finally, i would like to leave you with these words from steve jobs as food for thought, “ i am convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance. ” let ’ s persevere, and make namibia a truly competitive, global player. ladies and gentlemen, it is therefore a great honour for me to present the awards to the winners of the business idea competition. i thank you! bis central bankers ’ speeches

identified would hold up to empirical assessment, the crucial questions would remain as to how big or how integrated financial firms need to be in order to attain these economies. the relative dearth of work that would help answer these questions can be attributed to a number of factors. 5 first, the sample size of the very largest firms is obviously small, limiting the ability of researchers to derive precise statistical relationships between cost, on the one hand, and firm scale and scope, on the other. this problem of sample size is exacerbated by the fact that there has been tremendous growth in the size, complexity, and concentration of the financial sector over the past 15 years or so. second, there are serious limitations on the data available to researchers, and thus any useful discussion of an analytic agenda for research on financial industry structure must include an agenda for overcoming proprietary and other constraints on developing appropriate data sources. for example, data on the use of a variety of financial services by specific customers is generally unavailable to researchers. third, even if appropriate data become available, it may be quite difficult to isolate costs for particular banking activities, given the number of products and activities offered by even moderately complex financial institutions. two additional considerations bear mentioning in mapping out the issues associated with scale and scope economies in the financial sector. the first is a well - known qualification to the proposition that scale and scope can be beneficial – the possibility that firms may grow so large as to face diseconomies of scope and scale. although existing empirical work is again scant, one often hears the suggestion that complexity and agency problems may lead to diseconomies for financial firms under certain circumstances, a proposition that should be considered alongside the hypotheses for positive scale and scope effects. 6 the second point is that the size and composition of a financial firm ’ s balance sheet play a complicated role in producing economies of scope and scale. to be sure, a large trading book or custody business might produce social benefits by allowing a bank to match or clear both sides of transactions at lower cost. and large balance sheets would appear to enable banks to diversify or hedge their positions and to access a variety of funding sources, thereby reducing their cost of capital. but conventional io - type analysis, which would tend to interpret lower funding costs as evidence of scale economies, is potentially misleading. in essence, a more sophisticated product to its clients, which may also choose such a firm in part because they can be assured they have retained the most