Second, we can explore together how to develop a green financial market ecosystem. Chongqing and Singapore have been working with our financial institutions to raise awareness of green financing amongst Chinese corporates. Chinese corporates which want to issue green bonds can avail themselves of MAS' grant schemes to help defray the additional costs of third-party verification when issuing green bonds in Singapore. Chongqing and Singapore can do more to simplify the application process for qualified companies in the Western Region to raise sustainable finance overseas. This can leverage on the trials that Chongqing and Chengdu have done earlier this year to facilitate such issuance. Third, we can do more together to align our green taxonomies. ASEAN has embarked on developing a taxonomy to define sustainable and transition activities in six focus sectors as a start. China has also developed a taxonomy. China and ASEAN can work towards greater inter-operability across their taxonomies, especially for transition activities. This will help attract greater cross-border green financing to the region. Fourth, we can explore together innovative structures to help scale up transition financing for the ASEAN region. This includes financing structures that blend finance from the public sector, private sector and multilateral development banks to de-risk and fund projects that would otherwise be unable to attract pure commercial funding. In short, there is much that Chongqing and Singapore can potentially do together in the green finance space. Let me wish all participants a fruitful Summit, with good exchanges of insights and new opportunities for collaboration.
If anything, it looks to be slightly lower than anticipated. However, so far this year wage costs per produced unit nevertheless appear to have increased by more than we had expected as a result of the weaker productivity. Employment continued to increase during the second quarter of this year, but unemployment remained largely unchanged compared with one year ago. The outcomes were close to the forecasts. The number of hours worked per week continued to increase during the first half of the year, which contributed to a decline in productivity. The Economic Tendency Survey in July was also weak. It fell and now indicates that the Swedish economy is much weaker than normal. It is mainly households that are contributing to the low level. This is the most pessimistic that households have been about the Swedish economy for 15 years. The confidence indicator for the Swedish business sector fell, but it is nevertheless at a level corresponding to the average since 1996. The Economic Tendency Survey also shows that sales prices in the wholesale and retail trade continued to rise to a large extent and that continued increases are predicted for the third quarter. Households’ and companies’ inflation expectations continued to rise. They even rose more than is indicated by statistical correlations between inflation and inflation expectations. However, inflation expectations as measured in the bond market, what is known as breakeven inflation, have declined. Inflation rose from 4.0 per cent in May to 4.3 per cent in June and 4.4 per cent in July.