Ryan McGuine in conversation with Ian Coxhead //
Ian Coxhead is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, of which he was the Chair from 2013-2017. His research covers the long-run growth and development of low-income economies, with an emphasis on the economies of East and South-East Asia. More specifically, he studies the effects of globalization and market shocks on production and welfare, how labor markets affect physical and occupational mobility, and the impacts of domestic policies on growth and the environment. He also has served as Interim Director of the Wisconsin Energy Institute, is an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s Department of Economics, serves as a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago, and edited the Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Economies. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and a Master’s and Doctorate from the Australian National University in Canberra.
In the very first installment of Sustaining Conversations, Ian joined Ryan to discuss Japanese cuisine, the importance of education for economies, why labor markets matter, trends in global trade, consumer-led environmental movements, communism in Asia, what makes an effective response to COVID-19, and more.
How did you come to study economics, and development economics in particular?
I kind of walked backwards into this. My undergraduate degree was in history, with a specialization in modern Asia, and as an undergrad I had an opportunity to visit several South-East Asian countries, predominantly Vietnam, as part of an organized tour in January 1980. That opened my eyes to problems of economic development, and ever since then it has been, as they say, “hard to think about anything else.” So I turned my history undergraduate degree into an econ major at graduate school, and from there it has been a pretty straight path.
Your work spans a huge number of topics — from natural resource extraction to global trade to education. Do you think there is a common theme uniting them all?
Actually all these things converge very closely. Firstly, like all development economists, my fundamental interest is in poverty and inequality. If you are not asking questions about human welfare at that level, then you are not really engaging with the subject matter of development economics. And then because I study countries in East and South-East Asia, I am especially interested in the interactions between international engagement — that is, trade, FDI [foreign direct investment], and international labor movements in particular — and their effects on the structure of the economy.
Those effects on the real economy play out in terms of changes in the mix of goods and services produced, and therefore in employment. And employment is the key to understanding changes in poverty and inequality, because the labor market is the one market in which we are all engaged.
The natural resources and environment part of that work is a little bit less directly engaged, but if we are interested in poverty, then we know that in addition to their labor, the other primary asset of the poor is typically land, or access to returns on land. If we care about that, then we care also about how land is managed, and how policy decisions at the macroeconomic level, including trade, impact the use of land and its long-run productivity.
South-East Asia has a history of strong, semi-authoritarian leaders. Despite this, many countries in the region are well-run “developmental states.” What led to this kind of government gaining a foothold in the region, and what prevents leaders from using their positions to improve themselves?
You used a couple of terms that I am not sure I fully agree with. You talk about “strong governments,” and I think you mean that the democratic institutions are not very robust. This gives some leaders and governments a lot of discretion over policy and other kinds of actions, but I would not characterize them necessarily as strong.
Let’s think about a country like Indonesia — that is the biggest country by population and economy in South-East Asia. It’s got a history of what look like strongmen leaders, often referred to as dictators, at least up until the year 1999 when it transformed dramatically into a functioning democracy. In the years prior to that, they only had two leaders between gaining independence in 1949 and 1999. The institutions of governance gave the impression of a very strong leadership, but the actions of government belied much weaker foundations. In particular, the pro-development administration of Suharto, who governed the country from 1967 to 1998, looks to me like a combination of a strong leader, with a very strong need to build a popular base. I think that that mix — that is, he had a lot of authority, but he also relies on popular perceptions of success — has been really critical, because it means that there is a lot of development spending in Indonesia, in spite of huge amounts of corruption. And just to be clear, there is tons of corruption, and tons of mismanagement in South-East Asia.
Which Asian country has the most underrated cuisine?
Japan. Most people think that Japanese food is bland, and kind of limited in palate — they think about sushi, they think about some other dishes like that. And they think it all tastes kind of the same. Well, it does outside of Japan. What the Japanese have developed is the art of distinguishing at a very fine scale between very subtle variations in food. And the Japanese obsess over this, and specialize in it, and once you get into that mindset, then all Japanese food looks extraordinarily varied, and very, very interesting.
As China’s economy slows and transitions toward services, what challenges and opportunities does that open up for other Asian countries?
