MR BROWN: Hi, everyone. I just want to introduce our Assistant Secretary in our Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs Manisha Singh. She is here today to talk about some of the recent work she’s done and to talk about priorities within the bureau. This is a sampling of our esteemed bullpen.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SINGH: Who let him in? (Laughter.)

QUESTION: This guy? You know this guy?

MR BROWN: She’s going to give us remarks up front and we’ll treat that on the record. So whenever you’re ready.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SINGH: Well, thank you so much. I very much appreciate the opportunity to sit down with you, and I want to thank my great staff who helps me prepare for generally everything that comes up, and they’ve done a wonderful job in just generally setting me up to talk to the press, all of my speaking engagements, everything that I do. I have to start by saying that the economic Bureau really does have probably the best staff in the building, and I say that regardless of whether I’m there or not. People say that – think that I’m saying that because I’m head of the bureau. Even after I leave, this will be one of the most talented, dynamic groups of people that the State Department has.

So we are celebrating my two-year anniversary as the first confirmed woman to head the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, so it’s a momentous occasion. And it is literally today that I started in the bureau two years ago. It was two years ago. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the staff of my executive office stayed late, and I was trying to tell them that they could just set me up on the computer and take off to have a nice Thanksgiving with their families, and they insisted on staying. They said, “No, you’re coming in as the new head of our bureau. We want to make sure that you have everything.” So again, just a great staff.

One of the things that I thought about as the first woman to head this bureau is what do I want to broadly with the bureau, what – are there specific things that I want to focus on from an economic perspective? And I always tell everybody I’m not necessarily a gender or a women’s coordinator type of role. I’ve never played those roles. I’ve always been an economic policy maker. I’ve worked on economic and trade issues for over 20 years in this town.

And so I wanted to focus on how we could increase women’s roles in the economy, and we started looking at papers, statistics. Everybody from the World Bank to McKinsey have done reports saying that the lack of women’s full participation in the labor force leads to declines in the overall economic statistics. In fact, McKinsey’s report has said that if we can increase women’s participation in the global economy to a full extent, we could increase worldwide GDP of about $28 trillion. And I’ll double-check that number, but it was a – it was 28 – Christine’s nodding yes. It’s a significant number.

And so one of my thoughts was, “What can we do to achieve more concrete results in the area of women’s economic empowerment?” There are a great deal of networking forums. How do we promote women in the workplace or the famous work-life balance? And that’s – that conversation has been had for many decades, so I didn’t want to have the same conversation yet again. So my team and I sat down and thought, “Well, what can we do to come up with actual programs that will promote women’s entrepreneurship, women’s abilities to start their own companies?”

The result was a program called POWER – Providing Opportunities for Women’s Economic Rise – and there were two things that were very important to me in POWER: one, that there be a U.S. nexus or a U.S. component to it, because as the economic bureau, our mission is the economic workforce, it’s American prosperity. We are one of the bureaus in the department that I think is very closely tied to the American economy, as opposed to a lot of the regional bureaus are the relationship managers for Europe or Asia. But as the economic bureau, we see our mission as how do we promote American companies, American workers overseas. So the first part was a U.S. nexus.

And the second part was, as I was indicating before, an actionable result. Are there women-owned enterprises that are having difficulties getting funded? How can we be better connect them to venture capital firms or private equity firms, people that might actually be willing to fund their enterprises? This was another statistic that really surprised me. I was reading that women-owned enterprises get funded at – they get only 2 to 3 percent of the venture capital that was out there. And when I first saw that, I thought, how can that statistic be correct? And I started looking in different places and I saw it repeated, and so I thought, wow, this is significant that women have these great ideas for startup companies, yet they only get 2 to 3 percent of the funding that’s out there.

And so as part of our POWER program, we’re working with the private sector. We have a great partnership with MasterCard. They have programs to fund SMEs generally, and more specifically, women-owned enterprises. So they function as sort of an incubator. They have an internal incubator within MasterCard that helps identify and affirmatively fund small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which happen to be women-owned enterprises. And the thing that I appreciate about a company like MasterCard is it goes up to the CEO level. I’ve gotten to know Ajay Banga, who is the CEO of MasterCard, and for him it’s a priority. It’s not a niche area. It’s not a gender advisory section in MasterCard that does the work. For him, he has said that this is a business priority. And it fits, therefore, squarely within the economic bureau. As I mentioned, we don’t do gender work, we do business work, and we feel that this is an initiative which will benefit the American economy. It will benefit the global economy overall.

So that was one of the important themes that I thought about being the first woman confirmed to head the bureau. And quite frankly, when I started doing the research into my predecessors, it surprised me. I knew a few of my immediate predecessors. I know Charley Rivkin and Dan Sullivan. You probably know these names. But I went back, all the way back to Dean Acheson, who was the first assistant secretary for economic affairs, and there were no women, which really did surprise me. And so one of my thoughts was, I don’t want to ever take it for granted that women have the same opportunities that I do. I’m lucky. I feel very honored to be in this position, but not everybody does, so I’m never going to take that for granted, and I wanted to make that a central part of my role as head of this bureau.

