This means the median observation for the white group occurs a lot earlier than for the ethnic minority group. As a result, when we run a pooled Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, more weight is placed on later observations, where the ethnic minority population is larger leading to a negative ethnicity pay gap. This is at odds with time-series results which take into account the relative shares of the two groups in each year. To ensure that the results are comparable with the gender pay gap, we aggregated the results from the time series regressions using the share of the two groups in each year as weights. 24  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  24  ethnic minority workers tend to be employed in regions where wages are higher (40% of ethnic minorities work in London) and tend to have higher qualifications than their white counterparts. Once these compositional effects are accounted for, the unexplained (“pay bias”) ethnicity pay gap is as large as for females. It averages just under 10 percentage points over the sample. This demonstrates one of the perils of interpreting raw, unconditional, pay gap data too literally. Replicating this analysis for people born in the UK reduces by half the size of the pay bias. Conversely, for people born outside the UK from ethnic minority backgrounds we estimate a significantly larger pay bias, at around 12 percentage points.
In other words, their use has been driven by purely economic and commercial motives. 17. The growing concerns over SWFs and various proposals to restrict either the mode of their investments or areas in which they might invest are signs of a worrying trend of rising investment protectionism, and pose a risk to international financial stability. We are  4  BIS Review 51/2008  sympathetic to concerns in recipient countries and acknowledge that these worries, if left unaddressed, would only increase protectionist sentiments. In our last meeting, the IMFC called on the IMF to play a role in identifying best practices for SWFs. We share the view that as a multilateral platform, the Fund could play a useful role in this area, by allowing issues to be discussed in an open and neutral manner. We welcome the inclusive, collaborative, and voluntary approach taken by the Fund. The principles should focus on governance, institutional arrangement, and transparency and be co-written by the SWFs and for the SWFs, hence would help increase ownership of the best practices, which is critical to its successful adoption. We also welcome the parallel work undertaken by the OECD in drawing up a similar set of guidelines for recipient countries to forestall the risk of protectionism. It is highly important that in drafting such guidelines, the standards for SWFs should not be more onerous than for other large institutional investors. Conclusion 18.