This is a good addition or complement to what we were talking about. We are huge believers in one of the values that official development assistance—and probably only official development assistance—can do; that is, to help strengthen the enabling environment for businesses to grow, whether it's small businesses or it's large businesses.
I'll give you an example. I'll also give you an example about the small business, because President Obama believes in all economic growth, not just small businesses; it's just that as an aid agency we care about broad businesses.
In Argentina, which is not exactly a developing country, it takes four years to get a business licence. I'm a serial entrepreneur. In Seattle it takes me one and a half hours to get a business licence, and the reason it takes me one and a half hours is because I have to drive from Seattle to Olympia. If I lived in Olympia, it would take me about ten minutes.
What happens is that you have a number of things, whether it's property rights or it's ease of doing business. Then the businesses start in the informal economy and they never get into the formal economy and the country is sort of mired in this economic doldrum. We believe that one of the key roles we play is helping on the enabling environment for entrepreneurship, for public-private ownership.
We also think that technology can play a huge role. I'm a technologist by background, so I understand this may be particularly interesting to me. I'm not so sure that in our lifetime we're going to see property rights completely litigated around the world, but there is a new move to put property rights in the cloud so everybody declares where the boundaries are.
I talked earlier today with a member of the committee about a project where people are mapping their neighbourhoods so we can get maps. This is a belief that if you could declare property rights in the cloud, over time we could create that much faster than governments could. We think that technology, as well as the enabling environment for this, is really key.
One last thing on large business versus small business is that I'm from Seattle, and Boeing is a major employer there. I like to think of global businesses—Canada has so many world-class global businesses—which often provide the anchor tenant in these developing economies. We're proud of Boeing, but we have hundreds of suppliers to Boeing that are small businesses operating in Washington State. We believe that a number of the global companies, whether they come from Canada or Europe or the U.S., can create the kind of anchor tenant that you have in a mall in these countries to provide huge opportunities for small businesses locally.