The new mosquito bomber, twin-engined, long-range, and made-of-wood. Officials of the de Havilland plant in Ottawa display the revolutionary construction and material of the new plane. The fuselage is made of two skins of plywood with an insulation of softer wood between. Answering the controversy of wood versus aluminum, in some cases the mosquito has proved less vulnerable to gunfire than metal machines. The wings are formed of large sheets of supple wood, light, strong, and easily molded. The result is a high-speed reconnaissance bomber. Pictured for the first time, the mosquito is wheeled from the hangar for a trial run. This new weapon is being built for the de Havilland Company as a result of a bottleneck in light metal material. Its engines are being made in American factories from English design. Unique in construction as well as material, the mosquito is assembled in two pieces. The halves are then joined to make the body complete. This plane requires half the man hours needed for a similar plane of metal. It mounts four cannon and four machine guns. Test product de Havilland sets his controls ready for the take-off. The mosquito taxis down the field, takes up speed, and lifts from the ground like a chip in the wind. Viewed from the nose of the plane, the airport beneath is a fast, disappearing street. Its speed and climbing power are military secrets, but has been known to out-distance the fork-wolf 190, indicating a maximum speed of 430 miles per hour. Slicing vapor trails with its wooden wing tip, the bomber does a slow loop. To a look off a rear gunner, its striking power is more like a timber-wolf than a mosquito. One motor cut is constant like a fighter, maintaining perfect balance and efficiency of speed. Actual combat and attack, the mosquito has upheld the excellence of its trial run. A bomber made of wood has proved its metal. Milne Bay, on the tip of New Guinea Island, is an important harbor for the United Nations. If it had fallen into Japanese hands, our position at Fort Morrisby would have been endangered. And the whole campaign to drive across New Guinea and capture Guna and Guna would have collapsed. The Japanese attempt to land the force at Milne Bay met with a decisive defeat. With the hull of the tip of New Guinea in the Lide hands, it is possible for the cargo ships to dock in Milne Bay. From there, they discharged their valuable supplies which have then shipped up-country to the Allied forces. However, it is necessary to send scouting parties up along the coast to seek out and bop up any isolated nests of japs that might be holding out in the jungle. Japs landing barges were left on the beach, put out of action by the parrots of the Kitty Hawk fighter planes. These steel barges carried 60 men and some mechanized equipment. Flowing through the daily rainstorm, soldiers are wary and alert. Always conscious that japs snipers may be hidden in the underbrush or in the trees. But all the evidence they find points to a hasty and complete retreat. Abandoned tanks riddled by anti-tank fires. These important links in the supply chain, tanker trucks, are shot up and useless. Thirty-seven millimeter field guns were discarded by the japs in their flight. They will now be turned against them. Particles have been used extensively by the japs in all their campaigns from Malaya to New Guinea. One of the most interesting items found among the abandoned equipment is this garment, a bulletproof vest. The steel lining can deflect shrapnel but is vulnerable to a direct hit. Their gas masks are cheaply constructed of flimsy material. Here is one of their typically broad short bayonets. This soldier has put on one of the very practical two-toed rubber-soled shoes that japs snipers use for tree climbing. According to the men who fought at Milne Bay, no praise is too high for the magnificent work of the Royal Australian Air Force Kitty Hawk fighter squadron. The pilots swept Japanese opposition from the sky, strafing landing barges, even coming low to pick off snipers from free tops. Deep in the jungle, our engineers have packed out landing fields, but the rains keep the ground soggy and unusable. These steel masks were brought in to provide a firm strip for take-off. From these small portable landing fields, our pilots take their planes into the daily offensive that is being waged to drive the japs off the islands of New Guinea. Many household appliances can no longer be purchased. Stores that once had well-stocked shells are now empty and some are forced to close. Kitchen utensils are now going into war production. Those that the housewife now had will have to last until the war is won. Some new parts easy to install are still available for home repair. And stockings too can now be mended at home with a simple device and a little patience. Cotton and wool also are vital war products. Instead of throwing these trousers away, expert workers take threads from the hammer seams and re-weave the torn parts. Small fixer chops