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Nathan Hunt: This is the Essential Podcast from S&P Global. My name is Nathan Hunt. For all of the focus on China in financial and policy circles, it is, in fact, India and not China that will be the world's most populous country within the next couple of years. Such a large population creates its own economic center of gravity, which will require new policies and approaches, both within India and in the larger world.

To understand the challenges and opportunities of this developing economic superpower, I am joined today on the podcast by Dr. Ajay Chhibber. Dr. Chhibber is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University and a Senior Visiting Professor at the Indian Council for Research on India's Economic Relations and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Among many other prestigious posts, Dr. Chhibber served earlier as Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. Dr. Chhibber has written 6 books on economic development, the latest of which is Unshackling India: Hard Truths and Clear Choices for Economic Revival, which has recently been dubbed one of the best new books on economics by the Financial Times.

Dr. Chhibber, welcome to the Essential Podcast.

Ajay Chhibber: Thank you very much, Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Nathan Hunt: I'd like to start with a quote from historian, Romila Thapar, in regards to the current situation in India. She said this recently in an interview with the Financial Times, "Everyone is shouting about, "How can you spend rupees on buying crude oil, and you're buying it all from Russia and you're supporting Russia." In fact, we're supporting our own economy. People elsewhere don't understand how critical the Indian economic situation is. You have to keep that in mind."

Would you agree with her assessment that the Indian economic situation is critical and that Indian leaders are well advised to focus on Indian problems over outside geopolitical concerns?

Ajay Chhibber: Yes. I think she's broadly right. I don't follow Romila Thapar that closely, but I think she's right. She's a great historian. And I think the External Affairs Minister, Jaishankar, said it best. He said, we buy less Russian oil in a month than Europe buys in one afternoon. So focus on that rather than on focusing on how much oil -- Russian oil India is buying.

India, in any case, is a very large importer of oil. And most of the oil it imports comes from Saudi Arabia and UAE, a little bit from Iran. But Russia is certainly not a primary supplier of oil. They may be supplying other things but not oil to India. And so that's -- I think India has been hit very badly because of this big spike in the price of oil. And also, the fact that this is not well known, but India had planned a transition to net 0 by 2070 despite all the problems it faces.

The Prime Minister announced this in Glasgow recently at the COP26 meeting, but it require a shift first from coal to natural gas. And because of this big spike in the price of natural gas, I think some of that transition will be even harder for India. So there are lots of issues there, but I mean I don't want to go on, on this. But she is broadly right.

Nathan Hunt: Prior to reading your book, I had very low awareness of the extent of the economic issues in India. Can you share with our listeners some of the challenges around nutrition, education and health care that make it difficult for India to rise to middle income status?

Ajay Chhibber: Well, of course, India is already a middle-income country, a lower middle-income country. So the next stage it wants to get to is higher middle income. Of course, everybody recognizes how important basic health and education is in the drive of any country to reach that level.

What we lay out in our book is that India has underinvested in health and education. Particularly, public spending on health and education has been quite low compared to China or compared to many of the fast-growing East Asian economies. And in the initial stages of India's development, it focused a lot on tertiary education, on higher-level education, not so much -- not enough on basic education, and that has affected the pattern of growth of India.

And as the pandemic has revealed, India was hit very badly, particularly by the second wave, how the underspending in health had actually cost India hugely during that period. So we lay out a case for much higher levels of health and education spending in India, if India wants to get to the next stages of development. And particularly on education and even on health, I would say, there's now quite widespread coverage, but we have to focus on the quality of education and the quality of health care.

Nathan Hunt: Ajay, you dedicate a lot of your book to talking about improving maternal nutrition, and the rights of women is essential to the growth of India. Looking at where Indian women are today, how much work needs to be done?

Ajay Chhibber: A lot. I mean -- so we look at economic rights. We look at political rights. We look at access to land, and we look at issues like labor force participation. Labor force participation rate, that is how many women actually have paid jobs in the economy, has fallen very sharply in India, and it's now below 20%. So that means that this economy is running without the participation of most of its women in the paid economy.

There's also very heavy discrimination, which has been pointed out a long time back by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, looking at girl-boy ratios. That means that there's been a lot of increase in the male-to-female ratio in the population, which means that girls are being killed basically at childbirth, that people don't want girls and they find a way to abort them.

And then you go on to other levels like at the political level, we look at how many women -- we've had powerful women Prime Ministers. But for the bulk of the women population, their participation in political rights has been very low if you look at seats in parliament. Even in progressive states in India like Kerala, if you look at political power, women don't have very much of it, and that's a matriarchal society. So it's quite surprising.

So there's a lot there that we point out that needs to be done, and India cannot make progress to develop status unless it fixes this problem. You can't have half of your population basically not contributing. That's the situation we have.

Nathan Hunt: You raise a fascinating point talking about progressive states. I think one of the things that struck me in reading your book was that we think of India from the outside as a single country, almost a single entity, a single culture. But there seems to be a lot of variability within states. You make the point in your book that some of the states are probably too large, too unwieldy to be effective governing regions.

Ajay Chhibber: So I think we have to think of India like you think of the European Union. This is called the Indian Union actually. That's the real name for India. So it's a union of states, it's not a federal country. It's a union of countries but with a strong central government.

But there is huge disparities and huge diversity as is the case in the European Union. Perhaps in India, even more so because we have so many languages. We have at least 16 official languages and many others, which are spoken and used but not registered as an official language. So we have these huge disparities across the country, and we have a very centralized financial system.

Unlike the European Union, which doesn't have fiscal union, we have a very strong central fiscal system where much of the taxation in this country is collected by the center and then hand it out to the states by various formula.

And we have a third level of government also below the state level, which is the local government. We have a state, Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of almost now, when the next census comes out this year or next year, probably have a population of close to 250 million. So just shifting resources from the capital, New Delhi, to the state of Uttar Pradesh really doesn't mean very much when you have a state at a size of 250 million.

And we have several other states which are close to 100 million in size. So they are basically this much larger than most countries in the world. So we have to find a way to shift resources down to the local government, that is at the level of the mayors in the cities, and we have to shift resources to the village level to people who run village councils, et cetera.

Just to give you one number. Of course, in most developed countries, you have very strong local government. But even in China, I'll just use the example of China. More than 50% of spending in China in an authoritarian state is done at the local level, not at the provincial level, not at the central level, at the local level. That is the level at villages and towns and mayors and cities, et cetera. In India, that number is 4%. So 50% in China, less than 5% in India.

So you can imagine how centralized a state is with such diversity and such disparity, which is why we argue in our book very strongly that if India has to develop these resources, we have to become much more decentralized.

Nathan Hunt: The agenda of the book, if you'll forgive me for simplifying, is how India can move up into that upper-middle income country status. I had an idea that a lot of India's challenges could be attributed to the cost of doing business, the so-called License Raj. How significant a factor is that at this time in holding India back?

Ajay Chhibber: We argue first that the foundations are weak, which is this health and education that we talked about. And we also argue that we have an overbearing state because it's very centralized. And so those 2 things must be fixed.

And then we have this issue of competitiveness, how competitive is India. And we argue that the cost of doing business is very high because India is basically a very, as you said, very large population. So we have a lot of people who could work, so labor is plentiful. And land is scarce because so many people on that land obviously means land is scarce. And capital is scarce. If you're an underdeveloped country, capital is scarce.

So what we argue in our book is that we have misused these resources. We have allocated them in a very poor way because we have made it very hard to use our labor because we have had myriads of labor laws, about 100 labor laws, which, as someone said, if any honest businessman was to follow all these laws, he couldn't run a business. And what has it also meant is most people -- most firms have tried to then remain very small because these laws only apply to firms that cross the size of 10.

But if you see, almost 90% of firms in India then end up being less than 10 people working there. Most of them are just 1 or 2 people, basically. So you can't compete in a global economy today with a firm structure of that size. So one of the things we argue is that, that has to change.

And then we made land very expensive because we passed legislation, which makes it very hard and very expensive to acquire land. We've also had regulations like -- if you think that the floor area ratio, which is how many floors are you allowed to build on a piece of land in a country where land is scarce, would be very high. But we have the lowest floor area ratio in the world. So in a drive towards higher income, you have to urbanize. But if you urbanize in India with very low floor area ratios, you end up with very inefficient sprawling cities because you are restricted by the floor area ratio. So that's another factor that we point out.

Let me turn to capital. We calculate it for the book that the efficiency ratio of our banking system, which is the -- how much -- what is the price at which you lend money and what is the price at which you take your deposits. That ratio, the intermediation ratio, which is called in financial circles of the banking system, is one of the highest in the world. It's about 500 to 600 basis points, which is close to what you see in Venezuela or in Russia. In China, that ratio is 300. In Malaysia, it would be even less, like 200.

We have made our most abundant resource, labor, very hard to use. And we have basically misused the most scarce factors of production that we have, which is land and capital. Now we also -- India also was uncompetitive because it had very poor infrastructure. Now they have tried to fix some of that now by spending lots of money on roads and ports and airports and things like that. And India has actually done fairly well on that or is at least improving considerably.

But the cost of using that infrastructure is very high because we have very high petrol and diesel prices because of state taxation. So for example, in diesel, our prices are 20% more than China. In petrol, we have 50% more than China. We also cross subsidize. We have a huge railway system, but we cross subsidize between producers and consumers. We charge very high freight to producers in order to be able to subsidize consumers.

The same goes for electricity. We have one of the cheapest electricity for consumers, but one of the most expensive electricity for producers. So we have done a lot of things which have made India uncompetitive, which can be fixed.

Nathan Hunt: The Modi government uses the slogan, maximum governance, minimum government. As a concept, is this, in your opinion, the right approach? And how successful have they been in realizing this goal?

Ajay Chhibber: Well, they're trying. But I don't think we are there yet because we are so centralized, we got rid of the License Raj. But then we set up regulatory bodies, which now have become a sort of a re-License Raj, in a way.

And we have government intervening in too many things in India. We need to spend -- to refocus the government on the basics, on health, education, infrastructure, meaning social infrastructure. Even on defense, we are not spending enough and on -- now on the emerging challenges of climate change. And we need -- we have still about 250 public enterprises, which are in almost every sphere of economic activity. These are government-owned companies.

We just privatized and managed with great difficulty to privatize the airline, Air India, back to the original company from which it was nationalized, which is the Tata Company, which I think is a very good thing. So we have this huge legacy from the past of an overbearing, commanding, command-style state, which the intent of the Modi government is to get rid of. And they have made efforts in that direction, but we still have a long ways to go.

And on top of that, what I mentioned earlier is the need to decentralize the government to the local level. You cannot run health, education, agriculture, sitting in New Delhi and designing plans for different parts of this union of states, which is the Indian Union, with so much diversity and disparity.

And some of the best schemes have actually come from experimentation at the local level. So we had the direct farmer support scheme in one of the provinces in Andhra Pradesh, which now has been taken on. So we have to allow much greater experimentation to take place at the local level.

So we need 2 things. We need to refocus the state on its basic fundamental issues that it should focus on and get it out of all these other areas like running an airline or running a telephone company or even manufacturing of cars and electrical equipment and things like that. And so we still have a lot of companies doing that, public companies, I mean. This is the direction which we need to go. The Modi government's intent is in that -- rightly in that direction, but it's all in the execution.

Nathan Hunt: Farming in India continues to be a very large part of the economy and a large employer in the economy, at least compared to other countries of similar size, especially when you consider -- as you said earlier, that land is a scarce resource. Obviously, the government offers a lot of subsidies in order to support farmers. It's a very difficult life, a very challenging life. What are the nature of these subsidies right now? And what is a different, perhaps better model, that you and your co-author discuss?

Ajay Chhibber: Yes. So I think you're absolutely right. We have just too many people on the farm. And what that has done is reduce the farm. The average farm size is now less than 1 hectare, which is a very small amount of land and unsustainable for a family anyway. So what has happened is that we have had a massive growth within the service sector, especially because we have been a leader -- a global leader in IT services, et cetera.

But there aren't enough jobs there to absorb all the rapidly growing labor force. And India has suffered what is called premature deindustrialization. We haven't done as well in industry for the reasons that I mentioned: bad use of land and labor and capital. And so what that has meant is that a lot of people, like in China, a lot of people left the farm sector and moved to manufacturing.

That has not happened in India. So you still got a lot of people left in farm. So part of the solution to what's happening in the rural areas is to get people out of the farm. There are just too many people there. And part of it is to modernize the way we deal with the farm sector itself. We had big food shortages in the 1960s, and we were very heavily dependent at that time on food assistance from abroad.

And India then decided to try and fix that problem. And we -- with the help of, of course, outsiders, especially Rockefeller Foundation, India went through what is called the Green Revolution, which is we went into high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. And we used a combination of subsidies, fertilizer subsidies, farm price support schemes, free electricity, so that you could pump water out of the ground to irrigate, and we also expanded irrigation considerably. So that was very successful. India became not only self-sufficient in wheat, rice.

Today, it is ready to -- especially with the Ukraine war, where Ukraine and Russian wheat is now in short supply, and you have global shortages. India is now ready to supply up to 30 -- almost 30 million to 40 million tons of wheat and rice to the rest of the world. So that part has been very successful. But the problem that it has created, also now a huge environmental problem, which is that all this pumping of water out of the groundwater has reduced the water table very deeply. Heavy use of pesticides and fertilizer has meant that much of that water now is creating cancer for the farmers. And we have now a very distorted production in the farm sector, where we have too much wheat and rice and sugarcane. And in the meantime, because of rising incomes, the dietary patterns of the Indians have changed. The demand for basic calories has gone down. People now want vegetables, they want more [ pulses ]. They want edible oil, et cetera. So India is short on those and has to import those.

So we have to shift all this. And also the fact that they try to grow extra rice crop then leads to stubble burning, which is a quicker way to get the soil ready for the next crop, which creates massive air pollution. So all this is laid out in our book quite extensively.

So what we argue is we need a second Green Revolution in the farm but very different from the first one. We don't want to be in this business of telling farmers what to produce, so we would want all these subsidies removed and instead give farmers income support, like you do in the United States or in the European Union, and let the farmers then decide which crops to grow based on market demand.

This has been tried in several middle-income countries also like in Mexico, in Turkey, with great success. So it is a direction in which India is trying to go. But unfortunately, the Modi government ran through some reforms in the farm sector without proper consultation, and that led to a huge reaction from the farmers who, despite the COVID pandemic, carried out a rebellion against the government for more than a year and finally won.

That has set back farm reforms probably for another decade. And it's a lesson in how not to do reforms. But the direction in which India needs to go, I think, is get people off the farm, meaning have more jobs in the non-farming sector, and also modernize the way you provide subsidies so that you don't affect the crop mix, but you provide some base of support to the farmers.

Nathan Hunt: In the book, you talk about official corruption, the paying of bribes and the perception of corruption that ordinary Indians have. How significant of a drag on economic activity is corruption in India today?

Ajay Chhibber: People say that it has reduced to some extent. But as we show in our book, with the figures from Transparency International and surveys done, it's still very, very high. Now there's a saying in Asia that corruption is actually the grease that helps commerce, but I don't really have very big sympathy with that argument. I think it's a huge deadweight loss.

And in India, the corruption is not just at the high level. It's also on every transaction any individual gets through, whether you want to get a driver's license, whether you want to get -- anything you want to do. Whether you want to sometimes even get your own money out of your own bank account, you might have to pay a bribe. So it's so pervasive and it's so -- such a huge deadweight loss that we have to find a way to get rid of it.

Now what the Modi government did was, unbeknownst to anybody on where this advice came, Prime Minister Modi decided to have a demonetization of the rupee. Basically, the rupee existing notes were abolished and new notes were issued in the hope that this would unearth so-called black money, hidden money, corruption-related money.

But that was a huge disaster because in the end, it's a flow, not a stock. It's a process that produces it, not -- so it's not a onetime thing. And that shock, actually, the demonetization hit the economy very hard, especially in an economy like India, which is not as digitized as the rest of the world. It's a cash economy to a large extent.

But I think we have to get at this issue of corruption, but it will require systematic reforms, more transparency, more competition. We used to have to pay a bribe to get a telephone. Now nobody bothers to do that because everybody has a mobile phone or a cell phone. So we have to increase competition, increase transparency, make access for services much greater and go after some of the big fish, in a way, to get at this issue like most countries in the world have done, which is they've gone from more corruption to less corruption systematically.

Nathan Hunt: The role of the state in India looks different than in the United States or Western Europe. There are successful state-owned industries, as you point out in your book. And these state-owned industries are balanced by waves of privatization that have happened over time. Do you consider the Indian model to be a distortion from the Western norm? Or does India have its own unique form of economic development just as China does?

