Hi, everybody. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me welcome you all to this session. It's great to have you here and it's great to have, I see a number of familiar faces in the crowd to join this discussion with us to look at basically the financing and our future economy. This is admittedly a fairly broad topic, right? Financing, economy, this can be a lot of things. But I think in the aftermath of the financial crisis that started in 2008 and in the middle of many current economic challenges that are threatening our economic growth of the world, I feel there's no better time actually for us to look at these topics, which is basically how we can invest in growth. To look at what exactly are some of the barriers we face today and also to explore and brainstorm a little bit on some of the solutions. So to have this discussion, we have an exceptional panel here on the stage. To my left, we have Prime Minister Dobrovsky from Latvia. Good morning. And Ms. Wei Kristiansen from Open Stanley, the Co-CEO of Asia-Pacific. And then Minister Bulliff from Morocco. And finally, on the far left-hand side, my good friend Victor Chu, Chairman and CEO of First East Investment Group in Hong Kong. And in addition, we have our global shaper Heather Ma. I don't know where she is with our inside reporter. And my name is Kevin Lu. I run the World Bank's Investment Guarantee Business for Asia-Pacific. So let's get down to a very specific situation on the issue of financing for growth. And let's look at Asia. Let's look at infrastructure. ADB estimated that there are 1.5 billion Asians who have no access to decent sanitation. 640 million people have no access in Asia to clean water. 930 million have no access to electricity. And 7 out of 10 have no access to telephone in this region. So to address these needs during the decade of 2010 and 2020, the estimate is that every year we need $750 billion of investment into this infrastructure needs. But in reality, when I travel in the region to many emerging developing Asian countries, you actually see a lot of unfounded infrastructure demand needs. So there is a problem between the need, a great need on one hand, and the lack of funding on the other hand. But Asia is a region with 37% of savings rate. So the money is there. The capital is there. It's not a region where people have mortgaged out their future for overconsumption today. Why we still have those financing not in place for this crucial need? And what are the barriers? Is it because that investors don't have clarity and they don't have the right information? Is it because the banks are too risk averse because of their own funding structure? How about the capital from the longer term investors such as insurance companies and pension funds? Or is it because on the government side that we don't have strong mechanism to prepare, prioritize, and package these needs into bankable projects that can actually attract financing? What can policymakers do to address this? And how can barriers for domestic and cross-border financing be addressed? So I have all these questions and puzzles in my mind. And with those questions, let me first turn to Prime Minister on my left side. Prime Minister, if you could give us an update about your country, about Latvia in terms of where your economy stands and how do you see the situation? What's a growth trajectory you see? And maybe comment a little bit on the financing side for that growth. Okay, thank you very much. Well, as you all probably know, Latvia was very seriously affected by a global financial and economical crisis in 2008, 2009. And at that time, Latvia has been seen as a travel spot of Europe. Well, now we can say that we have moved on from this situation. Currently, we are fastest growing EU economy. This year, first half, we had a growth rate of 5.9%. Last year, we were growing 5.5%. So really, we can see that we are out of the crisis and seem to be moving towards also a more sustainable developing bus. And so not only were fastest growing EU economy, but also structure of economy is changing with more emphasis on industrial production and exports, where we had on average some 10% of increase in industrial production each year for the last two years and 30% increase in export for each year for the last two years. But I think one of the fundamental factors now moving gradually to this issue of financing, while Latvia was able to achieve this growth, was that we did the necessary adjustment early on and thus we managed to restore the confidence of financial markets. And I think that's very much which was important because if you have the confidence of financial markets, many things starts to happen. Bank starts lending to your citizens and businesses. Your companies start investing again. Citizens start spending. It's possible to attract foreign investment and your economy can move forward. Whereas if you try to delay the adjustment, as also seems to be the strategy in certain countries, just the opposite is happening. Banks are not lending. Companies are not investing. Citizens are not spending. And you are just getting deeper into recession. So I think first and foremost, if we talk about financing, it's about trust between public and private sector. And in some cases there is this trust and there is availability of financing. And in some cases there is no trust and there's no availability of financing. Because it seems that lack of the capital or lack of available financing is probably not the main issue right now. If we look, there are many countries also in Europe, like Germany, like Netherlands, like Finland, paying tribute to the organizers of the forum, also Switzerland, where investors are actually willing to pay those countries to be able to hold their debt. And then there are other countries which just either paying some crazy interest rates and just having their debt financing unsustainable or private sector would not lend to those countries at all. So it's really very important if a country can house a trust of financial markets and from then how the country then can finance itself. And just on general sorts, if we look to compare Europe and USA, another difference now moving more to the company financing what we see. Now the real bottleneck is really bank financing. Banks for some reasons are not willing to lend to the real economy. And again, not that banks don't have the money. They're willing to lend to each other really cheap if you look at the interbank rates. They are willing to store money in central banks even cheaper, almost for free. And yet they are not willing to lend to the real economy. So what we need to look is also, especially in Europe, on alternative sources of financing and one alternative source of financing which seems to be underutilized is equity financing. If you look at the capital markets or equity markets in US and if you look at the same markets in Europe, you'll see that Europe is certainly underutilizing these possibilities. And for companies which now have difficulties to raise their money in a debt market from bank financing, really I think it's worth exploring those possibilities for equity market and actually going for IPOs or trading extra shares or actually trying to raise the capital instead of debt. So those are probably just some introductory remarks, but really the general thought would be that there is not necessary lack of financing, but it's a lack of trust to bring this financing to place where it's needed. Thank you Prime Minister. That's an excellent point. I think, again, as you summarized, it may not be the lack of capital, but the lack of trust in the global system. And in a sense, it's also related to the issue of equity financing. In a sense, equity financing is a financing where you're taking more risk, you trust the others a little bit more than just demanding a fixed coupon. So these are some of the aspects of the global financial system. But what about the, this is a question for Minister Bulliff. What about some of the, we'll talk about the opportunities in the financial side. What about some of the opportunities and particular deficiencies of the global economic system in your view? Yes, indeed, it is like what you have described. But let me first touch upon some other points. Well, everybody is aware of the ongoing conditions of the market, the monetary conditions of our economies. In many schools and colleges and campuses, we have learned a lot about the need to drive rational behavior. The choices by economies should be optimal once. However, given the current state of the economies and the financial market, there is the lack of rationality. We have our financial market in which from time to time there's a big bubble and the real economy is sliding while a financial bubble is building out. And there's a lack of financing channels and availabilities to fuel the economy because of lack of trust. So I think the behavior by many economies is suboptimal, is unreasonable and irrational. Take a look at the sports economy, a soccer player or golf player. If participating in a match or winning a match can earn 100 times more than a professor. So is there an effort worth the pain? And many of us would like our children to join colleges, but is it a better future if they become messy of Argentina or some other sports stars who will be at hundreds or even thousands of times more an engineer. So do you want to send your children to colleges or to football fields or golf courses? So that's irrational. And also let me talk about IPO, the public market, the listed market, many companies have gone public. So IPOs, the global economy, we have over 1,000 employees, but how could they market doing very bad our products? One of the companies listed is of late, and it's an internet company and it provides social media platforms. I would not name the company, it has asked me a question. Is that company that valuable? Isn't the valuation too high? So I want to say our behavior is irrational at this stage. That's my first point. And for my second point, I want to talk about the global economy. I'd like to emphasize that the value growth has been different in our global economy. So right now we've seen new forms of MAUX, that is one of the big problems of the current economy, the speculation. We speculate on prices, we speculate on indexes, we speculate on the speculation that we had before, and therefore the laws of the market, we can be as liberal as we want, the laws of the market no longer apply at the current economic level, but also at the financial level. So suppose for us to deliver all those rules, if everything becomes speculated on, when supply exceeds demand, the price should go down. And if the demand is higher than supply, then the price should be able to go up. But if we look at our current economy, especially the price for energy and oil and other commodities, there has been an over-supply. However, the price still goes up. And therefore, for price exceeds 100 U.S. dollars, therefore the market room, in my view, is still important. We need to have rational behaviors to keep the fundamentals intact in this market. But nobody can really predict the trend of the price. Nobody is really aware about the growing trend of the economy and the market. That's why we need to do both the things from the perspective of the financial sector. If we are to reposition our economic choices, then our next step, I'd like to give you an example about oil prices. The average price for petunary should be around 60 to 80 U.S. dollars per barrel. But right now, the price is around 20 to 130 U.S. dollars. In other words, every day we have to be at 10 to 30 billion U.S. dollars. In Greece, it's around 100 billion U.S. dollars. In other words, if you look at France, France is high during its fiscal deficit. So, France already has a deficit of 7 billion U.S. dollars. Imagine every day we use the 30 billion U.S. dollars to do this. Then the fiscal deficit is true across Europe. We'll be in the mines. I'll get to the details later. All of those issues are very important to me. I think that we can have regular analysis. We can also look at... Thank you minister. That's an excellent series of remarks. My take is that the key words here are rationality versus irrationality and the role of