One of the other themes that I thought about also related to how can we help the American worker and American company remain competitive, and that was in the area of technology. So I thought there’s so much going on out there in American innovation right now that we as U.S. policymakers don’t necessarily understand fully. This includes artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, things that various agencies are focused on, and we as the State Department really need to understand the innovation economy, because it is certainly not limited to the U.S. market, it is borderless.

There is innovation happening all over the world, and there’s also regulation happening all over the world. We hear from our companies all the time about how the EU or whether it’s India or any other of the market economies in the world, they have challenges with what they can do in terms of their innovation because the EU will very heavily regulate certain types of business activities. And we all know the stories on our technology companies and what they’re going through right now. So I’ve made it a point to include in my conversations with foreign government officials the fact that we hope that in terms of their regulations, that they’re not specifically targeting American innovation.

And in an effort to better educate the bureau, my team has done innovation roundtables, which we hold one a month, and we’ve had them on autonomous vehicles, on artificial intelligence, on blockchain. We just did one in New York on cloud and what does the cloud mean. And how is it that we are going to effectively understand these new technologies so that we can help American companies remain competitive and get ahead of any of the developments that we need to from an economic but also a security perspective because, of course, the State Department is a national security agency. So we need to understand for our own purposes how is it that our cyber systems are safe from foreign interference.

So innovation is another theme that I’ve tried to champion within the bureau, moving economic diplomacy forward from traditional economic factors, retail manufacturing, which are all still very important to us, but also moving into the future.

And of course geographically there’s a few areas we’ve focused on. We have very much looked at the Indo-Pacific region as a part of the President’s national security strategy, of course, that we are focused on. And the key point there is we’re trying to provide an alternative to the Chinese model. I still get asked questions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, about TPP, and is there a chance and are we possibly going to re-enter that. Well, the answer is I think we’ve been so focused on the TPP that we don’t see that there are many other bridges and avenues to engage in the Indo-Pacific region, and our Indo-Pacific strategy is one of those.

Here at the department, of course, we had three pillars on our Indo-Pacific strategy, which were infrastructure, energy, and cyber security. And infrastructure and cyber security fall under the economic bureau. The energy pillar of course falls under ENR with Frank Fannon.

So we’ve engaged extensively with the major economies, our partners in the Indo-Pacific region. In the last year, I held a summit with the Japanese ambassador here in town and with the Australian ambassador here in town to determine how U.S. companies could partner with the private sector in Japan, with the private sector in Australia so that even if we couldn’t do it alone, we can find partners in the region to help fulfill the infrastructure needs, the cyber security needs, just the general development needs of the Southeast Asian nations, of the Pacific island nations. So we thought opportunity here is for U.S. companies. For them it’s a win-win, because the U.S. Government wants to provide them with platforms to engage in business in the region, and our policy gain here is that we tell countries if you do business with American companies, you know what you’re getting.

Our companies operate based on the rule of law. They are transparent. They care about the environments in which they operate. They’re not trying to infringe upon your national sovereignty. Every time we see a deal where the Chinese Government goes in to help – and I put “help” in quotes – with a port facility in a foreign country, we always advise them, look, you might want to think about what you’re giving up here. The – I always say the choice is not between America and China, the choice is between China and your own sovereignty. Our private sector is coming in to do basis [1] on commercial terms, and so we think that this is a better alternative for you to look at.

So I know you all are probably well versed in how this administration is dealing with China, certainly when it comes to intellectual property and technology transfer. And this also relates to my innovation roundtables where we want to keep American companies at the forefront of global innovation, because we’ve seen over the last couple of decades where the Chinese transfer of intellectual property is not just an economic issue anymore, it is a national security issue. It is something that we should take very seriously as a national security agency. So that’s another broader theme for the economic bureau that I have emphasized.

And I think the – some of the other things that we’re doing you’re also familiar with, which include the travel and tourism portfolio is one that is not as well known, but it was one that I was very excited about, because the economic bureau of course negotiates Open Skies agreements. And we have about 120 Open Skies agreements with countries around the world. And we literally open the skies for U.S. travelers, for U.S. business, contributes billions of dollars to the American economy. And our transportation team has had many successes this year. We were able to gain increased slot access at Haneda Airport in Japan, which our airlines were very happy about because they didn’t originally have this slot access. It helps them take more passengers. This is for passenger aircraft. Our cargo carriers also benefit from Open Skies agreements, which includes FedEx, UPS. So across the board we’ve had many successes.

We have a U.S.-UK Open Skies agreement in place for when – if and when Brexit ever happens. That’s a matter I always say it’s not within our purview, but we are watching the collateral consequences for us upon Brexit. And so we have a U.S.-UK Open Skies agreement ready to go, which has assured our carriers that they will have continuity of service, there will be no disruptions.

So travel and transportation is a very important part of the EB portfolio that I think doesn’t get talked about as much, but it provides so many benefits to the U.S. economy. And, of course, there are our bread and butter issues of trade, sanctions, foreign direction investment, cyber security; the OECD falls under EB as well.

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[1] business