0830 - 1300

Registration

(Participants are free to attend the concurrent focus workshops of the Community building, finance and trade forums)

1300 - 1430

Lunch

Launch of World Bank’s Global Economic Report 2004: “Realizing The Promise Of The Doha Agenda”
Chair: Christopher Findlay (PECC Coordinating Group Chair)

Presentation:

• Dominique van der Mensbrugghe (World Bank)

1430 - 1630

Infrastructure Development in the Pacific Region
This is a session for reviewing and assessing the possible roles of infrastructure for economic growth and its implication for policy management. The slow US productivity growth since the 1970s, known as the productivity puzzle, raised the question of the shortfall of infrastructure as its cause. As well, the East Asian Miracle in the 1980s raised the worry about possible under-provision of infrastructure as the bottleneck of sustained economic growth in the 21st century. Meanwhile, accelerated technological progress has changed the meaning of infrastructure and its implication for economic growth significantly. In addition to physical infrastructures, human and knowledge-based capital has become more important as a driving force of new industrialization based on information and telecommunication technologies. Furthermore, providers of infrastructure shift weights from public to private sectors. What, then, will be the role of government in the provision of old and new infrastructure? What's going on in the Pacific region? Perceiving the enormous differences in developmental stages, we should like to sort out learnable historical lessons due to development stages and an unprecedented pace of changing agendas due to accelerated technological progresses among our experiences in the region.

Moderator: Dr. Akira Kohsaka; Coordinator, Pacific Economic Outlook – Structure Task Force, Professor of Economics, Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University, Japan

Panelists:

• Ms. Vijayakumari Kanapathy; Senior Analyst, Bureau of International Economic Studies, Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia
• Prof. Jeffrey Nugent; Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Southern California, US
• Mr. Tang Kwong Yiu; Government Economist, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, China
• Dr. Naoyuki Yoshino; Professor of Economics, Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Japan