markets. I think that's key. When you look at the financing for economic growth, you have capital on one side. You have the demand on the other side. What's in the middle is the market. If the market can be rational, then that will facilitate the flow from capital to need. So let me turn to Wei. Maybe Wei, if you can comment on the financial markets in China, the capital markets in China, what do you see? What is needed in order for these markets in the middle to play a bigger role to channel capital to the need of the economic economy? Certainly. Historically, banks have played a very important role in financing investment over the past several decades. The role of the banks have been increasingly shared by various different other kinds of forms of financing, such as equity markets, bond markets, private equities, and more. However, in many economies, including in China, these other forms of financing are still at its very early stage and they are facing a lot of challenges. If you look at China, we know that the banking assets accounts for 92% of the total aggregate assets of financial institutions in China, whereas securities, insurances, and mutual funds companies in total accounts only 8%. So this shows that the capital market is really at its early stage despite its 20 years of glorious development and achieved tremendous track records, including becoming the number three largest stock exchange in the world in terms of market capitalization. Because this market, as we all know, the first bottleneck, in my view, is that this market is still very much a retailer market and really likes the institution participation. We know this market actually is, the composition is 80% retail, 20% institution, and it's plagued with short-term speculative trading. So I think no matter the initiatives of the regulators to introduce more sophisticated products and to further broaden and deepen this market without the institution base that cannot happen. Therefore, I think it's very important as the regulators under the Chairman Guo's leadership at CSRC has been focusing on to introduce a fair and also efficient platforms so that you can effectively attract corporate new duties and pension funds, social security funds, housing accumulation funds. These funds, if you know down right, they actually can provide very well-balanced and structured portfolios and with low portfolio turnover. And of course, as a foreign participant, we absolutely believe it's important that the Chinese market will provide access to firms like us. And we are very grateful for the new initiatives to allow the increase of QV, because that's how we really participate in this market other than obtaining an Azure license for the foreign investors to have a flavor and access to this market is largely through QV. The QV quotas, as you know, have been increased from 50 billion to 80 billion, and we think that is a great initiative. In all these different methods, I think in combination over time will hopefully create more depth and also stability to this current market. The other issue that is often talked about and to reflect the deficiency of this market is the lack of funding for SMEs. I'm sure you heard the speech from Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday. The government is actually very focused on that. I think no one now makes a mistake about the robust force that how big a force that SME has become. They account for 60% of China's GDP, 80% of China's employment, and 50% of tax revenue of China. But at the same time, alarmingly, most of these SMEs, total number roughly about 10 million, only 3% have access to banking capital. So that's obviously something seriously wrong here. I think over the years, starting 2004, China set up this SME board in Shenzhen and five years later they set up the second board called Chinnax Board in Shenzhen, which obviously helped. However, I think by and large, these SME sectors is underserved. But if you look at the other side of a coin, why do banks stay away from SMEs? It's not only the fault of the financial institutions because these SMEs, we heard a lot of horror stories, we read about them. And unlike SOEs, the financing cannot be collateralized. There is no government guarantee. So what is critical about the financing is credit. However, in China, the current system is very difficult to evaluate the credit of SME. Even though in China, we have quite agencies that are being created and they are very active, but they are very stretched and busy, and I'm sure most of them are not focused on SME. And more importantly, sources for really variable informations in China is getting more and more difficult. It's very difficult to even check the balance, cash balance of the company or debt level of the company or record of litigation. And these kind of things or corporate documents, corporate filings as AIC, are very difficult to obtain. So therefore, we can't simply blame the banks for backing at lending to SMEs. I think in order for the high quality SMEs to have a fair access to the financing, I think government needs to mandate a system for better ability to access information of SME. For instance, we need to establish a registration for lawsuits. And maybe government should give more license for private rating agencies. And the government needs to provide more access to corporate documents and top corporate filings at agencies like AIC because these kinds of measures are necessary for lenders and also for investors to feel more comfortable. And also, as we know, because this is China, even though China has changed a lot, still contractual rights of the investors and also lenders sometimes get negatively impacted at the local level by political organizations or sometimes just because of the cultural effect. People simply do not like to see a corporation enter into a phase of bankruptcy. So therefore, I think it's very important for government really to empower the investors, also the lenders, to give them the power to cost effectively punish the dishonest SOEs and also negligent auditors or intermediaries. Thank you, Wei. I think you have a very valid point that in order for SMEs to actually have access to financing or maybe even more broadly, for other parts of the economy to have the access to adequate value, we need number one credible systems, procedures, and policies in place. Number two, fair and balanced platforms such as the fund you mentioned. And number three, responsible and possibly institutional investors particularly. So while we're talking about the investor, Victor, you are a very active investor in the region. So how do you see the opportunities and risk related to infrastructure space, for example? What can you do as a private investor in that space? Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I think we are talking really a very crucial area of the economy because everybody is looking for growth and infrastructure projects and particularly as Wei mentioned, SME financing are key to long-term sustainable growth and indeed innovation. I think not just in China but globally, financing for small and medium-sized businesses are problematic. Wei has already articulated the problems in China but internationally we do have a problem about risk weighting of bank financing to small and medium-sized enterprises. That's, you know, Basel III, you know, allocate the risk of lending to unlisted SMEs almost at the same risk of lending to hedge funds and high-risk instruments. So certainly that is not very thoughtful and not very helpful. And when you have a massive deleveraging on a global basis, the people who have suffered really are accepted the people, the backbone of industrial economy worldwide that we need to support. So I think we need to look at this very seriously. I'm very intrigued to read your article, Kevin, at the FT that you circulate to us. I think one of the issues is we need to look at the problem on a holistic approach, not just looking at bank regulation. We need to make sure that we provide more liquidity to these longer-term projects and we need to look at, for example, the rating agencies, whether we can persuade them, not necessarily rating a, for example, an SME but look at the project because a SME, because of the lack of very full information, as we mentioned, a lack of transparency, or maybe the governance standard may not be as good as a multinational, but the project may be good. So we may be able to look at projects rather than the company itself. And in terms of liquidity, asset banks, securities, putting a bundle of medium-sized PPP projects, infrastructural projects, into a portfolio and then securitize them. Now that's happening in China, which is very, very encouraging. Nanjing and four other municipalities in China are already putting together a portfolio of smaller infrastructural projects, which are already income producing, no construction risk producing income, put them together in a pool, securitize them and they have complete liquidity. Now these are the kind of innovation we need to push more, but the other area which I'd like to suggest more is the PFI, the private finance initiative that was quite successful during the Thatcher era in the UK. Small infrastructural projects belonging to local government does not always need government funding and government management, government design all the way. For example, if you're building a school or a local hospital or a local police station, these are public projects, but they can really bring the private sector to design, to finance, to manage. The government commit to use the facility on a rental basis, let's say for 20 years after 20 years is transferred back to government. Because of local government backing, they enjoy a much higher rating than they would otherwise enjoy as a pure private project and therefore banks are encouraged to look at them because they is almost a sovereign risk. These projects somehow has not really been promoted very well in this part of the world and partly is because you need a legislative framework, you need a statutory framework, but it's worth looking at because that's also providing opportunities for the private sector, particularly for the small and medium-sized private sector to engage in PPP projects with government backing to use the facility long term. And finally, it's very interesting, talking to friends around in the summer doubles and indeed in the winter doubles, I think big corporates on the whole are flooded with liquidity. I think the top 1,000 companies in the world are sitting on a cash pie of over 2 trillion US dollars and we're all looking for quality long-term sustainable return. So definitely for good projects, they are people looking for safe long-term return. Also in China now with insurance companies beginning to become more active, people are taking on long-term savings products, they will be looking for investment products that will create long-term recurrent return because investment institution, particularly the life insurance companies, they really should be investing not for maximizing return, they should be investing to meet the long-term liabilities. So these long-term infrastructural projects big and small by definition should be of interest. And finally, I want to again say something about the role of Miga where Kevin, he may be too shy to talk about Miga. Miga, multi-electro credit guarantee corporation, part of the World Bank system, provides political risk insurance for these infrastructural projects big and small on a worldwide basis and particularly when one is investing in emerging market, if there's a Miga guarantee on top of it, it will make financing a lot easier. So I think the, your, your, your reach, your pride, grinding out for holistic approach really is the key to unlock the backdrop of a global deleveraging scenario that we have. Thank you, Victor. I think that's a very interesting take on the, on the holistic approach in terms of some of the critical elements we need in that approach, including the role of government backing to provide credit enhancement, including the role of multilaterals like us to use our balance sheet to actually credit enhance some of the projects, for example, as Victor mentioned by offering the risk guarantees. And Victor, let me, let me, while we're talking about the role of government and what we're talking about the long-term investors, let me, let me switch gear a little bit and what do you think should be the role of sovereign investors? You know, we, in this, in this region, particularly, you have a lot of government-backed funds, government-backed pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, central bank pool of capital. How do you, how do you see, what are their roles in terms of, you talk about the government's role on the project side to provide credit enhancement. How about the government role on the investor side? Yeah. I think here we need to define, what are we talking about? Because sovereign wealth fund is a, you know, is like private equity. It's a big description.  