Globalization and firm competitiveness in the Middle East and North Africa Region.

In a world of 5.7 billion people, we at the Bank deal with 3 billion people who live under $2 a day and a billion 300 million people who live under $1 a day. A billion and a half of those people don't have clean water, and in this region of the world, you know full well the impact of not having clean water, an impact on the lives of families, an impact on the opportunities for women and girls, a destructive impact on the lives of our people. We are concerned with the issues of health and we are concerned with the issues of education. We have concluded in our institution that we cannot do this alone, and we have come to a... partnership around the world. We've also learned that it's necessary in order to have growth, which is a prerequisite to human development, that we must be partners with business, with the private sector. Not just the private sector internationally, although that has grown enormously. To give you an idea, seven years ago, foreign investment in developing countries was $30 billion a year, and the loans from institutions like the World Bank were $60 billion a year, which means that the official institutions were twice the size. Today, the official institutions are around $45 billion and the private sector overseas investment is $260 billion. So from being half the size, it's now five to six times the size, and for every dollar invested from overseas, four or five dollars are invested locally. So the private sector is not a gloss, it's not an institutional group that we can forget, it's a group that is central to the activities of development.