Ajay Chhibber: Yes. So I think we have gone in our book quite systematically into the state-owned enterprises. This is based on a 2-year study that I did before the book was written at the National Institute of Public Finance.

But basically, what we argue is, no, we don't think that they are very successful. We think 7 of the largest ones, which are very strategic, they are in oil and gas and heavy engineering, those could be retained in state hands. But in our opinion, the bulk of these 250 enterprises -- and by the way, these are 250 that are owned by the central government. Then at each state, each province has also state-owned enterprises. And those number, about -- for the whole of the country, they number more than 1,200. And we argue that there is no rational reason to keep these in government hands at all, except for these 7, 8 or now maybe 10 big ones because they are in oil and gas and things like that.

But otherwise, we make a strong case that like Air India was privatized just recently, and the helicopter company -- the government owned a helicopter company also, which was privatized recently, most of the -- rest of them should all be privatized.

We also show that there was a previous government, the Vajpayee government in around 2000, which privatized about 30 companies. And we tracked the performance of those 30 companies after they were privatized, and they have done much better than they would have had they remained in government hands. So we are very much against retaining these state-owned enterprises in state hands. There's very strong vested interest to keep them there because political parties, when they come into power, they put all their hats on the boards of these companies and management of these companies. There's also a lot of corruption related to them because the contracts are given out in nontransparent ways. Despite the few that have been profitable and those largely have been profitable because they may have been monopolies, there's been a huge drain -- like Air India, for example, more money has been poured into Air India than had been spent on the health sector. So we have no case to make for retaining these in government hands.

Nathan Hunt: A few times in the book, you raised the possibility that India may have prematurely bypassed the industrialized phase of development that tends to provide lots of jobs towards a more service-oriented model. Is it possible for India to meet the demographic challenges it faces as a services-first economy? Or is there not enough growth along that path?

Ajay Chhibber: No, it's not. Because India has also a large labor force and some of that labor force is highly skilled, the engineers, the IT engineers, et cetera. And they have benefited hugely from the growth in services, and India has done well in that and will continue to do well in that because global trade may have declined in manufacturing. But in services, global trade is continuing quite strongly. But if you take all those jobs, it's not enough. And especially for those people who are coming off the farm and who have basically a secondary education and need more low-skill manufacturing jobs where India has missed the bus on and where China has done -- had done so well. In fact, now China is shedding some of those jobs.

So with the IT sector, what you have is a few highly skilled people who get the top jobs and then an ecosystem that services them. They'll need a driver, they'll need a cleaner, they'll need some maids in their houses, et cetera. But that's not going to provide the kind of jobs India needs to go up the ladder to become an upper-middle income country and then a more advanced country.

What you need is now to be able to provide jobs to all these people sitting on the farm with secondary education, pull them off the farm into low-scale manufacturing, and as China is exiting from these sectors, India has not been able to take advantage of them, except in 2, 3 areas, gems and precious stones and maybe a little bit in ceramics and somewhat in iron and steel.

But China gave up almost $150 billion worth of exports since the global financial crisis. And India is not the big winner in that. Other countries like -- and even our neighbor, Bangladesh has taken advantage of that, especially in apparel.

So India has now tried to fix that problem by doing 2 things. One is a scheme called the PLI scheme. It's a production-linked incentive scheme to give some subsidy in a way to those producers who will invest in India in 12 or 13 prescribed sectors. Some of which overlap with where China is exiting from. And it has also started to do something, which I think -- which we think is very damaging, which is to increase tariffs, which is to restrict imports into India.

The restriction of imports is very dangerous because they've also restricted intermediate products, products that are used in process of production, which means you have made production in India even more costly than before. So I think they're playing around. They're trying to figure out what to do, how to reindustrialize.

At the moment, we have to see how the scheme works, this PLI scheme, which is targeted, of course, at things also which have been hit by the supply chain due to COVID and now by the Russian war like semiconductors. So India will want to become a big manufacturer of semiconductors. But that's not going to create lots of jobs. What we need also to focus on is labor-intensive, low-cost manufacturing, which is what we need to pull all these people out of the farm.

Nathan Hunt: Ajay, you mentioned in the book that if India reaches an average yearly per capita income level of $12,500 by 2047, which is roughly where Romania is today, with a projected population of 1.6 billion people, India will be a $20 trillion economy. As you project your mind forward and imagine India as a new global economic superpower, what is your hope for what growth and society would look like?

