International Conference on Financing for Development

MR. REEKER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the State Department. As you know, next week the United Nations will be sponsoring the International Conference on Financing for Development to be held in Monterrey, Mexico. The President of the United States, accompanied by Secretary Powell of course, will be attending that conference. And we are very pleased to have with us today our Under Secretary of State for Economics, Business and Agriculture Alan Larson to talk to you a little bit about the Monterrey conference, some of the things we'll be doing there, and then to take your questions on the subject.

So I will let Under Secretary Larson give you a few introductory remarks, and then we'll turn it over to questions. Thanks very much.

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Thank you very much, Phil. I will just give you a little bit of an overview on the conference, say a little bit about what the objectives of the United States are as we approach this meeting, and then would be interested in any questions you have.

This is a UN conference and it's one of a series of UN conferences that will take place on development and development-related issues this year. The specific focus is on the financing of development. It will be followed by the World Food Summit five years later, a meeting that will take place in Rome in June. The G-8 will meet in Canada this year, and a part of that theme, as you probably read Prime Minister Chretien explaining in some of the press accounts today, will be on the G-8 cooperation with Africa. And then later in the year there will be the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which will be held in Johannesburg.

This particular meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, has both a ministerial phase and a leaders phase. The ministerial phase will take place from Monday through Wednesday. The leaders portion will be on Thursday and Friday, and President Bush of course is going to be attending the leaders portion of the meeting.

In addition to the formal sessions, there will be a number of side activities. The BCUN, a business group associated with the United Nations, is sponsoring a full series of activities. The US Government and others are also sponsoring various workshops.

The basic message of this conference, as reflected in the Monterrey Outcome Statement, is that there are many sources for financing investment and that they all have to be used as effectively as possible. The document which was negotiated and is now agreed cites the importance, for example, of domestic ownership and leadership in the development process and the importance of using efficiently the domestic savings that accrue in developing countries.

I might just mention in passing that these domestic savings are estimated by the World Bank to be some $1.7 trillion. So the amount of money one is talking about is very large, and obviously it's an amount that will grow as developing countries can grow.

A second source of financing of investment is the export earnings of developing countries. This is something the President mentioned in his speech yesterday. And those export earnings are just short of $2 trillion now, and also that's a figure that could grow immensely with the right policy framework in developing countries, as well as in developed countries.

It is very important as well that developing countries be in a position to attract foreign investment. My figures suggest that flows of foreign private capital to developing countries have grown dramatically over the last decade and are now on the order of $180 to $200 billion a year. This is also a very important source of financing development, and that is recognized in this Monterrey text.

The text talks about debt where, of course, the international community is implementing this Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and it also talks about development assistance, both the important of effective use of development assistance, and it talks about volumes of development assistance.

It is at this point that I think the President's speech yesterday comes in, and it will really form the basis for the message that the US delegation will carry into the conference in Monterrey. The beginning part of the week the leaders of the delegation will be Ambassador Negroponte, AID Administrator Natsios and myself. Secretary O'Neill will be there for Wednesday and Thursday, and then of course the President and Secretary Powell will be coming on Thursday.

We are going to want to stress the message the President laid out, which is that we believe all of these sources for financing investment need to be maximized. In particular, we are prepared as the United States to make a very large additional contribution to development assistance. The President proposed a new compact for development that would be supported by a millennium challenge account, and we propose to build up $5 billion over and above, over and above, our ongoing 150 Account or ongoing development assistance accounts. And this would be used to support development in those countries that are making the strongest possible commitment to development.

And the President highlighted three factors that will guide our decision-making on that. One is whether they are governing justly; secondly, whether they are investing in their own people through education and health; and, third, whether they are fostering the sort of economic policies that encourage enterprise and entrepreneurship.

The President asked the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury to reach out to the world community to get help in developing the sort of criteria that would help us make clear, concrete judgments about whether we're making progress in these areas.

The President also highlighted in his remarks a very important theme that's in the Monterrey document, a very important theme that we'll be mentioning all throughout the week, and that is the importance of focusing on developmental outcomes. The President said that the United States supports the international development goals that are expressed in the millennium declaration. It sounds a little bit like inside baseball, but what it means is that there are some specific outcome goals that have been agreed to by the international community. Universal primary school education by the year 2015, cutting in half the number of people who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, making dramatic progress in reducing infant and childhood mortality, making dramatic progress in lifting up out of poverty people who are earning less than a dollar a day.