They're slightly different. If you're talking about the sovereign wealth funds that invest the foreign reserves of a country, the CICs of the world, then I think they, for them, liquidity is key. You know, they, they will need absolute liquidity because the vast, vast majority of, of the portfolio is invested in, you know, high-grade fixed income instrument. So you need, what we need to do is do the packaging. We need to create a product which, at least on paper, will satisfy the liquidity requirement and also on paper will provide the right investment rating for the sovereign wealth fund to invest. So they can invest in the fund which has been, you know, investment-graded. So now there I think what we can do is to try to persuade them to provide a larger allocation on their alternate investment portfolio, which in the CICs case could be relatively small, but in terms of absolute numbers, these are huge, you know, and if, if that will help on, on this kind of infrastructure projects. Yeah, Mr, let me, let me just challenge you a little bit on the issue of liquidity. I think, I think I agree with you, liquidity is very important to, to a lot of investors because they may need their cash tomorrow to, to fulfill their liability obligations. Do you think there are also certain type of investors out there, whether they are sovereign investors or institution investors, where actually because their liability structure is not that specifically defined, they actually have the luxury of going very long term. Therefore they may be able to involve in, in projects which give them higher return, but less liquidity. Absolutely. As I mentioned, the life insurance companies and some of the major investment institutions, they will be looking for long-term quality, sustainable return, but high risk, higher, not high risk, but higher risk, you know, they can, because they can structure the risk property, but not sovereign well funds. I mean, not sovereign well funds in the, in the traditional sense of the word, right, but life insurance company, yes, and investment institutions like, you know, Thomas said, they can allocate a portion that can take a high risk. Yeah. Thank you, Victor. While we're talking about liquidity, obviously one of the most liquid investment is the public market. If you're investing in public equity, you can liquidate your, your, your, your holdings very quickly. So I have a question for Wei on that. And how do you look at the equity markets in China, particularly the IPO process? Is there anything we should do more in that space in terms of promoting a really a deep equity market in China? That's a very good question. You know, I'm sure a lot of you, the audiences, all market participants, and you have a firsthand experience of interacting with the market place, players as well with regulators and with issuers, et cetera. I think this market actually is very robust and has a lot of energy and achieved amazing results. 2,400 companies has been listed. However, if we're looking forward, there are barriers for more effective financing. For instance, you know, wearing my hat as an investment banker, we look at the IPO process which the process itself is actually rather unique in the sense of the roles played by the government, the regulators. I think in the early days, we understand the regulatory rationale because China is so inexperienced in the sense of having a lot of green market participants without much experience also have 90% or 80% retail investors. So government needs to hold more hands, if it will, than the regulators elsewhere. So therefore, historically, that's the case. So even now, I think the regulators continue to play a very paternalistic kind of role in supervising and regulating the market. I think it's time that the regulators started to think about the change, and as Chairman Guo has said many times, that he's exactly now focusing on this. One of the things that I think they need to focus on is instead of looking at the profitability, the business model of the company, they should focus more on things like protection of the interest of the investors and how to let information flow more openly and more accurately. So this current regime needs to be somehow reformed to become more information disclosure-oriented rather than regulator making all the judgments on major elements of the process, including pricing. I mean, that way, not only a regulator shoulders a huge burden that is typically done and shared by the market participants, they get blamed if the company gets listed and don't perform well. So I think this reform is really necessary, and I'm glad that regulators are thinking about it. I think this will change the dynamic rapidly because the long queues that are waited for the companies to be vetted by the regulators will be shortened, and also the supply and demand of the IPOs will be more market-oriented rather than artificially adjusted by the speed of the approval process of the regulator. Thank you, Wei. I think clearly we will need some reforms and improvements for the Chinese equity markets, particularly the IPO process. While we're talking about reforms, Mr. Bulliff, can you share with us a little bit the significant economic reforms your government has been undertaking in your country, particularly think of from an angle of, we have talked about a lot of domestic financing, but the other interesting part is overseas investor, right? If I were an investor here sitting here looking at Morocco, what can you tell me in terms of your economic reforms and the improvements you have made recently? I would like to address this question in this way. Politically, socially and economically speaking, Morocco is a very important country. It's a unique country as well. It is in between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. It's an Arab country. It's part of the Arab world in northern Africa, and at the same time, it's an African country. We're only 14 kilometers away from Europe, so we are a bridge between Europe and Asia, and also we are a country of Muslims. For the Arab world, we have 1.5 billion people in the Arab world, and we assume a central location in the Arab world. Last year, we had the Arab Spring, which also affected Morocco. But Morocco was the only country to have achieved a smooth transition into democracy without any violence, bloodshed or casualties that other countries sustained in their transition. So that's a very important boost for investor confidence. We hope our socioeconomic and political stability will be unrivaled and affected to attract investment from the outside. Indicators of our economic performance or competitiveness is quite high. Last week, Morocco was ranked three places to number 70 around the world, and in the Arab world, it was also moved out of our place. In addition, in terms of our investment environment, our investment environment in Tartu has also increased. The quality of ranking in Tartu of Morocco has been ranking by around 12. In addition, our economic system and our economic economy is very stable. Our financial system and our banking system have remained to be very robust to now north of the European Union and to the North America, United States or some places in the United States. However, it is also expanding in terms of profitability. We are also expanding our private banks, but also, in terms of impetus to our economic growth. The government demonstrates the stability of our banking sector. Our new government is in office for 7 to 8 years. The government has done a lot of things in infrastructure and new energy. It is also playing out to do lots of things. We are trying to do the number one country in so-and-so a part of our private energy country. All of these objectives can deliver a benefit. In Morocco, 96% of our energy are imported. However, our fundamentals and the statistics of our macroeconomy is the problem of the Arabic world. Our economic growth rate in the past of 3 years has amounted to 4.8% that shows the positive picture in our economic fundamentals. In the future, for our future economy, we are forwarding that out, specifically in the future policies in manufacturing sectors and structures, logistics industries, financial sector, etc. We are looking forward to working closely with our European partners and, of course, our partners from Asia and China and Turkey now. This is because China has been increasingly engaged in Morocco's development. Many sovereign wealth funds are in Morocco. Thank you minister. That's a very comprehensive and useful overview. And I have the same question for the prime minister. Can you give us a two minutes update on Latvia economy? Thank you. Well, as regards the situation in Latvia, I already gave this general perspective as regards possibilities for investment in Latvia. Certainly, we are now concentrating on more attracting foreign direct investment, especially in the production sector. And I must say there are some good reasons now to invest in Latvia. I think Latvia is now a good place to invest first of all. We have, during the last years, achieved macroeconomic stability, financial stability. So our budget deficits this year is 1.9% of GDP. Next year we are moving down to 1.4%. So we have both economic growth and financial stability. Then, of course, there are a number of other factors which matters. So while we are doing our adjustment, we also did many structural reforms to reduce administrative burden, to cut red tape, to improve business environment, to improve access to infrastructure, to improve access to different connections and so on. And it all seems to be working. Our colleague already spoke on corresponding indexes in Morocco, so I can just outline the same in Latvia. So this year we moved 10 positions up in a World Bank Doing Business Index from a 31st to 21st place in the world for the first time ahead of both our Baltic neighbors Estonia and Lithuania. And now just above us are Japan and Germany. But well, our intention would be in the coming years to move to the 18th position in terms of these of doing business. And as regards World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, we also moved nine positions up this year. And among other things, we are still probably quite unique now in Europe that we are now working also on reducing taxes. While we had some tax increases during the crisis, now we will be gradually decreasing taxation, especially on labor. We have already flat tax, but we'll be moving on personal income tax down to from 25 percent personal income tax rate to 20 percent personal income tax rate. And basically Latvia in terms of tax burden is one of the countries with the lowest tax burden in EU 27. So I think there are many good reasons to invest in Latvia, stable macroeconomic environment, good economic growth, favorable taxation, good business environment, qualified laborers, so come and invest in Latvia. Thank you. Thank you Prime Minister. It's actually good to hear good news from Europe from time to time. And which is not common these days. Let me open the floor, see whether there are any questions from the audience for the panel. Can I go here first? Let's see. Thank you. My name is Ludves Siddiqui. I look after a business line for UBS in Asia. My question is to you Mr. Chu and maybe anyone else who may want to answer. You alluded to the fact that international bank capital regulations are onerous when it comes to SMEs and access that they might have to capital. I would also contend that Basil III is largely incompatible