1Articles and Speeches SFC BULLETIN April-June 2001 First of all, I would like to thank Tunku Abdul

invitation to speak this evening before such a distinguished audience. It is a great honour to have the opportunity to speak on this occasion, marked in tribute to the Nation's founding father, Tunku Abdul Rahman. I find myself awed by this invitation since previous speakers included such distinguished persons as a former head of state, a Prime Minister and two Ministers of Finance. My modest contribution to this evening is that I wish to share with you my own observations as an institutionalist, someone who has been involved in the intriguing question of institution-building within nationhood. I have been privileged to learn under the best central bank governor of the developing world, the late Tun Ismail Mohd Ali. I worked within the Malaysian bureaucracy during its exciting post-Merdeka years, and then worked in the World Bank studying the lessons of bank failure in the 1980s. From the vantage point of Hong Kong, I learnt quite a lot about the functioning of free markets, the stresses of large capital flows and the importance of law, regulation and institution-building in the role of markets. The value of information and knowledge is in the sharing. For what they are worth, I dedicate these thoughts to all those who care about nation-buil ding, such a s thos e who fought for independence like the late Tunku Abdul Rahman, and who are still in the difficult task of taking development forward in an uncertain Millenium. This evening, I wish to say a few words about a subject that used to be called management, and is now called governance. I want to focus on the utterly boring subje ct of "transp arency, accountability and governance " in Asian markets in the context of a changing world, and its relevance to the future of Asia in the 21s