So this is very important because it's trying to put the focus on getting the results and the outcomes. And the President, as you know, is a very results-oriented President, and he has been very, very clear to everyone who is working on these development initiatives that we need a process that is very, very accountable, accountable in terms of the contributions of the developing countries, but also accountable in terms of the way our own assistance and development policies operate.

I would just end with one thought on this, and that is our view is that development is so important, and getting this right is so important, that we ought to devote the same rigor to the way that we use the taxpayer money in support of development as we would expect corporate managers to use money that they're investing in new plant and equipment. You know, we have a system within the United States where capital markets impose very rigorous accountability to corporate managers, and we're very serious about how we spend our money in our own households.

And what we're saying is let's make sure that on something that is as vital and as important as lifting people out of poverty that we're having that same sense of strong accountability in how we're using our resources. And if we do that, we think we will both have much, much better development outcomes, but we'll also generate support for development policies in the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan and other parts of the world that are making a commitment to the development process.

With that introduction on the Monterrey meeting, I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you've got.

QUESTION: Ed Williams from AFP. Just two questions. One is, now that you've got this commitment for the money, where does that put the World Bank request for -- I think it's the doubling of aid over the next five years? And also, why does the money kick in in 2004, and not almost immediately?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Well, first of all, on the various calls for increased aid, I think you will have seen that Jim Wolfensohn himself sees the President's announcement as a very, very positive step. I have said before that I think what the World Bank has been doing is very laudable in trying to raise more attention to the importance and the urgency of the development issue. I also have said that I don't think anyone knows whether the correct amount or the needed amount of development assistance is any particular number. There simply isn't the analytic base for doing that.

What the President is saying is we are prepared, as a nation, to make a very, very large increase in our commitment to the development process. And we want to use that money in a way that is very strongly accountable, where we will be very selective in where we spend it, and we'll be very rigorous in monitoring whether it is being used correctly. And we think that if we can do it in that way, then we don't have to worry about the theoretical question of how much is enough. We will find a way to make sure there is enough development assistance resources that are available.

Now, we're starting this in the '04 budget because the President's '03 budget has already been submitted, and because there already is a discussion of a supplemental budget request. We're going to use the time between now and then to work with the international community to get these criteria right. You can be sure that we will be attempting to apply some of these principles to our ongoing assistance efforts. But we will be making our major push for the President's program to be initiated as part of the '04 budget.

QUESTION: Sorry, I'm a reporter for Africanewscast.com. Mr. Larson, as you recall, I had a last-minute question for you the other day, and it was off-mike. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to bring it back.

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Good. Thank you.

QUESTION: And the question is about farm subsidies here in the United States and in Europe. Could you -- how would you attempt to reconcile that with the call for increased trade with the developing world, since the developing world does not have the capacity to engage in that kind of program? And I have a follow-up if possible.

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: All right. First of all, you know I talked about the development meetings going forward. I could easily have gone back to Doha and talked about the very important role of the Doha development agenda, the launch of a new round of global trade negotiations last year.

The United States fought very, very hard to get that successful launch. Under Ambassador Zoellick's leadership, we reached out to all the countries in the international trading system, but I would say in particular to the African countries, to make sure that we could find the common ground on which we could get a trade negotiation launched. Our number one objective for that launch was to get a strong commitment in the Doha Declaration to the elimination of agricultural export subsidies and to a very strong negotiating agenda for the reduction of other subsidies and supports, and for a dramatic increase in market access. That's what we want. That's what we fought to get, and we fought to get it for two reasons. One, because we think it will be a benefit to the United States if we can bring down these agricultural export subsidies, which are very large in Europe, frankly larger than here. But we accept that this is to be a mutual or reciprocal gain. We also think that it will be very beneficial for farmers in developing countries, whose governments, frankly, can't compete in a subsidy contest.

So we have a very, very clear commitment to move forward on that type of a negotiating agenda, and we think it will be a very important contribution to development, as well as a very important improvement in agricultural trade relations.

You had a follow-up.

QUESTION: I am very happy with your bravery in responding to the question as you have, because most of the time when this question about subsidies has been asked, most people tend to think that it is almost impossible in this country for negotiating down farm subsidies to happen because they think there's a large constituency interested in the farm subsidies, and that if anything like that happened, there's going to be an uproar on Capitol Hill possibly.

And the Europeans have also said that they are prepared to negotiate down more than the United States, and the British minister in charge of agriculture came here sometime around Christmas, and now she was very emphatic that Europe is waiting for the United States to come down with the farm subsidies. Are you prepared at this time to be more emphatic in telling the world that the United States is going to reduce farm subsidies in order to enhance (inaudible) trade?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I'm very glad to hear the Minister's comment. She speaks for the UK. She doesn't speak for the European Union as a group. But I'm glad to know, and I have known, about the views of the British Government on this, and we welcome that.

The fact of the matter is that the subsidies in Europe have been very, very high and very, very longstanding, and getting the agreement of the European Union to the Doha commitments to move forward on eliminating progressively these export subsidies and dramatically reducing other subsidies was a commitment that is very hard to achieve. And if the overall view of the European Union is that they are ready to move aggressively to reduce agricultural subsidies and to eliminate agricultural export subsidies, that's very, very good news, and news that American farmers will welcome. And we'll be ready to move forward.

QUESTION: When you talk about these new stricter standards for a responsiveness to what the US wants in connection with its aid, how do you plan to, if not enforce -- I think enforce would be the wrong word -- but how do you plan to get back that information? Would it come from the government itself, the recipient government, or would international organizations help monitor if the aid is being spent the right way and you're getting the appropriate results from it? Or would this take extra American staff in AID to do this kind of stuff? Could you just give us some practical examples of how it would work?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Sure. At the beginning, how it has to work is that we have to reach out to international partners, developing countries, others who are involved in providing development assistance, the international institutions so that we -- and nongovernmental organizations who have a lot to contribute. So we want to get the best ideas that we can about how to address these issues on the front end; that is to say, how to develop the criteria that would help us make wise choices about which governments are the most committed to ruling justly, investing in their people and promoting economic freedom. And that is an exercise that we are extremely serious about.

The second part of it is to, you know, once decisions have been made and once projects and programs are launched, how do you make sure what is working? And there too we have given that a lot of thought, and we will continue to work with other countries to develop those sorts of criteria. I think the starting point here is that the developing countries increasingly are recognizing the importance of accountability. It is a major theme of some of the work that is being produced in the context of so-called NEPAD, the new African partnership on development.

And so I think that there is a great deal of support for finding new and better ways to make sure that programs are actually working and that they are having their intended effects. And by intended effects, I want to circle back to these international development goals. Are people being lifted out of poverty? Are more and more youngsters getting a basic primary school education, and so forth? That is what the objective is.

QUESTION: Do you share the assessment made by the Treasury Secretary, Mr. O'Neill, that foreign aid has largely been wasted and unproductive in the past? And if so, why are you suddenly putting in $5 billion more into foreign aid? Doesn't this represent a real sharp change in policy in the Bush Administration?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I think that everyone in the administration that's working on development issues, from the President on down, would agree with two basic facts. One is that there have been some very, very important success stories in development assistance over the last decades, and we have actually highlighted some of those in a publication that I think some of you have in front of you, and a publication that we'll be distributing in Monterrey to the conference participants.

The basic theme of these many different success stories that are listed is that assistance works best when it is provided in the context of a strong commitment to market principles and a very strong economic policy framework. And that brings me to the second point that I think all of us who are engaged in development policy work for the administration would agree on, and that is that aid has at times in the past not achieved its outcomes, and that when one is talking about something that is as vital as lifting people out of poverty, that is as vital as helping to improve the lives of people that are living on less than a dollar a day, it's especially important that we make sure that we're using that money wisely, it's especially important that we get as productive as investments as we can.

You know, there are some households in the United States, if a certain amount of money isn't used wisely it's no big deal because there is a margin. In the development area, that isn't the case. And so having money available from taxpayers and not spending it effectively to lift lives out of poverty is something that really is intolerable, and I think Secretary O'Neill has been very strong and eloquent on that, and I think we agree with him.