with the Asian context in many ways. As one group treasurer of a major corporate here told me you bankers and the regulators and your technicians in a moment of extreme guilt have gone into a corner and come up with these rules for the people who have to pay the cost as us, the users. The problem is who should be raising these issues? The banks largely don't have the moral authority to do so. The politicians I don't know if they're technically competent to do so. What's the best way to make sure that the end result which is availability of credit, particularly international lines of credit, remain in place? Victor, can you hold your response? Let me take a question from there as well. I'll take two more questions and we'll answer together. Gentleman in the middle. Be brief. Thank you. I'm Sanjay Gorenka from India. I'm a questioner to Mr. Victor. So you're talking about infrastructure financing. Infrastructure financing in roadways and port is very common but you're talking about infrastructure financing on a beauty basis probably in schools and hospitals. So can you please explain this thing? One more there at the back. Gentleman at the back? At the back? Yeah, one more. I'm from India. I see under newspaper and I see a question is to as you know you've mentioned it's difficult for SMEs to get back financing by your view and you mentioned private rating institutions and you've made a number of other recommendations but it will be still difficult to address the financing issue for SMEs. The government is putting out a number of debt to influence on SME financing. In addition, in terms of equity financing and debt financing, if you compare these two two, is it possible that equity financing is more appropriate? Yeah, I'm very grateful to my learner friend from UBS for raising this. In fact, certain forums such as the G20, APANQ and the International Chamber of Commerce, which represents private sectors around the world, have been working quite hard to push the global banking regulators to take a look at this issue as part of the global redesign of the architecture, you know, financial architecture. But I think in forums like this, if we speak out and here, you know, we two of us already spoken out and people like yourself, that will actually through the power of the media will attract their attention and actually through the good efforts of some of the organization I mentioned, there are revisions going on that will help but I think we could do more and certainly I will encourage whenever you can, we should speak out for SMEs. And for my friend from India, we're talking about the smaller PPP public-private partnership, other than the Big Power project or TOROS, but smaller projects that local government look at as public project and therefore infrastructure, even prisons, hospitals, schools, these doesn't need 100% government involvement. In fact, history shows that if government is involved in everything, the design is not the best, the is mostly will cost overrun and therefore delay and the net result is probably better to leave it to private sector. You create job opportunity for private sector but also private sector through attend the competitive project. We probably get a better project, better delivery on time, within cost but actually a better project at the end of the day. And these will also involve managing the project with facility manager. They'll manage the project for over long term but at the end of the day return to government but government will guarantee to use those projects at a fixed return over a long period and therefore it makes financing easier because the government backing. Thank you Victor. Wei, the question SME. Yes, regarding this issue of SME funding, I think you're absolutely right because even with the proposals we talk about, that's not going to solve all the problems. But what will help is that at least for investors, for instance, I think that will facilitate their understanding and their access to information and to build up the credit worthness of these companies and make it easier. So this is a right step towards the right direction and more importantly, I think, as you said, the government is doing many different things. One of them is to allow these SMEs to issue high yield bonds. And we know actually that's already available and they become very popular and also there are other kinds of debt capital market instruments are in the making and according to the press they will be launched soon. So in our view, debt financing is very convincing, you know, in the form of a bond, actually very convenient because as we know, most of the bond holders are institution investors. They are more sophisticated and they have a better way and skills in assessing the risks and also I think in the instance of high yield instruments and that high yield nature reflects the risk that the investors are bearing and is quite fair. And in addition, one thing we didn't talk about is the shadow banking. Shadow banking has gotten a bad name in the press in the western world but in fact, if you look at what the banking sectors has been doing, in fact trillions of renminbi has been put into the private sectors to fuel the void and provide practical solutions to the lack of a funding problem. So all of these measures I think come in will help and to your last question about equity versus debt, we are often of the view that both are viable solutions to a company, no matter how small you are, you need to have really a right balance sheet and you need to have the right debt equity ratio so therefore, you know, for different clients they need to think about different instruments and I think the more these kind of instruments we have in the market and the products we have in the market, the better we are. Wait, thank you. Yeah, what I would do is that in a minute I'm going to ask my panelist to spend 30 seconds each, only 30 seconds each. Think about if you are the master of the universe behind the global financial and economic system, what is one thing you want to change? The one top order you want to change in order to enhance the capital to finance our economic growth but in order to give you some time to think about it, let me take my 30 seconds, the way I see this session is that we're looking at basically three pockets, right? We have the needs on one side, the economic needs for the growth, we have capital on the other side and we have the markets in the middle. I think what we talk about on the needs side, we do need government actions, reforms to make sure people have the confidence in the system, so the investors on this side can come in. On the investor side, we talk about solving wealth fund, we talk about long-term investors such as life insurers or pension funds, we talk about the needs for institutional investors but the key is really in the middle. In the middle, in this middle pocket of financial markets we need, as Victor said, a holistic approach. We need equity markets that is healthy, including good IPO system. As Wei mentioned about we need to complete that market, including the bank project, a project bank market as Victor was talking about. We need innovations such as PPP structure where public private sector can both come in, we need government backing and credit enhancement, we need the right procedures and processes including credit ratings and we need platforms for those capital to flow through. So that's my one minute summary and let me go to Prime Minister, 30 seconds. What's your one change you want to make? Well, if there will be that kind of possibility, I think in a perfect world we should have perfect information. So if anything, I would concentrate on really moving away from those risks of asymmetric information which we have. I was talking in the beginning of the lack of trust between private and public sector. It's the same basically within private sector. You cannot trust each other because you don't exactly know what's going on and it's in a sense something also which Wei was saying that investors need to know more information in order to do right investment decisions. So I would rather go for this maximum transparency and improve information channels between different investors to increase trust and decision-making. Great transparency and information channels. Wei, 30 seconds. For me, operating in China, I like to see Chinese government continue to operate with total efficiency because I think that's a huge differentiating factor that the Chinese government has versus the other governments outside China. Because of this efficiency, the Chinese government can really weather through the difficult 208 and also many other challenges. They have a lot of more challenges ahead but with a efficient government, I think we'll be okay. So even more efficiency with the Chinese government. Minister, one change? Well, talking about the ethics of financial institutions of banks, I'd like to echo with that point very much. I think we should further pursue mutualization and the interactions between the banking sector and the non-financial sectors. The current French government is talking about 75% tax rate for very wealthy people. But if that's the case, the richest people, French people would go to Belgium to become Belgium's citizens. So therefore, between government and the private sector, amongst the triangle of government, private sector and banks, there should be trust. So that there will be a good cycle. Victor, you have the last words. In the ideal world, Asian benchmark currency. That's one thing we have not discussed today. So that the savings in Asia can be plowed back into long-term project in Asia. Unfortunately, the experience that we're facing in the Eurozone and Asia's largest economy, China, its own currency is not yet a free currency. I think that dream is still some years off. So Asia's common currency, that's a radical proposal. Let me thank the panelists for their discussion. Thank you all for being here.


All right, so it's not a lot of slides. This is going to recap just briefly about the history, because I like this to be more about a dialogue. The original motivation for this is to actually get S3 and S4 to suspend for file systems that have been actually broken for years. It might come as a surprise to some folks that file system freezing is broke, but it actually is pretty broken. And it has been for years. And the problem really stems from the fact that we don't have a unified way to automatically freeze file systems when we're going to suspend or hibernate. When you're doing a lot of IO, what ends up happening is, essentially, you just get a hang. And that, obviously, is not a pleasant experience for users trying to come back from Resume. Restore pages, no. So this is an eight-year-old problem. Jerry Cosina had basically described this issue with the K-thread freezer and the semantics that we used in the kernel about eight years ago. I think that was the South Korea kernel summit or something like that. I forget which one. K-thread freezer APIs are basically just used sloppily. And it came out of the idea to try to help file systems with the goal of making this suspend much easier. A while ago, maybe about three years ago, we discussed some of these patches. And a few issues came up. I was like, all right, well, C-group freezing is broken. Is it still broken? Or is anyone familiar here, if that's still the case? No, it's fixed. What did you do? Oh, fantastic. Thank you. That's a great help. And took how many years to get that fixed? Oh, wow. OK, look at that new file system. Great. So freezing races on Audemont. Is that still an issue? Or are you folks familiar with that? No? Anyone? All right, well, I guess we'll have to keep that in mind. Ordering changes, this is a bit maybe more of the complex things here to address. And it basically implicates that in the future, we may need a graph to basically keep the ordering of the super blocks. Alviro regretted and lamented the fact that he had actually implemented support for an IACTL called Loop Change FD in order for Fedora to support live installations and basically allow you to immediately jump over to the installed system. That basically breaks the ordering. And as such, if you do suspend that system, then this assumption that we're making when