Newsletter: The Berlin Summit - Re-Lives, Interviews & Declaration

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is only a small text, one page – and yet it could become a weighty one: the Berlin Declaration signed by well over 50 leading academics and practitioners at the Forum’s Berlin Summit earlier this week, including keynote speakers Dani Rodrik, Adam Tooze, Mariana Mazzucato and Branko Milanovic, as well as former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard and Thomas Piketty.

The declaration is a bit like the Washington Consensus in its significance, says Branko Milanovic. It gets to the heart of the new economic thinking that is needed to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth, writes Mariana Mazzucato. With the call, the forum has “brought together a remarkable coalition”, writes Adam Tooze – “the declaration is remarkable both for its agreement on principles of economic and industrial policy and for its embedding in an interpretation of the political and geopolitical risks of our time”. A new transatlantic agenda is emerging here. Specifically, the text calls for tackling the real causes of many people’s discontent – and reducing the widespread feeling of powerlessness: whether through a proactive regional policy in times of great upheaval, a reduction in inequality or a modern climate policy that relies more on incentives than deterrent prices.

Dani Rodrik said at the meeting that there would not have been such a large consensus on all of this six years ago. It was remarkable how a consensus on the necessity of industrial policy, for example, had matured since then. The signatories also include former WTO chief Pascal Lamy, Clinton advisor Laura Tyson as well as Barry Eichengreen, Gabriel Zucman, Isabella Weber, Jens Südekum, Mark Blyth, Francesca Bria, Daniela Schwarzer and Henning Vöpel from the Centre for European Policy. A breathtaking round. In the meantime, more than 100 people have signed the public appeal (here), without being among the big names of the innovative part of the guild.

Translations into Italian, Dutch and Japanese are now in the works. Also in German.

The highlights of the Berlin Summit included the adoption of the declaration, the keynote speeches by Adam Tooze and Branko Milanovic, as well as the opening panel with historian Harold James, