Introduction to the Second Plenary
Dr John Chipman, Director General and Chief Executive, IISS
We have three speakers in this plenary on encouraging foreign direct investment, which I suspect is of interest to a very large number of you. I thought we had an excellent first plenary and let me again thank the two speakers for their interventions and their agreement to take so many diverse questions. We hope to have as stimulating a discussion this time. I am very keen, as is the Economic Development Board, to ensure that all sorts of different voices have a chance not just to pose questions but to give their own perspective. Many of the people here would themselves be keynote speakers at other conferences and so it is important that all of you feel able to provide your perspective, and sometimes ending it with a question mark so that the people here on the panel have something to answer.
With those preparatory remarks, let me with very great pleasure hand over the chairmanship of this session to Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist, an extraordinary economist in his own right and author of numerous books on big subjects, especially on Asian powers and their rise, commenting when the sun rises and sets on their economies and even their sense of power. Bill understands more than almost anyone else the difficult question of how to attract foreign direct investment.
Chair's Introduction
Bill Emmott, Independent writer; former Editor, The Economist, UK; IISS Trustee
Thank you very much, John. I think you gave us all too much to talk about and think about during the first session. It was so stimulating that a 15-minute coffee break is hard to achieve but I thank you all very much for coming back so promptly. The title of this session is Attracting Investment after the Financial Crisis, and I think we should see it as pursuing and extending some of the themes laid down in the first excellent session, which can be summed up in a question that I think many of us have been asking ourselves for the last three years. That question is: are we in a new world, has something really changed, or are elements of continuity more important that the transformations?
In this subject about investment, in our discussion, in our preparatory remarks, I think we will look at some of these questions. Firstly, we are in a new world of governance, of G20 and not G8. Is this a question of active cooperation and collaboration in governance or is it more analogous to a process of disarmament, of confidence-building but also of, through working and sitting together, agreeing not to do some things, for example protectionism or putting up barriers against investment? Secondly, we are in a world where we are looking for capital. Capital has been flowing uphill, as water is not supposed to do, from emerging-market high-saving countries to the industrialised world in the last 15 years. As Montek Singh Ahluwalia said last night, that is changing. The capital is certainly coming substantially from the high-saving emerging markets but where is it now going to go and, in particular, how can we attract it?
Thirdly, it is also a new world in the sense of the primacy and importance of sovereign wealth funds as pools of capital, as providers of capital, but also as objects of political discussion. This takes us to some extent back to the 1970s when sovereign wealth funds first became prominent, but really they have developed in substantial size only since 2003-04. Fourthly, we come back to a constant issue in foreign direct investment and in the desirability of attracting investment, which is that capital is all very well but what we need as countries is also technology, know-how, diversification, and innovation. How do we get hold of that as national governments, as observers of the scene?
To explore these themes and to discuss further questions with you, I have three excellent speakers: His Excellency Imad Fakhoury, Minister of Public Sector Development and Minister of State for Mega Projects in Jordan, who was also involved in the Aqaba special economic zone, Ambassador Park Dongsun, Ambassador for International Economic Cooperation in the Republic of Korea and most particularly responsible for organising the second of the two G20 summits this year, the first in Toronto and the second in November in Seoul, and Kairat Kelimbetov, Chief Executive Officer of Samruk-Kazyna from Kazakhstan, a major sovereign wealth fund for that state.
So, as before, the rules of the game are opening remarks of up to 15 minutes with special rewards for those who get their remarks across in fewer than 15 minutes, and then discussion with you from the audience. We are going to start in the order in the programme with His Excellency Imad Fakhoury.