are opening in many communities. Here anything from a radio to a baby's rattle is accepted for repair. This vacuum cleaner will soon be overhauled and back in service again. Fashionable department stores also are opening save-it service divisions. This electrical plant used to manufacture new goods. Unable to get many materials, it now turns to the repair of household equipment. Older experience workers mend all makes and all kinds of home appliances. Many schools have swung to teaching children household repairs in manual cleaning glasses. Students bring their own appliances from home. A vacuum cleaner that doesn't work. A toaster that blows fuel. But under competent guidance, these children are helping the war effort by learning to repair the household time save. And in other schools, mothers and fathers are going back to the classroom once more. Learning from competent teachers how to patch and mend. This teacher is explaining how to mend a screen with a simple patch purchased at any drug store. Some people create a dangerous condition in their homes when they put a penny behind a blown out fuse. This fuse now, instead of being the weakest point in the circuit, is the strongest point. This is a disastrous trick that ruins home wiring and often causes destruction by fire. Today's slogan is, fix it. Here is a record of the first American attack ever made on Italian soil in the long history of war. The date, December 4, 1942. The target, Naples. The crew of the Daisy Mae goes aboard, fully prepared with maps, weather reports and knowledge of dangerous parts to be encountered. More than a score of United States liberators warm up for the take-off from a field somewhere in North Africa. The course of the squadron is almost due north, over barren stretches of desert, then on out, over the calm blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The mission has great importance in the strategy of European warfare. Italy's heavy industries, feeling the force of RAF bombing to the north, have been moved to Naples for safety. The huge four-motored bombers spread across the sky over the Mediterranean. Several of the planes are veterans of other successful raids. For every enemy plane destroyed, a star is stenciled on the fuselage of the bomb. A ship is painted on for every enemy boat sunk. As dust comes, the squadron approaches them. Pilots climb up to high altitude, beyond the reach of anti-aircraft guns. Gunners are on the alert at all times. From the tremendous height, the bombing is accurate and intensive. Oil refineries are smashed, sending up clouds of black and grey smoke. 100,000 pounds of explosives were dropped, thinking one cruiser badly crippling one warship and another cruiser. The waterfront, harbor railway installation and munitions dumps were left shrouded in smoke and flame. The raid on Naples, from which all American bombers returned, was brief, violent and effective. This is Arthur Hawking, plot number 2062. An American, a machinist for many years. Several months ago, a telegraph boy came to Arthur Hawking's door. And Arthur Hawking learned that his son was dead. Killed in action. In the next few weeks, Arthur Hawking was puzzled. Many things look very different to him now. He thought about his son and the sons of his friends. He felt he had something to say to his friends. And so, he wrote a letter. A few weeks ago, my only son was killed in the war. Most of you know this, but you can't possibly know how hard his mother and I feel. That is, none of you except Walt Gardner, who just lost his boy too. Since hard is death, I've been doing a lot of thinking. What I'm trying to figure out is why so many of us are taking things for granted and not doing all we can to help win the war. Maybe it's because we keep hearing and talking about the war lasting for years. That sort of thinking might keep anyone from hurrying. It could be that this long full stuff was why we lost almost half a million minutes of production time last month through absences and tardiness. Anyway, I'm fed up with all this talk about a five or ten year war. There's no sense to it. We can win this war quick. We've got to. If we don't, your boys will be killed like mine was. So put those five and ten year thoughts out of your head. Finish our refrigeration machines for the synthetic rubber program this month. Not next. Keep our portable cold storage lines going 24 hours a day, not 16 or 20. Sure, this means sacrifices. It's no fun to work the night shifts. It's not easy to put 10% of your pay in the war box. None of us go for gas and food rationing. These are nothing compared to losing someone you love. I know. Please, please don't wait for the casualty list to come rolling in. Throw yourselves into high now. Get going as though both the Hun and the Jab had to be licked in 1943. I suggest a new slogan. Here it is. Let's get it over quick. I hope you won't think I'm preaching. I'm not. I'm praying. Yours truly. Arthur Hawking. Crop number 2062.


Once upon a time, an old man and a young man were living nearby in an urban neighborhood. Somehow, this old man, being jealous of his young neighbor, started spreading rumors that his young neighbor was corrupt and of loose character. As a result of this, the young man got framed in some case and the police brought him to a magistrate. Days later, this young man was proven innocent. After being released, he sued the old man for wrongly accusing him. In court, the old man told the judge, the magistrate, that he, that is the old man, just made passing commitments, merely gossiped and did not harm anyone. The judge, before passing the final judgment, on this case, told the old man, write all the things you said about him, that is the young man, on a piece of paper, cut them up and on your way home, throw out the pieces of paper. Tomorrow, come back to hear the pronouncement of the final judgment. The judge told the old man. The next day, the judge told the old man, before I deliver the judgment, you will have to go out and gather all the pieces of paper that you threw out yesterday. The old man said, I can't do that. The wind must have spread them and I won't know where to find these pieces of paper. The judge then replied, the same way simple comments or gossip remarks may destroy the owner, by the honor of a man to such an extent that one is not able to fix it. The moral of the story which I just narrated is that if you cannot speak well of someone, rather don't say anything. Let us all be masters of our mouths, so that we won't be slaves of our words. Let us all be masters of our mouths, so that we won't be slaves of our words.


Our next speaker is Mamdou Karakochua, this is as good as I kind of pronounced your last name and please excuse me if I didn't do it well. True, but it's a bit longer one than I am used to, which is a very nice name by the way. I have been trying and you know, I'm training myself, but somehow I did not get it yet. I will next time. Mamdou will speak about the economic factors that will impact the region and shape the region's economy, whether it is energy dynamics or prices, public debt, capital of low, excess supply of labor, technology and the productivity. So will you speak about all the issues that previous speakers spoke about? And you will be limited to the same time. Thank you. I will keep it short, don't worry. I mean, I won't keep it short, but within 15 minutes for sure. Thank you, chair. It's good to be back in Abu Dhabi. It's good to be back with World Policy Conference friends and colleagues. So thank you. Now, of course, this is all happening under the tragic shadow of what's happening, transpiring in Gaza. So I shared the sadness in Turkey. We all shared the sadness and you can feel it in the people. It's very real. Moving to the actual substance of my remarks, I will be at the intersection of geopolitics and geo-economics, but more to the geo-economics side. For the last few years, actually, we were on the same panel I think last year, I was more on the geopolitical aspect of things, but now today we go get into economics. Of course, Abdurrahman did a great job of sort of painting that picture, then the intersection. So I'll try to build on that. I will sort of challenge him maybe on a few things.  One needs to be very humble. I'll try to do that. But as a speaker, I need to provoke a little bit, so I'll take a bit of a risk. So forgive me if I just don't get that balance right. Now, when I was thinking about this presentation, I just sort of thought back, and it was exactly 10 years ago in 2013 that I was asked by the Allied Command of NATO to write a piece on regional economics.  And I thought that would be a good reference point to take for myself. So that's the past 10 years. And that gives me some feel, at least I try to get tease out a feel for the next 10 years where things can go from here. When I look back at those 10 years, the reference that what I got out of my first analysis in 2013 was that the fundamental for me issue of development in the region is trust. The trust between its people and its governments. And that trust was fractured. And how do you rebuild it when there's so much pent-up frustration and impatience in the people? I mean, well-meaning governments, even if you try to deliver, execute fast, when people have been waiting for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it's very difficult. The challenge is immensely difficult. That's what I got. And with that, sort of, you know, when I think about it, I mean, if I divide the problem into two pieces, one is, will these economies grow? Will they create wealth? That's one question. The aggregate wealth. The second question is, will these economies put in place the mechanisms where the created wealth will be distributed to the society? It's the distribution, the engagement of the citizens that seems to be the problem in the Middle East. It is the creating wealth.  It's not the best, but it's okay. It is the distribution. Getting the people, getting the young people to be a part of this is the challenge. That's the problem. So looking back over the past 10 years, I wonder, you know, whether things have progressed in the past 10 years. Has the region come a long way? And when I think about that, the answer is not all that positive. I mean, the unemployment is high. Youth unemployment still high. Informal economy still huge. Women participation still very low. The quality of jobs, they're still low skill, low paid, low tech jobs. Not much change on that front. So and then the weak private sector. I mean, the dream has always been to get the private sector going so that the private sector absorbs these new bright, well educated people. It's not happening. It hasn't really happened to the extent that we all hoped. And this is not because the governments, the bureaucrats, the technocrats didn't try. Everybody tried. I think well-meaning people, very intelligent people are trying. They've been trying. And when I look back, I go beyond the 10 years. I do sort of remember the 90s and 2000s, definitely. It was the heyday of neoliberalism and IMF was in the region. There were programs with Egypt, with Morocco. So all this reform talk of you don't get rule of law, governance, reform the trade sector, reform the... You know, it was all on the table. We've had this before. And this until 2010, I think we had quite a bit of it. And then the last decade, of course, we had all these other realities. We had the aftermath of the Lehman crisis. It was the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I still call it the Arab Spring. And, you know, one after another. So these 10 years didn't really alleviate all these problems. But it wasn't for lack of trying. I think people have been trying. And I put the problem in sort of two different baskets. One set of problems is, as I said, there's this repetition of sort of their well-meaning and accurate, I mean, sort of well-targeted platitudes, but they don't go far. You know, when you say governance has to be improved, sure. Rule of law, sure. I mean, we all want that in my country as well. But it's the how. I mean, how does it happen? How will it happen? And we don't really see those, even incremental steps getting in that direction. That is one bucket of repeating sort of platitudes, right platitudes, but that don't get you to the result. Then there's another set where actually things were done, but we figured out that you do the policy, you actually implement the policy, but you don't get the result. And some of those examples, as I sort of delved into this, is, for example, I realized that in the last 10 years, the number of years of education have increased in the region in many countries. But that did not translate to better jobs, higher pay. So those better educated young people didn't end up getting good jobs, which is strange. So the thing was done, education, there was investment education, but the result isn't there. Then you look at, I mean, we always talked about the bloated public sector, the Egyptian public sector employs so many people. Egypt has actually reduced the number of the percentage of employment in the public sector. That's progress. But unfortunately, it seems, I mean, you would know better, of course, but it seems from what I read, is that the people who were, you know, the jobs that were left to the private sector were displaced not with formal, sort of, again, high tech, high value added private sector jobs, but they were substituted with low skill informal sector jobs. So people, the new job opportunities that were released from the state were not picked up by the sophisticated private sector. So that isn't working. That link doesn't work. So I mean, Egypt did, government did what it had to do, but the other piece isn't in place. Then we look at FDI, the foreign tract investment. There is some FDI coming in, but the shift from the real estate construction energy to the more labor intensive industries, not happening as well. And the worst thing, or the worrying thing, is FDI. We always hope that when a multinational comes for with a green field in a country that it will sort of ripple around, people will work with this multinational, this multinational will hire people, skills will flow to the other companies. That doesn't seem to happen. That link isn't working. So things are, we're doing things. We're implementing these policies, but not getting the results. Something is wrong. So that's, you know, that's, that's the sort of the what I teased out of the last 10 years. That brings me to now. So what happens in the next 10 years? Will we, in 10 years, if we all gather here again, 2033, will we again be saying, ah, you know, it just didn't happen. We tried and we didn't get the results high unemployment, low women participation? I hope that's not the case and we have to figure out a way. Now, what is different about now? What is different about now? What I'm feeling, I mean, our chair has introduced the headwinds coming our way for this region as well. We have the energy transition. We don't know what's going to happen to the oil price. We have the reasonably, you know, relatively lower global growth coming our way that will impact the region. We have probably after 10, 15 years, positive real interest rates coming that will hit the public debt of these countries.  