What the President's proposal really tries to do is to marry two thoughts: one is that it's very, very important for assistance to be used effectively; secondly, it's very, very desirable to have more assistance. We're going to do both. We're going to make more assistance available, but we're going to insist in doing it in a way that is very rigorous and produces the results that we want.

QUESTION: To follow up, what is the -- before this $5 billion, what is the US development assistance? About 11 billion, I've heard?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Yes, and there is a numbers game that I won't go into in agonizing detail, but I want to just say a very quick word about it. Development assistance, as defined by the OECD, is international assistance that is provided to a certain class of countries that are fairly low level of income. And our level of ODA, oversees official development assistance, is on the order of 11 billion. The overall US assistance account is something larger than that; it's something more like 17 billion, and that's because we provide a certain amount of assistance that we think is very important for international peace and security and actually for economic development. But some of it goes to countries that are higher-income countries than qualify as recipients of ODA, per se.

QUESTION: Just the question is, so this $11 billion is not going to -- the standards that you're talking about, the criteria, is applying to the 5 billion? Does that mean that the 11 billion that's going out now has no -- doesn't have these standards, is basically --

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: No, not at all. Not at all.

QUESTION: So the standards have been worked on --

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: We have been working -- look, it's a fair question. Let me do my best to give you a good answer to it. This administration and previous administrations in the United States, as well as aid officials in other governments and international organizations, have been working very, very hard for a long time to make aid as effective as possible. There's no question about that. And in our existing development budget, you will see reflected a commitment on the part of the Congress to invest in things like health and education and things that clearly are developmental and clearly are consistent with the basic approach that the President outlined.

What this proposal says is, we're going back for more. We're going to the American people, and we're asking for even more money for overseas development assistance. In fact, we're asking for $5 billion more, and we believe that in asking for more money, it's appropriate to ask for an even higher standard than we've been able to achieve in the past, a higher standard of effectiveness, a higher standard of results orientation. Because when you're going back to the American people for more money, I think they have a right to expect even more.

And we want to show at a time when there is a lot of debate about the development agenda that we think that we can do an even better job of lifting lives out of poverty if we focus on those countries that have the strongest commitment to economic development and poverty eradication, and if we make sure that we're working with the flow of market forces, and that we're helping countries position themselves in a way that they're better able to attract investment and better able to participate in the trading system.

One of the things that was in the President's speech is the fact that World Bank work, which has been published recently, shows that in countries that have very, very strong policies, that one dollar of additional foreign assistance, on average, seems to generate two dollars of increased private investment from outside or inside the country. So that's a multiplier you really would like to strengthen as much as possible, and so that's what we're trying to do in this new compact for development.

QUESTION: If you could talk about -- a little bit more about the good governance part of it. I mean, a lot of these countries where the poverty is the greatest, a lot of it comes from authoritarian rulers that aren't necessarily ready to adhere to these kind of strict rule of law, good governance -- I mean, how do you balance the fact that some of those are the neediest countries, and aren't going to necessarily -- I mean, these are -- you're going to have a really hard time with the performance-based measurements in some of these countries. I mean, how do you get those countries out of the cycle?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I think you're absolutely right. And governance is about making choices, and operating this new compact for development is going to involve some very tough choices, and choices that sometimes perhaps in the past we have had a tendency to obscure.

I think that when it comes to humanitarian assistance, for example, our goal has always been and will continue to be helping people and saving lives, and that's why the United States was the largest contributor of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, even when Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban. I think there will be cases in the future where there are countries that are badly governed, but where we will want to have a presence through humanitarian assistance or assistance developed through NGOs.

But, at the same time, if the choice is for spending an additional dollar, spending it in a place where you know that you're going to have two or three times larger a beneficial effect on alleviating poverty than if you spent it someplace else, then I think that's a hard choice that one has to make. And one certainly hopes, and I certainly expect, that as it's clear that that is the basis upon which these decisions are being made, one is going to reinforce the pressures within countries for stronger governance.

We think there are some good benchmarks for measuring the governance criteria. There's been a lot of work done on that subject by the World Bank and others. And certainly we are doing our best to be in a situation where we can offer the sort of technical assistance to countries where they say we recognize governance as an issue, we recognize we've got some problems, but we need some help in overcoming that. We need to be present in those situations to be able to help those countries where there's the commitment but not necessarily the capability.

