to achieve that goal.

Lectures / Readings

Education and Sustainable Developement V

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The Role of Higher Education in Sustainable Development

We’re thinking about education. It’s role for an individual, it’s role for society. I’ve been emphasizing that  education is absolutely critical for economic development, education is a pathway for a high productivity workforce. Education is the ticket to individual job security and higher incomes for individuals, especially in an age of knowledge at the center of so many parts of the economy.

I want to talk about higher education even beyond those individual human capital, issues and reflect on the importance of higher education. For overall economic development through other pathways as well. Not only the training of individuals, but the problem solving of society. Now let me say straight out, I’m utterly biased. I love universities and I have been in, universities now.

I’m, probably shouldn’t tell you, but it’s, more than  40 years, since entering, college, life, in, 1972. And since then, I’ve had the great joy and pleasure to be part of 2 great Universities, Harvard and Columbia University, throughout my life and throughout my career, places of great learning, wonderful students, wonderful opportunities to expand ones knowledge. I admire Universities for what they can do and should do for society. And I wanted to reflect a little bit on how important higher education is. Not only in preparing you or me for a job in the labor market. But for enabling us to participate more broadly as citizens and especially to participate in each generation’s challenge of problem solving. What we know about higher education is that, not only does it boost the human capital of the individual, but it goes right to the core that I’ve been stressing of the key to long-term economic development of technology and of know-how.

Higher education has shown itself repeatedly to be crucial for the 2 kinds of growth that we observed.

One is the endogenous innovation based growth, where new science and new technology are developed, giving birth to new industries, whether it was James Watt working in the workshop at Glasgow University in 1776 when he said, I got it. The new steam engine, or whether it’s the advances that have been pouring out since over the following two centuries, including the great breakthroughs in computer science, in material science, in Moore’s Law which has underpinned the transistor and integrated circuit revolution of the last 50 years of genomics, of agronomics. Universities and higher education have been absolutely central, because technology and scientific advance has been central.

The second kind of growth, is the adaptation of technologies from abroad. It’s true that not every technology requires a high skilled user to use it. How many of us really understand the quantum physics of how our mobile phones work, because quantum physics is crucial for understanding solid state electronics which is at the core of of the integrated circuitry, which makes it possible for the digital revolution to work. Well, not, not too many of us could recite all of the details of the digital age, but we can still use the phones. Some technology just is marvelously packaged, so that it can be used essentially by anybody. and, this is a wondrous thing when the breakthroughs of science are in a pill that can be taken to save a life, no matter what the education level of the pill taker. When the brilliant rapid diagnostic test that we have mentioned enable a village health worker to save a child from malaria. That’s a kind of technology that is packaged in such a way that it is very, very broadly accessible.

But a lot of catching up growth, which depends on bringing technologies from abroad and using them effectively, depends on skilled workers. Not necessarily the same kinds of scientists that invented the technology in the first place, but scientists and especially engineers who can adapt those technologies to local conditions. Seeds that are taken from one place very often have to be adapted to local growing conditions, or certainly to local farm systems. Even though Norman Borlaug’s seeds from Sonora, Mexico worked in India, thank goodness for India’s green revolution, how to plant them in the Punjab of India depended on skilled agronomists being able to make that translation of the technology from one place to the next.

So technology transfer is essential. Highly skilled workers are vital for that, universities of course are vital for providing that knowledge. Universities are vital for providing the research and development that our, at the core of science based innovation. Universities are vital, of course, for providing not only a highly skilled, highly trained labor force, but for training the trainers. Especially the teachers, who are going to be working throughout society. Helping to prepare youngsters at preschool all the way through primary and secondary education, so that they are developing their human capital to full capacity. And universities are critical for one more major activity that I want to underscore.

And that is problem solving, policies and strategies to make the differential diagnosis that we’ve been speaking of, identifying the specific challenges that countries face, whether in public health, or in transport and infrastructure systems, or in facing the problems of climate change, or in adapting cities to be more resilient to natural hazards. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation that will be required of new systems thinking, new ways to govern, new principles for our behavior and our organization of our social lives and our political systems, and universities are needed to play a key role in that kind of problem solving. Now this, of course, poses a major challenge.851

We’ve already looked at this map which shows the difference of enrollment rates in higher education in different parts of the world. Not surprisingly, we know that countries like the United States, the Scandinavian countries, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, are countries with a very high rate of university going, though, probably not high enough given the, information age that we are in right now. But compared to poor countries, throughout Asia, and especially throughout Africa we see that the reach of universities in many of today’s poor countries are not adequate to the needs for these societies to be able to generate the technology transfer and the homegrown innovation that’s so essential for their development, and to have the highly skilled well-educated leadership, crucial for the national problem solving. If you look at this picture, which is a map of the share of national income devoted to research and development, it looks a lot like, the tertiary education enrollment rates. R and D is heavily concentrated in the high income world.

This has been true, essentially for two centuries now, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. A tremendously high share of the new innovations have come from a small subset of countries. The United States, Western Europe, Japan, now Korea, Singapore, Israel. Just a few countries in the world accounting for the lion’s share of the scientific breakthroughs and the patented intellectual property, that underpins a lot of the technology advances.