I think there is a “before” and an “after” answer involved in this, because China is also dramatically changing its policies in response to this big demographic shift. If we think about the before — that is, before the adoption of the policy aiming for much higher rates of industrialization by 2025, and the so-called dual circulation strategy introduced by Xi Jinping in 2020 — then the opportunities for other developing Asian economies were twofold. One is the more advanced among those were selling parts & components to China, so they were engaged in global supply chains through China. That is, they were essentially selling parts and components to Best Buy and Walmart, but via China, where final assembly took place. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, to some extent the Philippines were leading players in that within South-East Asia. The other channel is natural resources and energy. Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar were very particularly engaged in that. Of course, China’s demand for natural resources of every kind and for energy has been almost insatiable, so those countries experienced a very different kind of growth boom.
Now, China’s policies on its own industrial base and its own supply chain are changing very quickly. What we see happening is that it is deepening and lengthening its domestic supply chain, so it is establishing a much higher degree of independence from global supply chains. The US and the Trump administration provided a major stimulus for this policy initiative, by engaging in unpredictable and damaging activities. As China pursues those policies, it will undercut some of the advantages for that first group of South-East Asian economies. Countries like the Philippines, which export mostly to China, and most of what they export are semiconductors, will find that that market begins to dry up as China produces its own semiconductors, which they are now doing. So that is a threat to those countries. On the other hand, the shift toward services in China is really good for some of the economies in the region. Those with high English-language ability — the Philippines, Singapore — will be big beneficiaries of that, as we internationalize a lot of services activities, and then of course the big rise of the Chinese middle class means that inbound tourism in South-East Asia is about one-third Chinese (or at least it was before COVID-19). So that has also been a very big economic boom for several nearby countries.
What are some of the causes of the “East Asian Miracle” that took place during the late 1980s and early 90s?
The East Asian Miracle was a period of about one decade, not a lot more than that, during which some South-East Asian and East Asian countries grew at GDP growth rates approaching double digits, so it was pretty unprecedented in terms of the speed of growth. To put that in context, a decade of growth at about 7% per year, which is typical of that period for those countries, means that real incomes doubled within the decade — that is pretty spectacular. Countries in South-East Asia opened themselves to trade and to foreign investment. A good marker for the beginning of that period of very rapid growth is the Plaza Accord — an agreement among the G5 finance ministers in which the Japanese yen, as well as the South Korean and Taiwanese currencies, were greatly appreciated against the US dollar. This undermined the profitability of their most low-tech, labor-intensive industries into the American market, and led to a huge outflow of FDI from those countries, into the most promising nearby economies that offered relatively well-disciplined, low-skill, low-wage labor force. So the industrialization that underpins the decade of very rapid growth was really stimulated by trade opportunities first and foremost.
Policies also matter. If we look at the countries that were not participants in the East Asian Miracle, they are uniformly characterized by bad policy. And so policies that created an atmosphere of openness and stability — that attracted investment, both domestic and foreign — turned into a boom in investment, which created lots of jobs, and stimulated lots of economic growth. So part of this is luck — these are countries that are just close in geographic and cultural terms to East Asia — and part of it is that they happened to have the right kinds of macro settings at the right time.
What happened between then and the Asian Financial crisis in 1997?
Well, the first thing to say about the Asian Financial Crisis is that although it appeared catastrophic at the time, when we look back from a generation later, it is just a blip. It was very small. At the time it seemed catastrophic because the countries of the region had been growing at almost double-digit rates, and suddenly they fell into a very deep, what we would now call V-shaped, recession.
What happened in between these periods was a combination of overconfidence, weak institutions, and bad management on the part of governments. Lots of optimism about the continued pace of economic growth led to poor decision making at the macro scale, and a lack of discipline among the financial institutions — banks, and the regulators of banks, including central banks — in those countries. Central banks in particular, as the ultimate regulators of the financial system, took their eye off the ball for quite a while. And all of that led to asset price bubbles — that is, real estate bubbles, speculative bubbles — in which lots of short-term foreign capital flowed into those economies, but was not rewarded with output and productivity growth, only with the exchange of assets among customers. And that pretty quickly led to a financial crisis.
Why have productivity growth rates slowed during the last decade in wealthy countries?
