Thank you.
Picking up on the dilemma the chair mentioned, we have a bit of a dilemma in that we recognize that some developing countries have relatively low per-capita incomes and slow economic growth rates and relatively high poverty rates, so it leads to a question about what magnitude and types of benefits would accrue to Canada from enhanced trade and investment with them.
On the other hand, in a speech to the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce in April 2012, the previous governor of the Bank of Canada indicated that Canada's share of world exports has been declining since the turn of the millennium. He said that:
Since 2000, Canada’s export growth was almost 5 percentage points slower than global export growth on average per year. Our share of the world export market fell from about 4.5 per cent to about 2.5 per cent and our manufactured-goods export market share has been cut in half.
According to him, Canada's deteriorating export performance could be explained by the concentration of Canada's exports in slow-growing advanced economies, rather than in the faster-growing emerging markets, and to a lesser extent, by some competitiveness challenges, and at the time the high relative value of the dollar. I'm going to get to you, Mr. Curtis, on that in a moment.
What advice would you give the committee on where we should focus? Should we focus on the faster-growing developing countries that have the challenges or should we focus on the advanced economies that have slower growth but are larger markets?