Ajay Chhibber: We have this quote from one of the famous industrialists in India, the Tata. We have a quote from Tata, which says, "I don't want India to be an economic superpower. I want it to be a happy country." And this is the most successful business house in India saying that, which is quite unusual for business people to speak like that. But anyway, that -- so that's amazing.

So we argue in our book as we -- as you said, the numbers are quite obvious that India, with a population of 1.6 billion, so $12,500 is today is the cutoff between middle income and what we call the higher income or an advanced country. And that's roughly where Romania is today or Mauritius, I think, is the other country. And so we say if we get there, $20 trillion, you will be easily the third largest economy in the world, right? I mean there'll be China, there'll be U.S. and there'll be India. And Japan and Germany and all will be far behind.

But even if we reach less than that, I mean, even if we reach Mexico's level today or Brazil's level today, we'll still be an economic superpower. But what we argue is that if we have all the inequalities that they have, we will not be a happy country in the words of Mr. Tata. And India has become very unequal.

And more than that, it has also become very divisive because there's this majoritarianism. And the democracies, India prides itself on being a poor country but still a democracy. But all the institutions are getting eroded as well, and India's ranking on democracy indicators is declining. So what we argue is that we must preserve those aspects of the good things.

And some people say, India lags behind because it's a democracy and an authoritarian state can do a lot more. And we disagree. We say that's the good thing we have, the democratic system that we have, the rule of law, the lack of arbitrariness that you can see in authoritarian countries. So we must preserve that as we progress, but we must also find ways to reduce inequality.

And one of the ways to reduce inequality would be very labor-intensive manufacturing. So some of it can come from handouts and subsidies. But some of it must come internally from the economic system itself by creating the kind of middle class and workforce that have adequately paying jobs, and that's what we argue.

Nathan Hunt: Several times in the book, you referenced the Nehru Independence Day speech that references India's Tryst with Destiny. When you look forward towards 2047, the 100th anniversary of Indian independence, how confident are you in India's ability to realize that destiny?

Ajay Chhibber: Well, I think it was a great speech that the Prime Minister made. And the word tryst is also interesting because you can imagine, the world had just come out of a world war. India had just seen a bloody partition between the creation of Pakistan, where almost 3 million people had been killed, a huge devastation.

The British had left India with 85% of the population below the poverty line. So people think the British left India great things. But actually, as we document in our book, the country was in a devastated state when he made that speech, the Tryst with Destiny. But the word tryst, we argue, is like a dalliance. It's a flirtation with destiny. We play on that in our book and say, we got to consummate this destiny 100 years later. So we look at the last 75 years and say, a course correction is badly needed if we want to consummate this destiny, and we lay out what that course correction needs to be.

We also argue that with climate change, we have to go on a path which no other country has gone because the Western world was developed in a very energy-intensive CO2-emitting manner. So is China. China is also a very heavy CO2 emitter, the largest in the world now and very polluting in the way it has developed. But India has only put down 20% of the infrastructure that India will need by 2047. Whether you look at power plants, whether you look at roads, whether you look at buildings, cities, et cetera, we have only put down 20% of the infrastructure which India will need. So we have 80% to go. And we have to do it now in a manner that is much less carbon-intensive and CO2-intensive. But we don't have the technologies. We don't have the resources. So we need some help.

We also have to go down a path which nobody has followed before. There's no trodden path to go on because if we followed the U.S. path or the Western path or the Chinese path, we would become yet another point in the globe, which would create even more pollution with the largest population in the world and more CO2 emissions. So we have to go in a much lighter CO2 footprint than before. But that gives you great opportunities also, this green growth.

Nathan Hunt: The book, once again, is Unshackling India: Hard Truths and Clear Choices for Economic Revival. Dr. Ajay Chhibber, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Ajay Chhibber: Thank you, Nathan. It was a pleasure.

Nathan Hunt: The Essential Podcast is produced by Kurt Burger with assistance from Kyle May and Camille McManus. At S&P Global, we accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments, and individuals to make decisions with conviction. From the majestic heights of 55 Water Street in Manhattan, I am Nathan Hunt. Thank you for listening.