Well I am not an expert on wealthy countries. But a lot of people attribute that to a maturation of the IT boom of the 1990s and the first decades of the 2000s. It looks like Moore’s Law, to choose an example, is no longer being adhered to with quite the same discipline as it was for about 20 years prior to this. So the pace of innovation in IT areas has slowed down somewhat, and I would guess that that is probably a very important part of the overall productivity slowdown.
Now I could also get political and say that it is becoming much more difficult and problematic to manage economies efficiently, particularly in the last 5-10 years, particularly in some countries including the United States. Institutional weakness in the political system spills over into economic policies which are not optimal. You see that in trade policy, for example, where the United States adopts policies which limit its opportunities to specialize, rather than specializing in what it does well. That’s got to be a source of lower productivity growth right there.
Are there better ways to do trade policy than bi- or multilateral free trade agreements? What alternatives are there?
It depends on what you mean by “better ways to do trade policy.” If you are thinking about the interests of individual countries, then I am not sure there are. But if you are thinking about something more broad, like world-level welfare, or a development objective which prioritizes the gains among poorer countries, then I think the answer would be somewhat different.
Bilateral agreements are generally okay. Multilateralism — that is, at a global scale, the set of institutions written into the constitution of the WTO [World Trade Organization] — has kind of driven into a ditch in recent years. That is in part because of a lack of political commitment to the WTO, but it is also because the WTO itself has exhibited a number of constitutional weaknesses — for example, the consensus-based approach to policymaking, whereby everyone agrees or no one agrees has not held up very well. The WTO is not constitutionally well-prepared for the explosion of global trade in unfinished goods and in services. These things were not even really on the horizon at the time that the WTO was being designed in the 1980s. As a result, it is not well set up to deal with trade disputes that involve those kinds of areas. So you notice that the Doha Development Round, for example, which went on for more than a decade and ultimately failed, was very much about these kinds of issues, as well as agriculture. And then subsequently, efforts to broaden the mandate of the WTO have not been very successful.
So what does that leave? That leaves regional trade agreements — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which failed on the second day of Trump in office; the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has replaced it without the US; the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which is ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] plus North-East Asia plus Oceania; and indeed the pan-African free trade agreement, the African Continental Free Trade Area, which was signed in 2019. These are continental or regional trade agreements, which have a very powerful logic: they bring together trade partners who do a lot of business with each other, and at that level they can resolve a lot of trade policy issues relevant to their economic interests. That has been very good. Secondly, these are, for the most part, trade agreements which go well “behind the border.” So instead of focusing only on tariffs and non-tariff barriers, sanitary-phytosanitary agreements, and things like that, they also dig in on things like labor, on environment, on commercial practices, on banking, finance, insurance, retail, government procurement, and a whole bunch of other issues. And by doing so, by some extent or another, they do a much better job than the WTO can to regularize the trade relationships between countries. I think that those are probably the practical way forward from now on.
If you had asked a Western scholar in the 1960s to name Asian countries that would do well in the following decades, they might have said the Philippines, but might have been pessimistic about South Korea. What about those countries’ development paths did researchers miss at the time?
Well there is no doubt that the Philippines was very widely regarded as “the next Japan” around 1960. Several very large international institutions established themselves in Manila at that time on the basis of that prediction, but the prediction turned out to be very wrong. Why? It is really hard to say. There is no one thing, right? The Philippines has especially weak institutions, that’s not unique. It is highly corrupt, that’s not unique. It’s got some other defects, but none of them are unique.
Maybe the one thing that the Philippines did very poorly relative to its neighbors in that region of the world, was to fail to position itself for a global economy in which growth was being led by trade and international investment. The Philippines more than its peers in the region was slow and very reluctant to get onto that particular bandwagon, which did not help them. They stuck with what I think of as a very old-fashioned model of economic development — behind high tariff barriers, with limits on foreign investment, and strong emphasis on domestic ownership of resources. That may make political sense for a while, but none of that is really regarded as economically efficient, and that low efficiency eventually translates into slow growth, as well as rent-seeking behavior and corruption.
