YES – Young Economic Summit 2017 Goes into the Final Round

Your Ideas. Your Future. – On 28 and 29 September 2017, around 200 high school students will visit the Regionales Berufsbildungszentrum Wirtschaft (RBZ, regional vocational training centre for economy) in Kiel for the third YES! – Young Economic Summit. Thirteen teams from six federal states will present their ideas on how to solve some of the most pressing global economic questions of our time and discuss them with experts from the fields of science, economics, politics and society. This is the first year that ZEW is participating in the YES! project as a research partner.

At the final of the biggest economics competition for high school students in Germany, the teams from the Southwest region will for the first time enter into direct competition with the North German teams and present their ideas on current economic policy issues. After the presentations and discussions with the experts, the students get to vote for the best solutions. Daniel Günther, Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein, will then announce the three winning teams. On 8 November, an award ceremony will be held at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Berlin.

As part of the competition, the 13 student teams spent six months taking part in a mentoring programme, in which they tackled the key questions, causes and possible solutions to issues such as populism, European integration, fair international taxation and sustainable consumption. ZEW researchers have been using their expertise to assist the participating teams in coming up with their ideas.

The “YES! – Young Economic Summit” falls under the patronage of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs, Brigitte Zypries, and is a joint project by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Joachim Herz Stiftung. Together with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) and the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, ZEW is supporting the project as a scientific partner.