we're iterating through supers would be broken. So we have to just be aware that suspend would be broken if you freshly install that system and use that feature. I'm not sure if Fedora will move away or migrate away from that, or if other distributions are supporting that feature. Just keep that in mind if we get this merged. RAID is another example where we have different devices. Maybe the ordering is not exactly the same. The concept here is essentially we want to iterate over the super blocks and the assumption is that we can iterate backwards to also do the suspend and the freeze. In theory, if you, so long as that's simple, things should work. In most of the cases for users on laptops or mobile devices, that should, in theory, work. That's where people are doing it. I don't think folks on RAID are actually doing suspend as 3, 2, as 4, anyone? Yeah, that's what I suspect. So long as we keep this in mind, we should move forward. Long term, though, we do need a graph. If folks are interested in helping to implement the proper graph in C, I do have some initial code. If anyone is interested in that, because I do have some initial template code for that. I just haven't looked at it for a while. You are? Yeah, yes? Oh, just at the bottom, you gotta press it all the way. This might have been better with the block people in the room as well. Because what are the things you talk about as you touch on the block there, I think? Which is the file systems? Well, the ordering is on the super block. So it is technically self-contained. We do have a super block for the block cache, but that's a bit different. We don't really, no, we don't deal with iterating supers. We're only supporting this when we have a backing device. So it's not really... Yeah, but it's kind of a combination of block devices and super blocks together. Because with stuff like loopback devices and stuff like this, you really have a combination that you create a dependency, essentially between two. Oh, and in that sense, yes, yes. And it is a good point that that dependency does exist in complexities for topologies for block devices. So in the end, I agree we are interested in the ordering of, basically we are interested in the partial order of the super blocks so that we can walk it from the back and freeze the file systems one or from the top and freeze the file systems one by one so that we don't create deadlocks here because we need to freeze the top first so that the file system underneath is still possibly contained or can still take the IO. But, yeah. It does beg the question then what the future layout for this might or should look like right too. Didn't you try to repost my old patch that just does the freezing in reverse? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's basically what's done. But this begs another question, right? For now, if we want to, we can dedicate our time towards the future of what this should look like. But I think that, oh, the other thing was mentioned was we actually don't have a notification to use space. This was mentioned a while ago. So it should be relatively simple to do that but to let an informed applications know that we are going to do automatic suspend and freeze so that way they can quiet us anywhere. So that doesn't exist. I'm not sure if that was ever added. But we could just add that simply. I'm not sure what user space would prefer. Maybe, is Leonard here? Maybe, he's got to talk. But to be informed of an impending freeze or a freeze happening could be interesting. The service could be frozen, for example, as well. What should we, anyone have a current hunch on what we should do in terms of user space? Yeah, so, I don't know that I can answer that question because the general problem, certainly Windows applications have seen this, is you have to give the user application a certain amount of time to QIES. But then if they don't actually QIES within some timeout, say 15, 30 seconds, you just simply have to go on without them. And so typically, the actual notification I don't think is hard. That's just plumbing. You use, yeah, debuffs or whatnot. The other thing I want to note here, though, is there is also network block devices that very much are a potential issue. That was actually identified eight plus years ago. And everyone just sort of said, yeah, that's hard. And they all backed away slowly. Yeah, so this is certainly hard. But I believe the notification as such is probably more of a user space problem. Like, I guess it would be perfectly fine if basically like the notification went on debuffs or wherever, yeah, where the applications can listen to it. And simply, if someone does something like a co-suspend to some proc file, yeah, which happens to suspend and, OK, that's going to happen without notification. But if you trigger it from your IDE or whatever by some tooling, then that should be wired up to generate the debuffs notification. And all the stuff, as you said, like some time out handling and stuff like this. But I believe this all has to be done. So for the kernel stuff, I don't think we really need to implement any notification as such. There is possibly one added complexity. And that's things like Fuse, where you have to stop the kernel bit. Now that you mentioned it, the checkpoint with start guys have all been doing this for a long time. Dealing with specific complex issues like Fuse right now. So complex dependencies has been a long-term thing for different areas of the kernel. Even at build time, we have this. And this is why I had resolved a simple DAG at build time using ELF and using ELF sections. This is the whole old linker table stuff. And that basically allows you to create a DAG. So that way, you can then, if you want to, say no op on these ELF sections, for instance. And then you can just do this at link order. You just sort the link sections. And then you have a DAG. You basically let the linker do it. But that's on the build time and linker time. This is a dynamic dependency, right? But yeah, there's different areas of the kernel. It begs the question, what are other areas of the kernel? Do we need a DAG for it? And how do we implement it? Is it possible that we can make a DAG that user space can register bits on? Says there. Implementing directly, classically, graph is trivial. The question is really to gather the information and gather the dependencies. I wouldn't say it's difficult. It's just you have to do it in a lot of places. Thinking about all the cases, like fuse properly, adding the dependency on the file systems, which on the resources it actually needs. And this is actually where the file system usually depends on the device. The device may depend, again, on the file system. Or we may have file system dependencies. So this is going to require a lot of research and poking in many places to actually properly do it. So I don't think it's complex, but it involves a lot of place. So obviously, this seems like a beginner question. But when I look through XFS test to see if we have any tests for this, I find a dozen examples where we test freezing. And all those freezing examples appear. Maybe I'm misunderstanding this. But at a high level to be, OK, we've got this XFS feature, XFS freeze. And it calls on Iocable to tell the file system to maybe do a snapshot or save the state at this point. So if something bad happens when we shut down, it's OK. But what I couldn't figure out, and it's really hard to figure out, is does anybody other than XFS support it? So basically, all the file systems or the standard bulk device file systems support freezing. We have support for this in VFS. And for the simple file systems, what's in VFS is enough. For the more advanced file systems, like XFS, EXT for BTRFS, they have their own support for freezing. So basically, I would say every file system now has the freezing. The thing is that what we test in FS test is the freezing of the individual file system. This is more about that we need to make the kernel freeze the file system when it is about to suspend. That's what's not happening currently. Currently, we just freeze the file system. Like we just let the file system live. Just gripping the tree, right? I think I found maybe there were very few places like we look for the word freeze that show up. So like, what's the entry point? I mean, there's an Iocable for XFS, but because I think only a few FS exposed that Iocable. So no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, many file systems support it really. The Iocable is the real entry point. And if the file system is not obliged to implement the freeze FS method, yeah, there is super block method freeze FS, but actually a lot of file systems don't even need this freeze FS method. Because we have freeze super function, which takes care of writing back all the data, blocking all the writes and stuff like this. The file system doesn't need anything else, like blocking its internal threads, possibly doing writes to the journal and stuff like this. If our system doesn't need any of these fancy stuff, then the VFS does all the stuff for it. Yeah, yeah. It's really only for file systems that wanna do something safer than just letting the file system write it all out. Like for example, actually committing a transaction. So in case the laptop never comes back from the suspend, that data is more likely to be safe. But strictly speaking, that's not necessary. And so you can freeze say a VFAT file system even though it doesn't have freeze anywhere in the code. Right? So with network file systems, presumably they want to do things like returning leases, if that can be done quickly. I was just thinking data. That's actually a really good point because I was dealing with a server resource can trade flow control thing recently where the server is gonna, those leases are somewhat expensive for the server to be tracking. And if we know we're about to freeze, yeah, release all the leases, it's much cleaner. But work file systems expose its FSTLs, better look. So for you to do this, the freeze FSTL block method is the replace you should be doing this in. Yeah. Okay, but maybe we can return back to the case. Well, Leonard's here, right? Hey, so one of the things that we were discussing earlier we didn't have a clear solution for was a user space notification for the fact that freezing of file systems is going to happen to allow applications sometime to QIS. Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that occurs to me given that I do know that, this is what I use at my laptop. So I have the hacky RTC timer thing to do hybrid suspend, which basically it suspends to RAM for a bit. And then after five minutes it detects that if it's still suspended then it goes into hibernation. So the question would be, would that be a good method here? So that way we actually don't suspend to RAM using the RTC timer to allow applications to QIS after, I don't know, three minutes or user configurable setting. Then we do the issue, the suspend. So then user space gets at least a notification but the question would be what notification should we send to user space or how? So actually we have a lot of infrastructure for things like that, like before we go to suspend, like people can, like in user space allocate something like how do you call that, like that blocks basically suspend until they finished and it comes with a timeout. So if they don't finish by some time we go to suspend anyway, but that's entirely user space concept. Also the thing that you were just describing, the hybrid, like this, we call that suspend to hibernate. No, suspend then hibernate. That's actually implemented also, like systemd has logic for that and it can actually look at the battery and then make different decisions. But I mean we never call the freeze from user space directly, right? That's the thing, so like given that let's say user or user space defines that they do want to go into S3 or S4, the kernel will do some work prior to doing that to freeze the file system. So that way we stop IO in path. But it was requested maybe years ago that prior to doing that, it might make sense to notify user space that this event is about to happen to allow gracefully applications to also try to slow down a bit or do something. Oh, it is, okay. So problem's taken care of then. Well, I mean it is taking care of applications actually want these notifications, of course, but we have these notifications that they get notifications early. We are going to go into suspend and then they can either do something or not. And if they ask nicely, they get a couple of seconds time before we'll continue and then they have to report back to us that they do this. By the way regarding freezing, like something that we are thinking about which might be relevant in this context is. So we currently have this problem when we implemented the thing that you mentioned was the suspend than hibernate that when we come back from a suspend and then decide to go back to hibernate, all of user space starts running again, right? Like for a brief moment of time.  