KCG Fellows Attended the Global Solutions Summit in Berlin

This year’s Global Solution Summit took place on May 28 and 29, 2018 in Berlin. The annual summit is organized by the global think tank network “Global Solutions Initiative” that is chaired by Prof. Dennis J. Snower Ph.D., President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The summit brought together international leaders from academia, business, politics and the civil society with the aim of discussing pressing global problems and providing policy recommendations to decision-makers in the G20 and beyond. Many high-level decision-makers and leaders such as the German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureates Prof. George Akerlof, Ph.D. and Prof. Edmund S. Phelps, Ph.D. etc. participated in the summit as distinguished speakers.

The leading theme of this year’s summit, “Recoupling Social and Economic Progress”, aimed at addressing global challenges that arise in times of increasing fragmentation of societies and polities. Speakers and participants of the summit discussed with each other about potential solutions for some selected key global challenges, incl. the future of work, infrastructure for sustainable development, food security, international trade (conflicts), digitalization, and global governance etc.

The importance of multilateralism and international trade were emphasized in several sessions and the implications of emerging trade conflicts as well as the future of multilateral trade cooperation were discussed. For instance, it was discussed how the benefits of globalization could be better reaped, communicated as well as distributed. More specific topics such as international tax competition in times of global value chains, the resulting problems for the fiscal capacity of especially developing countries and the related firm behaviour in this regard were addressed as well.

The leading theme and several discussion topics of the summit this year as mentioned above are highly related to the research at KCG that investigates the causes and consequences of global supply chains and analyses the associated ethical issues. Five KCG members, Thilo Kroeger, Jakob Lehr, Dr. Wan-Hsin Liu, Finn Ole Semrau, and Frauke Steglich thus participated in the summit. They actively engaged in discussions with high-level officials from organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD, and the United Nations as well as from academia, business and politics. In addition, KCG Coordinator Dr. Wan-Hsin Liu organized a session “Big Data: Risk or Opportunity for Inclusive Global Prosperity?”, in cooperation with Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research from Taiwan.

More information about the Global Solutions Summit can be found here.