And to a very important extent that technology, even when it’s being developed by businesses, depends on the university sector. Indeed it is itself a fascinating and complicated and complex challenge to understand how a society becomes an innovative society. As usual for the kinds of problems that we’re looking at there’s no simple linear path, nor a single answer. You might say well high income country has businesses that do R and D and it’s from that research and development that new innovation emerges. But inevitably, those companies first need, highly skilled scientists and engineers to be doing, that kind of research. But even more important than that, the research that is the basis for new technologies, is often not being done in the companies at all. It’s being done in national laboratories, or research centers, or to a very significant extent, in the universities themselves.

There is a very complex and subtle network that links businesses universities, national laboratories. And other cutting edge knowledge institutions together in a flow of information sometimes commercial, sometimes open scientific research or open source knowledge. There’s alongside that flow of information and research findings, more pathways of money flowing. Maybe the universities are supported by business to do some targeted research. Maybe it’s the government that’s funding the universities doing research that then gets incorporated into new start up companies. Started in clusters around the universities, like Silicon Valley. 852

Next door to Stanford University. So, we say that this is a national innovation system. That integrated mix of public and private, and philanthropic foundations of universities, of businesses, of government national laboratories. Of financial flows, and, All directions that is putting together a very rich flow of innovation and ability to make cutting edge steps forward in science and technology. It is part of the challenge of every country’s development to create a national innovation system, consistent with its capacities, with its needs, and with its opportunities. And within that, higher education plays an enormous role.

I want to turn to the fourth Aspect of Universities, that I very much admire and believe need an even larger place in our societies as we grapple with the challenges of sustainable development.

And that’s Universities as major engines of problem solving, looking at the complex problems that we’re discussing with sustainable development. How to move to a new energy system. How to have sustainable agriculture. How our cities can be re-engineered, re-purposed, redesigned for healthier more resilient settings with high economic productivity and less impact on the physical environment. And what has been known now for centuries, but really, demonstrated time and again, during the period of modern economic growth, is the role that institutions of higher learning can play and helping societies to grapple with their very complicated problems.

Now I’m very much attracted to one of America’s great breakthroughs in this regard, called the moral act. A piece of legislation passed in the US Congress in 1862 and signed by none other than President Abraham Lincoln. The moral act created what are called Land Grant Universities in the United States. They are Land Grant because the Federal Government granted land to the states, to establish new centers of higher education. And there is one for every state in the United States, in this system of land grant universities. But what makes the Moral Act and this initiative so novel and so important for America’s history, is that these institutions were set up not only to train, but to help the local communities and the states in which they are located to solve problems, to develop the skills the techniques, the knowledge base to solve problems, especially from 1862 for a long period of time, to solve agricultural problems through agricultural field stations and outreach of university based scientists into the community to help farmers grapple with problems of pests and productivity and soil nutrients and climate and the other variables and inputs into high productivity agriculture. So, the Moral Act in 1862, said that this endowment would support the maintenance of at least one college per state, where the leading object shall be, and I’m quoting from this Act. Without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the states may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education, of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. These were practical undertakings. What a great advance 150 years ago to think about the federal government, no less in the middle of America’s Civil War, saying we need to invest in higher education to solve the practical problems one per state in the United States. Other countries of course in similar ways have championed their institutions of higher education to play this kind of role.

But, many, many countries have so far not really taken up this idea. I meet with government officials in many places in the world where I find the reaction cringe worthy I might say. Where they view universities mainly as places to teach, perhaps as hotbeds of political controversy. But not as partners in development. And I always try to explain that government should view universities as engines of problem solving and of national development, and not only, though it is part of their role as places of education, and certainly not as hostile territory, where governments are worried about the political implications.

Thinking, yes, can lead to new innovation, new approaches, new calls for new kinds of governance, and it should. But universities must be seen by governments in this complicated age of sustainable development. As partners in problem solving. It’s for that reason that I’m also especially honored that UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, asked me to help him in his global leadership challenge of promoting solutions to sustainable development. To help put together a knowledge network based on the universities around the world, precisely so that these universities can be more effective partners in their own cities, in their own nations, in their own regions, in problem solving for sustainable development. You’re looking at the cover of a report that this new, United Nations sponsored sustainable development solutions network, or SDSN, as we finally call it. Issued to the Secretary General, in, identifying the main challenges for sustainable development for the period of 2015 to 2030.

SPSN is an outreach organization aiming for very broad membership of institutions of higher education from around the world. To join together to exchange knowledge, ideas, to debate and discuss alternative technological approaches, for example, the clean energy. To help keep universities around the world at the very cutting edge of sustainable development, thinking, ideas, technological know-how. Also so that students can be trained to be at the cutting edge. And countries around the world are forming their own chapters of DSDSN, the Nigeria chapter, the Ethiopia chapter, the Indonesia chapter, the Malaysia chapter, the Korea chapter, as well as regional groupings, for example, around the Mediterranean Basin region, headquartered, at the University of Sienna, or around the Si Hill countries of West Africa, centered, in, Dakar, Senegal. Or around the, universities of the horn of Africa with a base, in Nairobi, Kenya. or, the Osian universities for the southeast Asian countries with a, a headquarters in Bali.

In all of these cases, these networks are strengthening themselves through partnership. Through online materials, through joint activities, through, common teaching programs, through common problem solving efforts. To be available to society in the same way that the moral act created the land grant institutions to be available for practical problem solving. On the complex challenges of sustainable development.

I believe that by forming this kind of network, by energizing the extentand intensity of problem solving, and I’m counting on all of you to be part of that as well, we can indeed succeed in this great challenge of achieving the multiple objectives of economic development, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and good governance that all of our societies need and yearn for.