Carlos G. Dominguez
Secretary of Finance
Host Country Event
Past, Present and Future of the World Economy
May 4, 2018
Asian Development Bank President Takehiko Nakao; Fellow Finance Ministers; ADB Governors; my fellow cabinet members present here; workers in government; distinguished panelists; guests: good morning.
Please accept my warmest welcome to Manila and to the 51stAnnual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
For this morning’s host country event, we organized three excellent panels to help us reconfigure the past, understand the trends shaping the global economy today and peer into a future being radically reshaped by the power of information technologies.
Presenting for the first panel is Dr. Peter Frankopan, Director of the Center for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. Professor Frankopan is the author of the extremely compelling book, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which I read because my grandson who’s in college suggested that I read this book. That’s one of the good things my grandson learned in college.
Presenting for the second panel is Professor Paola Subacchi, a noted expert in the international financial and trading institutions that underpin the present world order. The post-Bretton Woods struggles to cope with great tectonic shifts in the global economy that revealed the misalignment of representation in the international global institutions.
Presenting for the third panel is Mr. Eric Jing, the chief executive officer of Ant Financial. Despite its name, it’s not a small financial institution. He will discuss the fresh developments in financial technology, including their risks and downsides. We expect to discuss here the need to leverage innovation and emerging technologies to ensure that they support inclusive growth.
These are broad but also provocative topics. I truly look forward to the great ideas this conference will surely bring forth. These ideas will help us not only deal with the promise but also the peril of this time of rapid technology-driven transformation.
This is a great time to be alive: to marvel at the dreams technological advance weaves and to worry about the issues history leaves us to deal with. These are issues of inequality, of the need to rethink our lifestyles to save the planet, of festering zones of intractable conflict, and of the vulnerabilities of our communities in the face of calamities.
Human history, we know, advanced because of the arrival of disruptions or the discovery of disruptive knowledge. Today, in the face of powerful and disruptive technological advances, we wonder if our institutions could adapt, if our communities could hold together and if our governments can absorb the pace of change.
There are many things that boggle us these days. I am confident that, with the impressive panels we convene today, they will leave us less boggled than when we first arrived.
Thank you very much.
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