I’m excited to be part of a panel on developing economies this week at the 20th annual Milken Global Conference. The gathering, bringing together 3,500 senior leaders from 50 countries, opened Sunday in Los Angeles.
Among many topics, our panel will explore how a young partnership between the State of California and Israel is sharing ideas and expertise in water technology as well as energy storage, transportation and agriculture.
Why California and Israel? Many reasons, but water certainly tops the agenda. Israel’s private sector in recent decades has created some of the world’s most innovative, effective approaches in water technology. Despite heavy rains this year and a respite from five-year drought, California urgently needs to invest in sustainable, secure water systems.
It is not just California, of course. Within the next ten years, as world population reaches eight billion, water shortages may threaten two of every three persons on earth. Primarily in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. That’s a scenario for catastrophe and conflict if we do not find solutions. Israel has proven solutions.
As the American Spectator explained last week, Israel provides abundant clean and drinkable water to its people while exporting surplus supplies across its eastern border to Jordan and to the Palestinian Authority: “Israel not only has more than enough water for the purposes of daily consumption, but also to supply its multi-billion-dollar agricultural export economy.”
All this within a geography that is 60 percent desert and not much larger than New Jersey (the fifth largest U.S. state), and a population that has grown to eight million from 600,000 when Israel became a nation in 1948.
With solutions comes opportunity. As the Brooking analysis we highlighted recently underscored, emerging and frontier markets now promise more economic growth and an expanding middle class than advanced economies.
Our Milken Conference panel, highlighting opportunities in global development, is open to conference participants. We’ll begin at 2:45 p.m. Wednesday, May 3 at the Beverly Hilton, in the Whittier Room. Title: “Start Up Nations: Creating Laboratories for Developing Economies.” If you are signed up, please join us!
Our moderator will be Glenn Yago. Glenn is senior director of the Milken Innovation Center at the Jerusalem Institute, a dazzling public-private effort that has brought Israel’s proven technologies to the forefront of global development, helping to meet growing demand for food, energy, water, health, and economic security,
I’m honored to be on the panel with Glenn and these other experts:
- Clare Akamanzi, chief executive officer, Rwanda Development Board
- Jeremy Bentley, head of financial institutions and public sector, Citi Israel, and
- Eli Groner, director general in Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office.
Many Milken Innovation Center achievements were stoked by discussions at the Milken Global Conference over the past two decades, and by intensive, long-term efforts of public and private sector participants in Israel.
The center’s successes are truly impressive. They include, but are not limited to, smart mobility and Israel’s national fuel substitutes initiative, financing infrastructure through revenue bonds, new programs in financial inclusion, private-equity investments in biomedical research, and the origins of Israel’s first sovereign wealth fund.
We’ll cover these and many other topics, such as: the California-Israel Global Innovation Project agreed by Gov. Jerry Brown and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu three years ago that is targeting new ventures in water and green technologies, and the recently announced tie-up between the University of California and Israel on financing scalable technology from R&D to commercialization.
Drawing from lessons in my book, An Accident of Geography: Compassion, Innovation, and the Fight Against Poverty, I’ll weigh in on what works in financing scalable technologies. Barnes & Noble will have copies of the book available for sale at the conference.
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To learn more about this week’s Milken Global Conference, please go to: http://www.milkeninstitute.org/events/conferences/global-conference/2017/
Richard Blum
Thomas C. Hayes
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