The story of South Korea is a really interesting one. Of course, that is a country which was extremely poor at the end of the Korean War in 1954. One thing that Korea had in its favor was being located between Japan and China — two very large, very rapidly-growing economies — so in terms of neighborhood effects, they had a lot going for them. Second, they had a very strong, very close relationship with the United states, at that time the global hegemon, so that certainly helped. Third, they paid a lot of attention to industrial policy, but they did not trade off much efficiency for growth in industry. They put a lot of policies in place that directed capital and other resources toward export-oriented industries, but they did not allow those industries to continue with the subsidized access to resources if they did not succeed.
Fourth and finally, when you look at education and human capital investments, South Korea is in a league of its own — okay not really, it is in a league with Japan. But among developing countries in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was in a league of its own. It invested in education all the way through grade 12 at a much higher rate, and with a much greater determination, than any comparable country at the time, or any comparable country now at a similar level of income per capita as Korea had at that time. And the difference in educational investments paid off hugely. So in one sense, they were over-investing in education in the 1960s because their economy did not really demand that much skilled labor. But in another sense, in the dynamic sense, in the long-run sense, what they were really doing was preparing themselves to move up the ladder of industrial sophistication, capital intensity, and skill intensity well ahead of the actual need to do so. That is a lesson which has not been very effectively learned by a lot of other countries.
Should that give us pause at predictions made by scholars today?
Sure, I mean humility is a really good asset for any economist, or indeed anyone that is involved in making statements that imply some kind of prediction about the future. So we’ve got to be very careful about that, and clearly the Korean experience indicates that. South Korea’s growth boom took place at a time and under a set of global conditions that have not been replicated since, and that is also really important — they are very much a part of the era during which they grew very fast, and that is a lesson which is sometimes lost on countries and policymakers elsewhere that believe that they should try to emulate Korea.
What kinds of education investments are most likely to boost intergenerational mobility in South-East Asia?
The importance of education is that if it is done right, it sets countries up to avoid the “middle income trap.” That is not a very good description of what really happens — it is a growth slowdown, not a trap — which I think is overwhelmingly due to underinvestment in human capital. Countries find it increasingly difficult and costly to move up the ladder of sophistication in manufacturing, and in service activities as well. Why does that happen? Well, countries open up to the global economy, they are labor-abundant, the rest of the global market seeks that labor, and in that process, we get a very big expansion of relatively low-skilled jobs, and the premium for staying in school longer gets compressed by that, because the fastest growth in the labor market takes place at the lower end of the skill spectrum. So that discourages a lot of kids, especially middle-ability kids, or kids from middle- to low-income households, from persisting with school beyond compulsory education, which depending on the country and the time might be either sixth or ninth grade, or in very few cases 12 years of education.
So the challenge and the opportunity for South-East Asian countries these days, having achieved pretty much universal enrollment through grade nine, is first of all to improve the quality of education that is supplied through ninth grade, so that children who do complete school through age 15 have more than just functional literacy. And second, to increase the opportunity for those same children to imagine themselves moving through grade nine onto grade 12, and perhaps onto some tertiary education as well. That is where the big hold-up is at the moment. Lots of countries can credibly claim to keep almost all kids in school through the end of ninth grade, but the drop-off after grade nine, and every year from there subsequently to grade 12, is huge in every country. That drop-off reflects increasing educational costs, as well as very high opportunity costs in labor markets that do not really perceive a very big difference in terms of productivity between a grade nine credential and a grade 12 credential.
Is there anything governments can do to prevent farmers from clearing forests for lucrative crops like palm oil?
Farmers, or corporations.
Or corporations.
Well there is an easy, facile answer — pass laws, and enforce the laws. But all that does is kick the actual question down the road a little further, which is “okay, those laws exist, and those policing mechanisms exist, but why aren’t they implemented in an effective way?” This is a classic example of the ways in which trade, which is almost always beneficial to a low-income developing economy, can actually undermine development in some pretty serious ways. And actually, the problem is not trade necessarily, although trade creates the incentives for that kind of environmental damage to occur. Rather, it is the lack of an institutional and regulatory environment which limits the kinds of actions that get taken, so in the long-run, the only real solution is to develop and implement regulatory solutions to that. Now that is really easy to say, but very, very difficult to do.
