Political leadership has support from relatively broad economic and social groups, with more impersonal relationships and hence stronger competition and mobility. The authors argue that the transition between development stages to what they refer to as “the second social revolution”, a somewhat broader concept than the Industrial Revolution that gives weight to, inter alia, the Enlightenment and Modernity, started over 200 years ago, and that it is still underway. In many countries, society has benefited from technological progress but is still captive of the old stage of development of personal power relationships. They point to a clear concurrence between the open-access society and economic prosperity. North Douglass C., Wallis, John Joseph and Weingast, Barry R. (2009) “Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History”, Cambridge University Press. 8  Nation-building is a difficult task if there is no trust in as vital an institution as the police. Johs Andenæs spent the spring semester of 1971 as a visiting fellow at Oxford, taking along his son Ulf, who was my schoolmate. That year, Leszek Kołakowski, one of the past century’s most famous philosophers, was also a visiting fellow at Oxford, and Johs Andenæs and Kołakowski became friends. Although Kołakowski had been one of Marxism’s prominent post-war thinkers, by 1971 he had completely lost faith in the ideals of his youth. His relationship with the same Communist authorities that he had served as an ideologist earlier in his life was becoming increasingly difficult.
This may well be the true answer or reality, but it is rather disappointing if not frustrating that the wide gap between demand and supply has continued to exist. 3. So the natural question for us would be how we can close that gap and bring about a winwin outcome for project proponents and operators on the one hand and financiers or investors on the other. And in this connection, I should say that Hong Kong is uniquely well positioned to play a pivotal role in facilitating and catalysing investment flows to infrastructure projects in the region. We have well-developed capital markets and a deep pool of professional talents, in addition to Hong Kong being a leading centre in arbitration and dispute resolution, all of which are essential building blocks in support of infrastructure investments and their financing. It was against this background that the HKMA set up the Infrastructure Financing Facilitation Office (IFFO) in July 2016. IFFO has the following mission: (a) provide a platform for the key stakeholders to get to know each other and share experiences; (b) enhance the capacity of the investing and recipient countries in infrastructure financing; and (c) facilitate infrastructure investment and financing flows. 4. IFFO now has 90 stakeholders from Hong Kong, Mainland China and overseas joining as Partners. They include project developers or operators, commercial and investment banks, multilateral development financial institutions, asset owners and managers and professional service firms. In the last two years, IFFO has accomplished a lot.