QUESTION: If I could follow up on that, that was my next question. In terms of some of your investment in those countries where the kind of commitment is there but the ability is not, that's going to cost even more of -- I mean, is this factored into the $5 billion? I mean, it's probably going to need a lot more increase in US programs and stuff to help them with their judiciary systems, rule of law programs, like we do in other countries. Is that factored in?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Well, it will take both time and money, but at the first it will take commitment. And I think our goal is if there is commitment, we want to make sure that there's the help available to create the capability. And of course the other side of this coin is that developed countries have an obligation not only to provide capacity-building but to make sure that they are not part of the problem.

And that is why the United States has been such a strong supporter of initiatives like the OECD Bribery Convention. We are going to continue to push to get stronger implementation of that and make sure that all of the advanced countries have laws that make it a prosecutable offense for their businesses to offer bribes to foreign government leaders in order to get a contract.

QUESTION: Can we get some idea of how many countries might be involved in this when you start it up, and could you possibly cite a good candidate or two for this kind of aid?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I really can't because we are very serious about working through these criteria and making the best possible decisions about that. It is interesting to me that when one sits down over lunch or at a conference or in a group of development experts and cites who are the really strong performers, you have a fair amount of consensus about who some of the top performers are. For example, in the President's speech he mentioned two countries that have made some very tremendous accomplishments, Mozambique and Uganda; incidentally, countries with very low capabilities, countries in one case that had been ravaged by civil war, in another case had been ravaged by a tyrant like Idi Amin. But in both cases it was possible for committed governments to begin putting in place the sensible policy framework, with the help, to be sure, of international assistance agencies.

So those are a couple of countries that I think are almost universally seen as very, very strong examples of countries that have made enormous strides against difficult odds and that have gotten help and have deserved all the help they've gotten.

QUESTION: Just roughly, can you say how many countries you think might participate in this program?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I really can't, for the reason I gave. It's going to depend on how many are able to meet the standard. And as I said a minute ago, we hope that the availability of these funds -- and we hope that other countries, by making similar funds available under similar approaches -- can create a real incentive, a real competition for good policies that will make our job all the more difficult. And we would, frankly, welcome that if our job is made difficult by virtue of the fact that more and more countries are aligning their policies with those that time has shown are the ones that can produce real progress in development and poverty alleviation.

QUESTION: And as a follow-up to that -- and perhaps the answer is the same -- but the President yesterday set a goal of doubling the size of the economies of the poorest countries. And I guess it depends how ambitious that goal is depends on what size universe we're talking about. How many countries does he intend to double the size? Are we talking about three or are we talking about a much larger set of countries?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: I don't remember, to be honest, whether the President specifically talked about the countries that have a per capital income of a dollar a day or two dollars a day. Normally, when one is talking about the poorest countries, one is talking about countries that fall into the category of IDA recipients; that is to say, countries that broadly have a per capita income of two dollars a day or less.

I think what one wishes to see is to see those countries where there is really extreme poverty to grow and grow quickly. And this is something else that I think -- if I could just amplify on that for a second. I mean, there are two messages here that we're trying -- the President is trying to convey and that the rest of us have been trying to convey as well. One is that growth is key. This isn't going to happen -- development cannot occur on a sustainable basis without very, very strong economic growth. It isn't just a matter of transferring resources and sort of providing for these health and development needs on an ongoing basis.

That isn't how it's going to happen. These countries, even the smaller and poorer ones, have to have the capability of spinning off growth, spinning off the resources that help them increase their own investments in health and education, albeit from a small base today. And we have the track records to show it can be done. Korea is a country that for years grew at 10 percent or more. And other countries can do this. Mozambique was the country the President cited that grew by 10 percent last year. So growth is absolutely essential to achieve these goals. Let there be no mistake about that.

The second reason why this is significant is we believe these countries are capable of growth. It is very important, in my view, not to fall into this psychology that these countries are too poor or too incapable of achieving economic growth. We do not believe that. We do not believe that there is any country that doesn't have the capability, with the right policies and the right types of help from the international community, to achieve these very high growth rates.