I also think it is interesting to point out in this context that where it is difficult for a country like Indonesia to make those actions stick, there is now a great deal of support coming from outside Indonesia which will assist them in making good policy and implementing that policy well. That support primarily takes the form of consumer-led movements in wealthy countries, which demand certain standards and certain commitments from the suppliers of ingredients into the products that they buy. So you think about palm oil — that is in everything in the supermarket, from foodstuffs to detergent, from Nutella to shampoo. Increasingly, consumer movements in the wealthy world are demanding that that set of ingredients be produced in a sustainable way, in a way that does not violate environmental or ecological systems. That pressure acting directly on firms is complementary to the pressure they might feel from governments, so in a sense, those two sets of forces are working in tandem. That will make it much easier for governments to make and enforce good policy going forward.
If someone were to take a 1-2 month trip around South-East Asia, what tips do you have for them to get the most out of it?
This is a post-COVID question, I suppose. Well, everybody has different preferences. Some people like to just sit on beaches, and I can’t really offer them any good advice, because I don’t know much about beaches in South-East Asia — I have seen a few, but I seldom spend time on them. I think that an obvious answer to that question would be: get out of your own comfort zone, and be prepared to plunge in and discover things which are off the sort of most accessible path of the tourist traps.
Removing fossil fuel subsidies is fairly unpopular anywhere it has been tried. Are there any lessons from past attempts that can inform policymakers interested in trying that in their own country?
Yeah, there are a couple of really big lessons. One is that it is much easier to take away fossil fuel subsidies when the price of fuel is low. Second, I think is that governments that are interested in removing fossil fuel subsidies, which as you say are politically very popular, have to build momentum behind reform efforts, first by building coalitions of interests that will gain by removal of the subsidies, and second by informing their electorates of the true costs of those subsidies. Those costs are often opaque — they’re not obvious, they’re not direct — and they are not easily perceived by those who feel like increasing the price of diesel or kerosene or gasoline at the pump is impinging on their costs of living. So I think that building that kind of coalition is really important, and spreading information about what it really costs to subsidize fuel, as well as who gains from it, is the other part of that story.
Four of the five remaining constitutionally-communist countries are in Asia, but if a citizen of the Soviet Union were to travel in time to visit them, they may be surprised by how market-oriented they are. What accounts for the persistence of the designation, and how does it affect their economies?
Well, part of that question can only be answered by a political scientist, and I have no expertise in that area. But one of the benefits of that political system is that it authorizes the communist party to maintain a monopoly over power, and not to relinquish it. That is probably the first and most important motivation for keeping that system — the system says there shall only be one party, and the one party is not going to contradict that, of course.
At a more fundamental economic level, as you point out, these economies would be unrecognizable to anyone from the pre-1990 era from any communist country. The one very big residual sign of all that is state-owned enterprises, which includes state banks, but also industries and corporations that occupy what Lenin used to call the “commanding heights” of the economy — energy companies, telecoms, shipping, shipbuilding, transportation, a whole bunch of other things like that, plus a whole bunch of side activities that those firms themselves engage in. Those firms, especially in countries like China and Vietnam, which are market economies in every other respect, benefit hugely from unlimited access to very cheap capital, which they then squander at the expense of the entire economy, and to the benefit of a small, typically extremely privileged and hugely corrupt few, who can divert that kind of capital to their own uses. So this is a very big drag on overall economic development, and I think a good question to ask about economies like China and Vietnam, that have grown very fast over a very long time, is how much faster could they have grown, had they not maintained this system of state support for inefficient, non profit-oriented, and corrupt state-owned enterprises.
Asia accounts for something like 77% of global coal use, and is one of the only regions where it continues to increase. Are there any realistic ways that the US and Europe could push Asian countries to reduce coal consumption?
No. That would have to come from the Asian countries themselves. The US and Europe don’t have very much bargaining power with respect to Asia, not even with respect to small Asian countries, when it comes to that kind of thing. They don’t have any credibility either — maybe the Europeans do, but the US certainly does not. And it would never rise to the top of the policy agenda in any case. So that kind of movement toward carbon neutrality has got to come from within.
You are right that between China, India, and South-East Asia, that is almost 100% of the new coal plant construction going on at the moment globally, so there is a lot of work to be done there. But commitments by countries like China, and indeed by Vietnam much more recently, to carbon neutrality are as credible and as sincere as the same kind of commitments made in the wealthier parts of the world, and so I think there is a case for international mobilization and for collective action. The Paris Accord showed us what the potential of that could be, and COP26, which is set to take place in 2021, appears likely to have a positive outcome.
