. one of my roles is to inspire everyone in our organisations to walk the talk on corporate ethics and values. these values must filter down to all aspects of the organisations. and we must align our system to reward those that uphold these values. we have therefore integrated the organisational values with our formal recognition and reward system in the bank. alignment to these values now determines the rewards that one will be awarded at year end. i have spoken many times in the productivity awareness week organized by productivity authority of fiji ’ s ( tpaf ). in one of my speeches i emphasised that “ productivity is not an end in itself. it is simply a means to an end. and what is the end? that end must be prosperity at the individual and household levels ”. being productive means working smarter and nor necessarily harder. it means producing more from the same resources and even producing more from less. in fiji our resources are limited. the biggest resources that we have are land and our people. how productive are we using these resources? i am sure that you will agree with me that we could do a whole lot more in this area. no wonder our long term economic growth rate is a meager 2. 5 percent – not enough to absorb our school leavers! at the bank, we have tried to take a macroeconomic measure of productivity by taking the total output produced by each worker. this is a very aggregative and crude measurement. it shows that productivity has grown by an average of around 1 percent since 1996. this is very low. some asian countries are achieving over four percent growth. my crude estimate says that the multiplier effect of a rise in the growth rate of productivity on economic growth is at least 2. this means that if we raise productivity growth from 1 to say 2 percent every year, we can raise our average economic growth rate from 2. 5 to 4. 5 percent. and that makes a lot difference in jobs, in incomes and in poverty alleviation. customer service let me say a few words on the second part of your theme that of customer service. when we talk about customers, we are really talking about you and me. we may be entrepreneurs or workers but we are all customers. and here the best motto is to do to others what you want done to you. firstly, we all want to be understood. communication and feedback are therefore important. listening is the best way of communication and believe you me listening is not an easy thing to do.

everybody may bring to the table what they can contribute, what they expect from others, but also possible doubts about feasibility. a special focus should be on policy coordination amongst the key players and maybe our discussants even want to present concrete steps forward. i am looking forward to an open discussion without taboos. of course, the challenge of tackling climate change has a global dimension – individual countries, like austria, or even the eu are too small to make an important difference. we have three options to prevent free riders from offsetting national efforts. first, a carbon border adjustment mechanism that comes close to an import tax ; second, a carbon - pricing club as proposed by nobel laureate bill nordhaus, which incentivizes countries to join in order to avoid their exports being taxed ; and finally, the imf proposes a globally agreed carbon price floor that differentiates between countries by their level of income. you will not be surprised to hear from somebody who has devoted a good part of his life to multilateralism that i would prefer the last option. central banks must worry about the costs and the impact on price stability. in a brilliant recent policy brief, jean pisani - ferry1 made clear that climate policy is macroeconomic policy, and its fiscal and inflationary implications will be serious. according to estimates, global investment costs would correspond to roughly 2 % of gdp per year, implying a climate policy shock comparable to the oil shock in the 1970s. however, pisani - ferry also lists mitigating factors : co2 prices are likely to be introduced not globally at the same time, but more gradually, and they will be far from unexpected and, ultimately, trigger technological advances, also because the world economy has become more flexible. of course, these costs must be contrasted with the benefits, albeit over a different time horizon. the benefits of climate risk mitigation materialize later while the costs occur now in terms of expenditure, inflation and public debt, even if green finance initiatives attempt to mobilize private capital for climate investment. unfortunately, government debt levels are already high due to crisis support and pension commitments, which raises the question of who should and could pay the bill? many argue that the cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action – yet the cost of transition is the devil we ought to know. to my knowledge, austria has the second most ambitious climate goal of all eu countries – namely, achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. while boldness is welcome