What it requires is increases in productivity, and one of the lessons of economics is that if there is any silver lining to having a low productivity level, it means you've got lots of upward potential. And we have seen case after case of where countries, when they pulled it together, have been able to achieve rapid, sustained growth and productivity which has led to economic growth. And it's important to understand that that is what the President had in mind when he talked about that objective, and that is what we have had in mind as an administration when we keep stressing the productivity goal.

QUESTION: You said that the United States was going to insist on laws that ban bribes to developing countries. Is that a new initiative, and can you tell us in what form you're pursuing that and what form it takes?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Sure. It's not a new initiative. The United States, on its own, passed a law in the mid-1970s, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that banned overseas commercial bribery. In 1988, the Congress instructed the Executive Branch to try to internationalize that approach. It took ten years, but we were able to achieve in 1998 an agreement in the OECD whereby countries agreed to outlaw overseas commercial bribery. And most of the OECD countries, as well as a few non-OECD countries, have actually ratified that convention and have put in place domestic laws to do so.

We have insisted on very strong monitoring of that, and coincidentally there has been a team in the United States this week from the OECD that has been monitoring our implementation. Now, we volunteered to be one of the first countries reviewed because we've been at this since 1977 or so, and we have put people in jail for engaging in overseas commercial bribery. And because of that strong enforcement stance, American corporations have very strong internal compliance procedures for monitoring the behavior of their officers, as well as people who work on their behalf overseas.

What we're trying to do now is get other countries to have very rigorous enforcement of the new laws that they've just put on the books, and to make sure that their companies have these very same strong internal compliance regimes, so that the companies are policing themselves. We also have some ambitions about strengthening the OECD convention, which now does not extend to payments that might be made to political party officials, for example.

So we have a very active agenda there, but it is an area where there has been some enormous progress in the last three years -- four years.

Yes. One more.

QUESTION: I'd like to have your comment on a phenomenon in the investment for development process, which has been identified by UNCTAD, the UN agency. And it is like this, that whenever there's an opportunity for new capital inflow into a specific African country, it is followed by foreign investors who attach themselves to that particular capital inflow. And as soon as there's a tendency -- as soon as that fund depletes, the investors then run away from the country. What do we have at this point, given all these new benchmarks, to make sure that that does not happen again?

UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: It's a very big subject you've opened, and I am going to, with your permission, just take two pieces of it and comment on briefly.

In my experience, there have been two broad difficulties over foreign investment in some of the poorest countries, when it has occurred. Now, probably the biggest problem is that by and large, there hasn't been much foreign investment in some of the poorest of countries, and that's what we're trying to overcome. I think that is the biggest of our challenges.

But in those countries where it has occurred, the problems that I have seen over my career have fallen into two broad categories. Category one is when there's been investment in natural resources, and for a variety of reasons that natural wealth hasn't been translated into real wealth in terms of education and health improvement in the lives of the people. You can see in lots of countries that are oil producers, for example, that you don't always see it reflected in improvements in people's lives, what you would expect to see after 20 or 30 years of oil production. And that has to do with a lot of problems in governance, I would think, and in not finding ways to make sure that revenues from petroleum production were used in the best possible way, including in investments in health and education. And to some extent, when there is a big cash earner, like petroleum, it tends to discourage entrepreneurship within the society, because people think instead of going to all the trouble of building a business on their own, why don't they just get a job in the government or a job in the oil company where they can get their piece of this action, something the economists call rent-seeking behavior, instead of wealth-creating behavior.

The other sort of problem that you sometimes see in countries that have received investment is that the countries are very friendly to the investors when they are courting them, and then once the investment is made, the climate turns more difficult. And we have a lot of cases where investments have gone sour because once the investment money had been committed, then the regulatory rules changed, the government in one way or the other made it impossible for the company to continue doing business effectively.

You've raised, as I said, a very, very big question. I don't know that that's a particularly adequate summary of the experience, but it does sort of summarize -- it does summarize my experience. My bottom line on investment, though, is that the major problem between foreign investment and developing countries is that there hasn't been enough of it in some developing countries, and we need to find a way to make sure that this sevenfold increase in foreign investment to developing countries that we have seen since the early 1990s is something that occurs more broadly. Right now it's gone to a relatively small handful of developing countries. I think one of our goals needs to be to make sure that more and more countries are able to attract investment.

So thank you very much. I hope we'll some of you in Monterrey.

QUESTION: Thank you.