Many Asian countries are doing quite well against COVID-19 — many have had fewer deaths than US states, despite being very densely populated, while the US and Europe are experiencing some of the highest death rates in the world. What is it about these countries that enabled them to be so successful thus far compared to the West?
I would say political initiative matters a great deal. The United States, which has performed very poorly compared to other countries in its response to COVID-19, has shown that this is first and foremost a political problem. So countries that address this at the political level and show determination to carry out whatever course of action they choose have generally done much better.
The courses of action have been pretty varied — Vietnam took a very repressive and top-down approach, locking down entire communities. It seems to have worked, although it is still too early to say for sure. Other countries, notably Taiwan, had a far more decentralized approach, and relied much more on individual responsibility and the collective sense that you should not deviate from that. It also seems to have worked very well, at least up until now. So I would say that while the modes of implementation have been pretty varied across the region, the one thing that they share is a political determination to make it happen.
What are some of the most under-studied topics, relative to their importance, in development economics?
The list is long. But I think my three favorites would be gender, ethnicity, and education. Gender because it’s difficult to quantify, ethnicity because it’s politically fraught, and education because there seems to be a problem in the industry that studies education. Specifically, they bifurcate between those who study education supply — that is, policies and programs to build schools and train teachers, and move schools to communities and things like that — and education demand, which is a function of household income, as well as expected rates of return on education. And these two literatures do not talk to each other very well. I think that educational investments are the most important investments that any country can make for long-term development, so until these two sets of ideas converge into a coherent set of policies, I think there is going to be a lot of inefficiency in educational policy. And that is something worth studying.
You like sailing in your free time. What is one key to winning regattas that beginning sailors do not appreciate?
Keep the mast pointing upwards! I have no idea, I’m not a world award-winning sailor by any means, I just do my best.
What are you working on right now, and why do you think it is important?
Right now, the thing that I am thinking about most is education, and in particular the moment at which children begin to contemplate the choice between education and work, or “the school-work transition.” As I’ve previously discussed, this transition is something that matters a great deal for children in poor countries, and children of poor households in poor countries most particularly, because the opportunity cost and the financial expense associated with continuing education is greatest for those groups. The high dropout rate around the end of ninth grade is driven in part by direct educational expenses, in part by curricula in upper-secondary education that do not appear to be particularly career-oriented — they are mostly oriented toward preparation for tertiary education, so they are seen as irrelevant by a lot of children — but most of all, they are driven by opportunity costs. When the economy is growing quickly, and the premium for twelfth grade over ninth grade education is not especially high, then the cost of staying in school for the additional three years becomes really intolerable.
There are a number of things I do in that area, but the one that I would single out right now is working in Vietnam on the propensity for children to take the national exam which gets them into tenth grade. At the end of ninth grade they can graduate — finish school, go out into the job market — or they can take the test, which will determine whether or not they get a place in high school and then the high school of their choice. The test taking rate varies hugely across provinces in Vietnam — it varies by socioeconomic status, it varies by ethnicity, it varies by proximity to high-skill labor markets. And all of those things mean that lots of children who might be of above-average ability, but happen to be of the wrong ethnicity or from a not very wealthy family, or from the wrong part of the country, opt out of taking the test and join the labor market. That is individually a bad choice, because it pays off in a bad way for them as individuals and transmits to their children as well, but it is also a bad choice in a macroeconomic sense, because it forestalls some opportunities for growth in human capital stocks at the aggregate level. So I study that — I think it’s just a super fascinating topic.
Are there any final comments or resources you want to leave readers with?
I would say that following your interests and exploring beyond the usual sources of information is generally a really important thing to do. In the part of the world that I work in, the website East Asia Forum is for me hugely valuable. It has hundreds of contributors across all disciplines and all applications of knowledge, it covers pretty much every topic, and it contains links to in-depth analyses. I would say that for any topic that you are really interested in, it is a good place to go browsing. I don’t mind giving them a free plug, over any other kind of free plug that I might be given the opportunity to provide.