Programs must be tailored to the current skills required by local employers. Placement needs to be a priority, and should be considered even before people are accepted into these programs. Workers need to know that a job will be waiting for them after they go through the effort of building their specific skills. There are several examples from Rochester and other parts of the region that illustrate the potential for this approach to workforce development. In fact, Rochester has a long history of involvement in workforce development. In 1885, a group of Rochester businessmen founded the Mechanics Institute. The Institute’s mission was to establish free evening schools in the city for instruction in mechanical drawing and other technical skills important for industrial firms. Funding was provided by contributions from Rochester residents. The first class drew more than 400 students. This endeavor evolved over time into RIT. Strong partnerships between Rochester’s higher education institutions and local businesses continue to this day. For example, RIT’s Center for Bioscience Education and Training provides local businesses and associations with workforce training tailor-made to specific organizational needs. And at RIT’s newly created Knorr-Bremse Mechatronics Laboratory, the university works with the companies that employ its graduates to make sure they have the technical skills they need to be successful. At the University of Rochester, the Center for Emerging & Innovative Sciences as well as the Center for Medical Technology partner with local companies to leverage the cutting edge research being done by the university’s faculty and students.

With lessons learned from previous episodes and improvements over the years, emerging market economies on average are better positioned to withstand financial turbulences, both now and in the future, than in the past. They embarked on extensive structural reforms aimed at overhauling financial regulatory and supervisory systems, strengthening public finances and fiscal discipline, granting central banks independence and adopting flexible exchange rate systems. These reforms enabled them to implement more prudent and countercyclical policies. EM economies supported their post crisis reforms by accumulating adequate foreign exchange reserves as an alternative to the IMF provided financing, which carries strong conditionality, as well as by further deepening and broadening their domestic financial markets. As a result, stock and flow balances, policy frameworks, and levels of economic confidence and market development in EM economies have strengthened substantially and radically. Deepened and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  broadened domestic financial markets have alleviated the so called original sin problem. It is fair to say that they now look strong enough to render the adverse effects of external financial shocks manageable. Given the current IMS what EM economies can most rely on are their prudent policies, better policy frameworks, foreign exchange reserves and flexible exchange rates. As for the IMS related questions of the session namely • “Do floating exchange rates along with largely unrestricted capital flows play their role of shock absorber? Are we going to witness a return of currency crises of the 1990’s?