This Year’s GED Session at the Global Economic Symposium

The Global Economic Symposium (GES), taking place this year in Kiel from October 12^th to 14^th, is aimed at finding solutions for global problems, such as financial crisis, climate change or vicious cycles of poverty that need global cooperation in our more and more interdependent world today.

The GES brings together top panelists from all over the world.

In policy-making, high level guest speakers will include Aart De Geus (Chairman and CEO, Bertelsmann Stiftung); Pascal Lamy (honorary president, think tank Notre Europe and former Director-General, World Trade Organization); Claudia Buch (Deputy President, Deutsche Bundesbank); Mehmet ŞİMŞEK (Turkey’s Finance Minister), among others.

In what concerns academia, guest speakers will include Nobel Laureate George Akerlof and Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal (President, Fundação Getulio Vargas).

Business leaders such as Hans-Paul Bürkner (Chairman, Boston Consulting Group) and Antonio Simões CEO, HSBC Bank will also take part on this event.

This year the GED team hosts a session on “Multilateral Regionalism and Emerging Markets – Opportunities and Risks in Global Trade”. The session will be held on the 14^th October at 13:15 CET.

As global markets are splitting up into fewer but more powerful trading blocs due to the increasing number of regional and mega-regional trade agreements such as TTIP, one has to ask how third parties and especially emerging markets may benefit or suffer from such agreements. Therefore, in our session questions will be addressed like

• How can mega-regional trade agreements foster positive economic and social development in emerging market economies?
• What steps need to be taken by developed countries to ensure positive outcomes for themselves and for emerging market economies?
• How can free trade lead to fair trade in this context?

Session speakers include Andreas Esche (Director, Shaping Sustainable Economies Program in the Bertelsmann Stiftung); Joseph Francois (Managing Director, World Trade Institute); Bernard Hoekman (Professor, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies); Pascal Lamy and Petra Pinzler (Berlin Correspondent, DIE ZEIT).

We look forward to welcoming you at our session!

In case you cannot join us in person please watch our live stream of the session on Periscope!

As always there will also be a live tweet of the session on our Twitter channel.