This, in turn, will mobilise more public and private sector investments through co-financing and greatly enhance the support available to developing members. We are also glad to see that governments are working together and making significant steps in promoting infrastructure development. They include, for instance, the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the G20 Global Infrastructure Initiative and Global Infrastructure Hub. These initiatives underscore the commitment by governments from within and outside the region to give infrastructure investment a fresh impetus. By bringing new funds and new ways for development assistance, they will serve to complement the existing efforts by ADB in meeting the region’s vast development needs. As highlighted in the theme for this year’s Annual Meeting, fostering cooperation among development partners – existing and new, private and public, national and multilateral – is crucial for reaping synergy and maximising development impact. ADB has a hailed tradition of cooperating with other partners in delivering results. By working together, we believe that ADB and its partners in the region will go a long way in mobilising funds and building the capacity of developing members in delivering high-quality infrastructure projects. As an international financial and business centre in the region, Hong Kong, China has an active role to play in supporting and promoting infrastructure investment in Asia. Corporates, as well as national and multilateral development agencies including ADB and IFC, have been making extensive use of Hong Kong, China’s deep financial markets in raising funds for infrastructure projects.

These would include vulnerabilities resulting from global imbalances, growth prospects, developments in housing markets, creditworthiness of borrowers, to name a few. The monitoring involves processing large amounts of (often disparate) information of a statistical nature and is based on market sources. In addition, continuous market intelligence efforts are essential for effective risk monitoring and the early detection of new financial instruments, practices or business strategies which could create vulnerabilities and risks in financial markets. In the case of the Risk Board, market intelligence will be complemented by what could be called “institutional intelligence” and “policy intelligence”, given the qualitative information and expert knowledge available to central banks and supervisory authorities represented in the ESRB. The Board’s independent, impartial status could prove to be invaluable in the surveillance and identification of risks viewed as material. Risk monitoring is facilitated by a large set of tools, including contemporaneous financial stability indicators and forward-looking early warning indicators and models. These tools need to be regularly revised and updated in order to capture innovation in financial markets, fuelled by new products and business models. Macro-prudential indicators comprise a vast set of indicators – on the macroeconomic environment, financial markets, financial institutions and financial system infrastructures. More specifically, they include macroeconomic aspects, financing conditions, monetary conditions, asset valuations, risk appetite, market liquidity, funding liquidity, credit risk, financial strength of institutions, and others.