Themes & Topics

The EMF's first meeting was held at Templeton College, Oxford on 9-11 December 2005. Some 60 participants from 25 countries and five continents included former heads of state, current and former ministers of finance and central bank governors, and corporate chief executives.

Gautam Kaji, Chairman of the Centennial Group commented at the opening of the Forum: "The fact we were able to assemble all these people and get them to devote their time to this event is a testament to the merit of the initiative."

Noting that the Inaugural Forum had chosen to focus on unresolved issues associated with private capital flows to and from emerging market countries the Prime Minister of Great Britain the Rt. Hon Tony Blair wrote in a letter of welcome: "The issues you are discussing this weekend are of course of critical importance. I wish you every success as you use your collective expertise and experience to agree practical steps to help meet some of the major challenges facing the world's emerging economies."

The framework for the inaugural forum encompassed three themes:

• How national policy makers can exploit synergies from policies on capital flows, domestic capital markets, exchange rates and trade.
• How world regions can learn from each other and in particular, how the rest of the world can learn from Asian experience.
• How emerging market countries can balance their needs for capital with the resolution of social issues.

Within the framework of these themes the forum addressed issues related with:

• Direct Foreign Investment in emerging market countries by OECD countries and by other emerging market countries, the potential benefits of which to investing companies and host economies are not well understood.
• Portfolio Investment Flows that have recently been growing in scale but are still regarded with suspicion by some people in emerging market economies and raise questions about increasing their scale and reducing their year to year volatility.
• Outsourcing and Off-shoring of production and services in emerging market countries which entail movements of jobs and revenues from OECD to emerging market economies and are the subject of fierce political and economic debate in both groups of countries.