Like because it's not supposed, like we are still in the sleep conceptually except that we are not. So what we like, we want to use a secret freezer for this actually so that we can basically freeze all of user space like most of the secret tree basically except for this little thing that actually is the one that checks what the battery status is and things like that and then goes either back to suspend or to hibernate. Is that somehow relevant? Like this thing is probably gonna be like a pinned process that is supposed to run with very little resources and it's supposed to be like the only user space process in that moment that is actually running. So I believe from kernel point of view and from the file systems we are discussing here we have to unfreeze anyway, yeah? Because your process will possibly need to access the file system and stuff like this. So yeah, we are discussing this actually that we need to freeze file systems before suspending so that the on disk state is actually consistent because like that provides better behavior when actually then you decide to power off the machine instead of like actually resuming and stuff like this. So yeah, so from kernel point of view I don't think actually there will be difference at least from the file systems. Like we need to unfreeze the file systems for your application to be able to check the battery and decide and then we can freeze them again when going to hibernate. Some people suggested that this binary we shouldn't run off the root file system but run it off a MFD or something like this. I never wanted to do this but if you basically just telling me now that I don't have to then I'm happy. Yeah, I guess you don't have to. Like we could make it work even without it and I think it will be even simpler for us. It would be much simpler for me too because doing that would mean we would have to compile static binaries and shit and I'd rather not do that. All right, now it seems like user space seems to be almost solved. So I guess now just review the patches. Chin or just provide one comment. I don't think it's a blocker. I think there's a way to out. Just review your patches if you think that this is useful or important. Other than that what I really wanted to talk about was what's next? It seems like after eight years we probably might be emerging some of this stuff soon. It begs the question what to do for the other subsystem. Remember this is the K-thread freezer API stuff. This is basically just hacks in the kernel. It basically checks should we try to freeze and then a whole bunch of flags like work use and stuff that would do the same thing for them. There's ways to basically remove this. This is all done in Coxsinole. I basically am removing all this stuff through with Coxsinole and eat one file system at a time. Three years it's proven to work. So I've actually manually reviewed the output of the patches. They seem sensible. But it begs the question once we're done with file systems should we just go AWOL and basically just remove this one subsystem at a time? Is there any concern? Are other subsystems basically using the K-thread freezer API is in an incorrect way at this point in time? Or things that perhaps we didn't think about. Remember the K-thread freezer API was introduced to allow file systems to stop IO in flight. But at this point in time, the question is are other subsystems using it for other things that we didn't think about? Also, well, Secret V2 does have a new freezer API. The Secret V1 one still exists. And that as far as I understand uses the old freezer stuff. So I mean, I don't remember what I wasn't following it very closely. My understanding is there is a reason why. They didn't want to change the old way it was done. And so that's why only Secret V2 has the new one. I suspect that if it's a question of removing everything, there will need to be the discussion about why. Like, can we change to it? Can you compile a kernel without Secret V1, do you notice? Like that you can say only one Secret V2 is supported? But file systems have the same issues as NFS or AFS does. Save stores. And possibly also KNF, SD, KS, and BD. I don't know whether we're interested in freezing those, because normally those will be on the server. Yeah, fair enough. In that case, those need to deal with inbound IO. It's one that's already in progress.  If you've got a TCP connection. Oh, yeah. So in the example of SMB, there's persistent handles. So if you took the system down and reconnected within a reasonable amount of time, then the state will be preserved. So you won't lose any data. But I think the risk is you want to reject certain types of incoming requests, maybe reject and open. There's no point in accepting any new open requests if you're about to shut down, right? Even Fuse just returns not supported, right? So if you tried to freeze the file system today, there are only nine. Yeah, so maybe really the networking file system should be handling the free CFS callback and do the stuff to shut down things. Because that's basically the notification for the file systems. So free CFS gets called when the BFS has already blocked all the write, blocked all the page fault for the file system, flushed all the dirty data. And then it's time for the file system to actually clean up everything as a preparation for the freezing. And you get unfreeze FS call when you are returning back. So I believe these two callbacks should be used. But if something isn't working there for you, then we can certainly talk. The process is already frozen. And then it calls the freeze call or the process is still running. What they did, guys, for checkpoint response, what do they want to do? That's independent. So freezing for Fuse is the same ordering problem, but complicated by the fact that user space is involved. And the other thing Fuse could do is make the waiting for requests to be replied making that freeze call. But the problem with that is that operation could hold the BFS lock, a new text or anything. And so even if we make it freeze call, if the operation is holding something, then something might be waiting on that lock. And that won't be freeze call, so that will block freezing. So it's a difficult issue for Fuse. See it from an Android phone or see it from a Google Chromebook. You want to freeze it or even a laptop. A laptop, typically, you don't have NFS. You have, I have, but most of the people on the world don't. So from priority, Fuse is probably higher than NFS, but it needs to be solved anyway. So I guess for the other subsystems, we'll just take it one at a time. And for network file systems, it seems it's going to take some time, too. But that's why we have a flag for the super block. So if you don't want to support this for now and not sure yet, just don't add the flag. All right, we're going to move on to the next topic, right? So.


ac yn arddangos o ddechrau ac yn creu cyfnodol. Thank you very much, very good, in front of you introduction. Thank you very much, Bob. Thank you very much everyone for coming, because I've looked along the programme in this slot and I realised I'm competing with Virtual Midwifery, which I think was the real draw in this slot. So I'm very very grateful that you're here, which means that you must find the topic interesting and I hope I can live up to that. For those of you who don't know Bector, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ffordd. Rydyn ni'n meddwl y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell o'r technolig yn ei ddweud, o'r ffordd o'r gyflawni'r ysgolau a'r FFE o'r ffordd o'r FFE o'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y llyfrgell ac o'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y llyfrgell o'r technolig a'r llyfrgell, a'r llyfrgell o'r technolig, o'i ffordd o'r gwaith ar reoli gwyllfa ar y byd. Mae'n gyflionnaiol y nesafoedd a'r hynny'n cael bys Llyfrgell a Chiswyr, Llyfrgell Nid i gynnwys a Llyfrgell Y Llyfrgell, a o'r ffordd o'r gweithio chips o'r cyfrifio, o'r llyfrgell Llyfrgell, i gydigasio'r llyfrgell, o'r gweithio'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y Llyfrgell, ond flwydd, Bringnarchad is dnan Running are the providers are good at it as well. and including the workforce. Obviously very important. This is really what this event is. About sharing practice, building practice, sharing innovation, leadership of innovation, leadership of technology very much underpinned by a really good educational infrastructure. That's not just the whole system's stuff like a good broadband network but also ensuring that colleges, schools, universities are enabled a mynd i chi'n gobeithio'r unigol, bo'r ffordd yw'r unigol fydd yn ei gweithio, i ddim yn gwneud o ffodus o'r leir. Felly, mae'r ffordd, mae'r gwneud, o fewn i'r ffordd, mae arbennig yn ffocusiad mewn ddweud, sy'n ddweud i'r ddweud o gwneud. Felly, iddyn nhw, fe ymweld o'i cyfnod, mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud yn y rhaid o'r defnydd, ac mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, byddai'r ffordd. Beth ynghylch yn siwr o'r ffordd, mae'n allwch ddataeth i'r amser ar eu cyffredin am y lat. Ond mae'n ffordd wnaeth ddefnyddio ziwyddiad i'r ffordd. Ond mae'r cinclau ffordd o'r cyffredin wedi'i ysgol ynghymliaeth cyllid yn gwybod ddechrau. Ac mae'n unwaith sy'n crossing sydd pan fwyn effaith ynghylch, dyma'r ysgol, mae'n roeddu yma'r pwyllt yn yr unig pray arall, rhoi yma'r amser a'r gofyn ar y c workplace arall. Ac rydw i'n meddwl i'r llywodion maen nhw. A pob rydw i'n meddwl eu meddwl meddwl eich meddwl noteidol a'r meddwl meddwl. Ar hyn ar gyfer eich meddwl meddwl meddwl, bod eich meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl whether or whether it is important to help students in schools of the 21st century, i meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl meddwl. Roedd gynllunau ac edrych i'r ei ddeithas a'r meddwl meddwl mynd ddiwethaf. bydd y cwestiynau oedlion gyda'r cyfrion, yw allan, yna fe gynllunol yn fawr i gair pan ddiolgrifennu, yn fawr i weld yn gweithio'r gweld yn gyfarigol a gweithio'r fawr i gweld yn gweithio'r mewn gweld a'i gweithio'n gw I'm holding on that. See, such as that thing, that's very important especially in the context of... ....actually in the UK are relatively high number of young people who... ....certainly by the age of 16 or 17 are out of any kind of formal education... ...or even employment or training, and we want to make sure that they remain engaged. Early intervention and support and big theme of 21st-century schools. when it's too late, but really understanding young people, their needs, you know, where they actually, you know, have problems perhaps in literacy and numeracy and diagnosing those, but also intervening and supporting in relation to those. So the diagnosis piece using computer based systems for that certainly kind of really good recording and sharing of information in really effective ways and in real time in ways that are going to make a difference. And another big theme is parents' partners. Very, very big thing. It's absolutely true that parents will make a real difference to young people's educational and other outcomes. That's absolutely true. And some people may argue, well, yeah, okay, so you get middle class parents, they're more likely to be involved and they're more likely to, you know, come out with these outcomes. But actually there's very, very strong studies that have shown that it doesn't matter what social group you come from and what educational background your