So the next 10 years, if it is business as usual, doesn't look any better than the past 10 years. So we really have a problem. So, you know, I've given so many negative messages, what am I saying?  The one thing we know is we're probably, you know, you go to any meeting and we're in the midst of transitions. We come to the globe is going through multi-layer transitions, poly crisis, so on and so forth. That's the talk. So that means, I mean, every transition is uncertainty risk, but at the same time, every transition, it's a discontinuity. Sort of cards are reshuffled and you can find ways to position, reposition yourself. So there is more room for strategic play when cards are reshuffled. That's probably where we are. That's what it feels like. And what am I saying? Let me give a bit more substance to it. One, the geometry of the world is definitely changing. It has already changed. So we were actually in a world of globalization. Everybody was integrating. There was a development model for that.  That was the development model. Not working anymore. And because that's not the world we are in. Instead, the world we are in, let's call it a fragmented world, brings in other geometries. It is the French-shoring idea. So you look at the map and it seems, you know, Europe should French-shor in this region. That's just a no-brainer when you look at the map. Not happening at the moment. But the strategic discussion, dialogue, effort, I think it is there. It is, it can be done. In a narrower sense, the energy integration with Europe is happening. You look at the Morocco-U.K. X-Links, sort of the under-ocean cable, impressive. Very impressive undertaking. The Italian-Tunisian interconnection, impressive. The Algerian-Spain, interesting. So that is happening. Some integration is happening. That's a different paradigm. Then you look at another geometry. It is the Chinese BRI versus the American Indian Europe corridor. So, you know, we have all these investments coming your way. Can these countries in the region look at this reshuffling and come up with a strategy and then focus on that strategy that will give them the push, the jumpstart, the leverage where the communities, the societies will feel, OK, this is the new vision, the new direction we are going. That, I think, might be an opportunity. But it will not, it's not easy. I mean, I'm obviously just trying to imagine things. I'll just finish by giving one little sort of example from my humble history and experience. You know, in my 30s, I was given this great task of founding and managing Turkey's first technology park. So it was a development project actually. And the idea was to get European American high-tech companies to come to Turkey to work with the local tech companies. And that's what we want, actually, from FDI in the region. And what I noticed after that, what I got out of that experience, yes, sure, rule of law, good governance, all those things, they need to be in place. They can really make your life miserable if they're not in place. And they did make my life miserable, but it is not enough. It is definitely not enough. You need to have an agile vision. You need to have leadership that knows that vision and can sort of maneuver with it. And you need to make sure that everybody in that community in that society knows about that vision. It is not, we cannot work with one size fits all policies. These need to be agile. These need to be sort of flexible. But you need institutions and institutional actors who can actually deliver, who can execute, who are given initiative, yet guidance. It is that kind of a structure works. So basically to wrap up, I think if we look at this problem as business as usual, the next 10 years, it does not look good to me. But it is, it seems to be full of strategic opportunities for the region. The region may well find ways to negotiate, you know, just find balance with Europeans, Americans, Indians, Chinese, to deliver. But it will require a different set of policy thinking, policymaking. And I hope that happens at the next time we meet in 10 years. I hope we'll have better stories to tell each other. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have one more speaker. Please write down your question. But thank you. You have covered so many issues, unemployment and formal economy. It's an issue. Economic reform, whether would it work or not, that would depend whether the patient in the intensive care or outside the intensive care before you start the reform program. Education, yes, there are very good dedicated people. They graduate, they go to Europe, they find good jobs, they participate. You have to have a private sector. You have to have a vibrant private sector. And whether the government is crowding in or crowding out the private sector is something, you know, we kind of speak about it.