set up covering attestation, widening investment flexibility, and making the ma calibration more risk sensitive through the use of credit rating ‘ notching ’ [ 17 ]. i would like to thank all those who have participated in the over two dozen meetings so far, for the broad range of information they have provided, for the lively discussions and particularly for generating constructive options. it is important that we are able to discuss and understand the technical issues, and such open dialogue will improve the policy - making process. the subject expert groups have helped reduce the risk of there being surprises to insurers when we consult on proposals later this year. but we are not front - running the consultation, which will be public and open to all respondents, industry and wider stakeholders in the sector. building on this approach, next month we will be convening a similar group to think through detailed principles for the stress testing regime, and we are also putting together a group of expert users of insurers ’ disclosures which i ’ ll come back to shortly. the supervisory measures set out by hmt are not independent of the wider operating environment. rather there will be a strong interplay between market forces, firm behaviour, regulatory requirements, and the increasingly important role that disclosures will play to promote market discipline. this interplay will become even more relevant as the bpa market continues to grow and mature. indeed, market discipline via greater disclosure has also been brought to the fore by the solvency uk package. the disclosures required on stress testing together with the publication of individual firm results will provide a transparent independent measure of firm resilience to the markets. this will benefit all stakeholders including both advisors to db schemes and scheme trustees when seeking to transfer liabilities to the insurance sector. for insurers, greater transparency could contribute to reducing the cost of capital, opening more opportunities for firms with stronger financial positions to benefit from the expanding market. in the banking sector, published stress tests for our largest banking groups have delivered greater transparency, better diagnosis of where weaknesses are, and a much deeper ability to compare the strengths and weaknesses of different business models, allowing counterparties and capital providers to make better informed judgements about counterparty risk when contemplating a transaction [ 18 ]. hence there should be a strong built - in incentive within the system to do disclosure well and for us as regulators this would be a sign of a market functioning efficiently. that ’ s why i ’ m keen we engage with current and prospective users

has been of lower intensity. as i have documented elsewhere, unlike the east and south east asian countries, during the period of accelerating economic growth in india in the 1980s and 1990s, although industrial growth was high, manufacturing employment and urban population growth decelerated ( mohan and dasgupta, 2004 ). despite being a peninsula with a long coastline, there was no attempt to concentrate economic activity in the coastal areas : in fact growth in the old concentrations of calcutta, madras and bombay ( now kolkata, chennai and mumbai ) slowed down in the 1980s and 1990s while, interestingly, inland cities such as bangalore, hyderabad and delhi prospered. there have perhaps been few such examples of inland cities growing faster than coastal cities and regions. the fulcrum of global economic growth has now shifted to the large economies of china and india. in the case of china, with the initial growth impetus having come from the coastal zones, the emphasis is now shifting to inland cities. although economic growth has perhaps now got more concentrated regionally in india, there is still little evidence of strategy shifting to the promotion of greater urban concentrations. so the export led, coastal urban growth that has been characteristic of asian urban growth in the last 50 years can now be expected to move inland in the large land masses of india and china. such a pattern of urban growth will probably necessitate higher degree of infrastructure investment – both intra - urban and inter - urban in order to ensure international economic competitiveness. iv. emerging issues for the next wave of asian urbanisation by all accounts asia has coped well with the unprecedented magnitude of urbanisation that it has experienced in the last 50 years. the asian habitat pattern has been transformed over a historically brief time period : an asian is now almost as likely to be found living in an urban area as in a rural area, with a high probability of being found in a city of significant size. because of the particular economic strategy followed over much of asia, its cities are engines of economic activity exhibiting ever increasing productivity gains and prosperity. this has enabled asia to finance its urban infrastructure investment without excessive international borrowing. in fact, the financial surplus that the region is now exporting to other regions of the world has come as a bit of a surprise, given its own resource needs for continuing investment, particularly in the infrastructure needed for further urbanisation. although the rate of urbanisation will, no doubt, slow down overall, the magnitude of urban population accretion in asia over the next 30