parents come from. But actually parental engagement and involvement in education, their kids' education does actually make a difference and can predict better outcomes. So that's a very important theme for the department. Now, how can technology help? This is just some examples of the ways that Bector is encouraging schools to use technology really as a means of getting that partnership working. Okay, albeit in, you know, limited ways, but ways that will support, you know, the genuine dialogue between teachers, for example, parents and learners about, okay, what's best for this child or what next or what's the problem here. And I guess the kind of extension of virtual learning environments that sort of uses the term, commonly uses the term learning platforms can be sort of learning in information platforms or even just information platforms. But platforms that enable information to be shared in a secure way with parents so that, for example, when they come to a parents evening, they're much more knowledgeable about some of the progress and the issues and can have a much better dialogue with the school. So that's a kind of a, you know, kind of a quick tour around the policy context for a lot of the work that Bector does. What about research? Because I'm my lead on the, on Bector's research effort. We put a fair amount of resource into research each year and I'm kind of crossing my fingers that that will continue for a while. Certainly over about the last three or four years, we've made significant investments in research to really try and understand how technology can support achieving some of those outcomes. We actually do pretty much three things. We want to know where our schools, so we do tracking and monitoring studies. We can do some interesting analyses of them. So which schools are, you know, really good at using technology? Do they have any shared characteristics? Is it small schools, large schools, posh schools, you know, poor schools? Actually posh schools, poor schools, big schools, small schools tend not to be factors in how good they are at using technology. But we do some analysis like that. More exploratory and just more, I guess, researchy research. So usually with a kind of policy issue, and I'll give some examples of that in a moment. And then impact research, which is horribly difficult, really just desperately difficult to do. But we do think it is absolutely critical to get a sense where we see either uses of technology, innovations with technology, technology being used in very specific ways with very specific aims in mind to assess whether or not there actually was a difference. Because if we can't pick up any real kind of improvement, either to the learning experience in the broader sense or to the outcomes for the learner, we do have to seriously ask, well, is this a good investment of teacher time effort and obviously the kind of technological enterprise that goes behind it? It's a genuine question. But we don't do it from a policy perspective. I think we used to be one of these kind of agencies that did the, oh, public money being spent, let's check it's being spent really well. Technology is in education. There's huge investment. It's not going to go away. Okay, we might be getting into more straightened times in the next few years. But huge investment is there and it will continue. It may reduce a bit. Who knows? The question isn't about should we be using technology in education. It's how should we and what are the most effective ways? And that has tended to shape our studies, our evaluation studies and our studies of impact. So, some examples and you'll see some of these coming up. Looking at narrowing the gap, which is narrowing the social class achievement gap and what role technology can play in supporting low achieving and under achieving learners, supporting needs, those not in education, employment or training aged sort of 16, 17, 18, digital literacy and participation, curriculum and pedagogy, one to one personal mobile access.  Actually, they're not things that we do every year. There's a kind of probably about five years worth of impact work that we've been building, a kind of view of what is the impact of different practice with technology. So, that's a kind of indication of our research programme. And then we do general surveys as well. And I've listed those because I will mention some of those studies. And some of them are kind of nearly reporting and I'm giving you a bit of a glimpse of what will be published. Some of them have already been published. I'll try if I remember to indicate where that's the case. I know, for example, this week or last week, I think it was narrowing the gap literature review went up. And that's a very, very good literature review which outlines some very interesting practice with technology and puts a nice framework around it for thinking about how, if you like, the school-based practices for helping support low and underachieving learners using technology. Okay, that's the intro, which was long enough. What do we actually know? Well, I'll start with children and young people. And what I'll do is really give you a kind of a set of fairly kind of, well, not necessarily bold, but fairly bland statements and try and say a little bit more about them. About what we actually know, if you like, from different studies, sometimes in some cases from accumulated research. I think one thing that you would have heard a lot and actually it's a no-brainer, I don't really need to say it, is that young people are not all the same in relation to technology that comes very clearly out of the research. They actually represent themselves and position themselves differently in relation to technology. Not only are they different possibly in their habits and behaviours, they actually think of themselves as different. So there are some kids that are thought of and might think of themselves, oh, I'm a really nerdy geeky and another kid may say, actually, I don't like the idea of being addicted to the internet. I'm more interesting. So there are very different ways that young people position themselves. And I think it's very important in a school response to that and also, of course, a college and university response as kids move up the system to bear in mind that not everyone is the same. One thing that is certainly true, though, and I think this is a trend that is really interesting bound to continue. Again, sounds pretty obvious. Kids are getting engaged with computers and the internet at younger ages and I'll show you a chart in a moment. Much younger ages than we thought before. So we're now talking five-year-olds being pretty competent in using the internet. Not all of them, but this is a real kind of reality. These are kids who haven't long been reading, but they're using the internet actually in quite comfortable ways. So we're seeing more of that and that's a trend. It's actually a fairly recent trend, but something obviously to bear in mind. Certainly, again, this is subtle. This is very, very subtle, but from lots of different research projects we're seeing that actually we're getting signs of the real implications for how young people obviously manage their lives and they are using technology to manage their lives and we know that their social interactions, their leisure time, their entertainment, you know, what they do in life and technology mediates that to a very, very large degree with young people. And again, not to generalise, but that's been a big trend, but also their learning, so they, of course, actually will drag in habits. Now, they might not use Facebook all the time for learning. It's not about that. They might use Facebook a bit to get the homework that they've left at school and make sure that they've done it, but they will get into habits of interacting with people while they're learning, interacting with different resources while they're learning and actually learning at home is becoming much more of that kind of very, very connected activity. Albeit a lot of it will be just connected with the web and having lots of good information, but that is shaping how they are thinking about learning and they're bringing, increasingly bringing, those expectations in. I don't want to overplay the kids bringing the expectations from that kind of setting into education. They also, interestingly, have expectations that education won't be very interesting in terms of technology. So, however, there is beginning to be a shift away from that. Okay, schools not that great at technology. Sometimes it is and I've learnt some useful skills and there are some very good schools that are doing good things. I'll tell you what proportion in a moment. And there's a chunk of schools that are kind of still trying to get there and still trying to make learning a little bit interesting. And there are curriculum issues, I think, in relation to the use of technology. So, this was a quote about, in fact, the ICT curriculum. It could be about anything really, but in this case it was about using Excel. Well, you know, actually I could have looked that up on a website. You know, this was added to by, well, they took five weeks to learn that at school when I could have just spent a bit of time online and learnt it quite easily because there's lots of tools to teach you how to do that. So, that's an expectation. Just an example, just one example. This is the really interesting, I like charts like this that have nice kind of interesting effects. This is tracking data of basically households with kids. Over time, and those that have an internet connection. And we had a relatively low, well, it's just a bit more than 50% in 2007, of those that had, if you like, the sort of five-year-olds in the house having access. And that's gone up quite steeply just in recent months. So, that's a really interesting or recent, in recent years. We haven't got the 2009 yet, but we will do. So, there's an age five to 15, difference from age eight to 15, and it's the five-year-olds adopting. And that's five to seven-year-olds adopting. And that's a really interesting trend. What more can we say? So, I'm sort of constructing this kind of picture of well-connected five-year-olds. It's not quite like that, but certainly it's true that well-connected young people is becoming much more an all. Certainly if you look over a kind of five-year period, the trends are really quite amazing. They really are. And I don't think in any arena of life, we've seen such rapid change as we have compared to young people's adoption and use of technology. So, there are gaps, though. I'll show you the kind of access gaps in a moment in terms of, you know, there is still a social class issue here, and we need to take it very seriously. But we also, of course, need to be critical of the kind of digital-native concept. We've been working with Future Lab on digital literacy and participation. And they've recently produced a very nice report which is about to be published on digital literacy and participation. And I've drawn together a bunch of literature. And it's very clearly saying, you know, let's be cautious about this concept. There are gaps. There are gaps in access, and there are certainly gaps in young people's abilities to do things with technology that may be useful for learning. And that's really the main gap. But one of the things that Future Lab, and it's Ben Williamson and his team there have said is that actually there is a real divide in terms of if you like the kind of more interesting and what they might, we might term 21st century skills with technology. So creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, using technology, or when you are solving a task with technology, do you actually engage in those activities? OECD is very clear. OECD has done an analysis of employment trends over time. We want young people to have productive, economically healthy lives because then we don't need to worry about them when they leave home. And so actually these skills are going to become increasingly important. And if you get a chance to have a look at some of the OECD analysis if you like of the kind of future skills, it's very, very interesting. So two things really. One is in relation to parents. Actually they might be quite important. In fact in the University of Oxford research that we've commissioned, there are examples of parents being really quite important. Certainly in kind of earlier years as in primary age group, supporting if you like kind of learning with technology and providing a kind of mentoring. And that becomes part of providing a sort of secure and supportive learning environment at home. So there are some good examples of where parents were really helping kids to understand, find the right websites, not the great website, be critical about the information, supporting them and being creative and publishing whatever they wanted to do and so forth. So that does seem to be important. Again, it's interesting. It's possibly slightly counterintuitive because we think kids just get on with it. But actually a lot of the time they can engage in really, quite mundane activities online. Some kids and they need support and help. And something that comes out is that I don't want to come over as overly critical on schools because I think this is a developing area and I think schools are trying really hard to keep up with technology-based changes and what they'll need for learning. But they're not necessarily doing that well at the moment in equipping children and young people for the future and building the right kind of competencies and behaviours. And that's why we've been working very closely with what's now QCDA, the Qualification and Curriculum Development Agency, alongside working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families in looking at the revisions to the primary curriculum, asking the question, okay, what kind of skills and competencies do we want an 11-year-old to come out with, from primary school, to go into secondary learning? We've started from an assumption that actually secondary aged learning should really be about independent learning, should actually be about independent learning. Not exclusively, but you would want to have the beginnings of good skills of independent learning. Now, this is something that when I taught in higher education, we were saying it was something we wanted higher education to do. It's because of technology. I think it's coming down far more into secondary school environments. So this is the framework that's coming through on the Rose Review, which is the primary curriculum review. It's a framework. There's lots behind it. If you want to look at the document, just google Rose Review and you'll see that there are proposals that are out to consultation at the moment and very likely to be included because they seem very popular with teachers and head teachers. This is the caution, though, in terms of young people. There are 6,641,225,000 but that was when it was published and there may be more or less since then. Children at school and that's primary school and secondary school in England. This is England. We've broken that down using some data from the family spending study, which is Ipsos Moray, into what the kind of household income will be for kids, the households that those kids are in. We've sort of done some fairly convenient divisions. The income less than 15,912 is the baseline for... or the top level, if you like, for eligibility for free school meals. So it's an important figure. Around about £16,000 a year household income. You might not always be able to get free school meals with that depends on other circumstances but that's the eligibility threshold. So we're interested in that group and of that group, which is a reasonable chunk. I haven't got the percentages, but you might be able to work it out. But of that group, which is basically kids that are pretty much in poverty, economic poverty, 39% don't have access to the internet at home. I don't think many of us think that of school age kids 40% don't have. Most think that most kids do. Of course, I'll put the kind of higher income, which is modest for a household income but it will go up to all sorts, 27196 and upwards. Then it's up at 93% with internet and then just 7% without. That's a very stark social divide. Very, very stark. Very interesting, very worrying. And the government is investing £300 million in a home access project, which is basically to equip parents with a single purchase credit card which will buy them connectivity and a computer for their kids if they're in that lowest. So the government is trying to fill that gap at the moment. That's planned for later this year. Again, back to website, we'll give you more information about that. I know I'm sort of running short of time. Hopefully have a bit of time for questions, but just a few things on what we can say about schools. Well, this is a chart I bring out a lot because it gives an indication of the range of practice in schools. This is secondary schools. We asked teachers, and we asked a lot of teachers, how do they use technology? The question is, do they use technology or how often do they use technology to do these things with kids? Gather information, analyse information, be creative, solve problems, work with others. Interesting range, but very much chimes with kind of thinking around 21st century skills. In 2008, for example, only 27% of secondary teachers used technology to enable kids to work with each other in effect, which is pretty damming actually, although it's excellent progress on the year before and we're awaiting this year's figures. They could be better. I think what it illustrates is, there is a little way to go in terms of practice. You wouldn't necessarily want every teacher to do all these things all of the time, but this is whether they do it some of the time. Basically, whether they do it at all, which is very interesting. Only 17% of secondary teachers do all five or did all five in 2008. Higher in primary, actually. And as I say, we're awaiting an update on that. So there are some limitations in practice with technology. We know that. And just at the broad kind of indicator, we look at school-e enablement. We collect a bunch of data from schools and we put it together and it's data on are they using technology across the curriculum? Are the skills there? Is the management there? Is the ICT resourcing their whole range of things that we put together? And we've recently done an analysis of it from this year's survey. Around about 35% of secondary schools, despite if you like a bit of a lag in practice, they're great at other stuff, managing and providing technology, are what we would call the enabled. The immature is a term that's sometimes used. We've got a kind of low hurdle version of that. Secondary school, sorry, primary schools, about a third. There is a bit of a margin of error here. You might think that primary schools have got worse. We don't think they have because of the margin of error, but they probably haven't got that much better is the conclusion we make. Let's skip through this very quickly. This tells us a range of factors in whether schools are good at that previous measure, e-enablement.  And then there's other thing. CPD comes out very strong on whether or not the practice is in place, obviously the technology, the management and so forth is working well. There's a main kind of theme there in terms of whether or not schools are getting there. Finally, some stuff on impact. Well, impact of technology, and again if Richard this morning said, well it's like saying, would you ask what's the impact of books on learning? Well you wouldn't because it depends what's in the book and depends how the book's being used and so forth. We do pick up some general impact, but we don't say what's the impact of technology. We generally say what's the impact of technology, this sort of technology or using technology in this way. Having said that, these are pretty broad brush, some of these. Assessment related project work. Lo and behold, having good access to the internet helps. Bit of a no-brainer, but it was useful at the time for justifying broadband. Interactive whiteboards seems to be good. Embedded use takes teachers time to learn how to use them in different ways. In primary, no impact in secondary. No impact of interactive whiteboards in secondary. 7 to 11 year olds, yes. Secondary learners, no. The GCSE outcome stuff. Really, really interesting. Actually just the fact that kids have technology at home and use it, and they don't have to use it for educational purposes, but not using it for games is the critical thing. If they use it for games all the time, they're sunk educationally to be quite honest, but if they use it for communicating and web searching and general information gathering, even if it's nothing to do with their school work, there is a positive impact on learning outcomes. That's that the IFS, Institute of Fiscal Studies, has done a proper model around that, which has factored out everything else to be a proxy for other impacts. Revision online. BBC Bitesize will be happy, and there's other packages. We've looked at some commercial data, in fact. That seems to be useful, because that's tied to being prepared to do an assessment, and that has an impact on assessment outcomes. Then the classic, know your kids. Schools know your kids. If you've got good online information systems for monitoring and managing learners when they're embedded in your school, then that's coming up as a good impact. Just to finish off, we're seeing emerging practices with not heavy impact evidence behind them, but some really good school practices that are emerging. Stuff up there at the top around, for example, engaging disengaged learners. At the bottom, we've got the Narrowing the Gap study, Literary Review just published, is actually coming up with some... What are pretty much exemplars, really, if you like, of these are ways that technology... In a way, these are processes, interactions, that are actually supported and improved by technology, rather than this is about the technology. So some very interesting findings there. It would be great to say we've got some heavy, wonderful impact evidence behind this stuff. We haven't. These are exemplars of reasonable good local evidence of impact, but not beyond. Finally, we're just doing some stuff with University of Nottingham and Cerro, some of which will be presented tomorrow, which is actually looking a bit more at new modes of learning. We know we have a lot more to do around new modes and practices with just getting into that territory, and we'll start understanding what kind of practices will work and will run, and we'll really make a difference in school-based settings. I'll leave it there. Thank you. We have literally about two minutes for questions, I think, for five minutes, possibly, if there are any. Josie. On the income, because... That one. Because just from the way you phrased it, it might have just been an accident of the way you phrased it, I got the impression that you were suggesting that the no internet access of 39% was a result of the fact that the income is low, but it clearly isn't, because 61% have got internet access, right? So do you have a sense of what the other, what the next most important factor is in that no internet group that's causing... So what are the factors in whether or not that is a choice? It's interesting. Income, I think, is probably a proxy for some other things. We certainly know that kids from single-parent families are less likely than kids where there's... Of course, income does play a role there, so it's difficult to separate it out. We know kids from, not all, but certain minority ethnic groups are less likely to have it than others. And we know that there are actually, interestingly, there are regional differences, but they're probably socioeconomic group issues. So, for example, southeast, I mean, basically, the further you get away from the southeast on the whole, and it's a generalisation, then the worse the access. Yorkshire and Humberside comes out pretty low, actually. And that's probably to do with, I guess, kind of cultural educational issues. I mean, not low as in no one in Yorkshire and Humberside has it, but relatively low. And it's probably most likely to reflect a kind of... Obviously, the kind of work-based background of the parents or culture and the educational stuff as well. Just a comment. It may not be a very easy problem to solve, and money might not be the answer. Thank you.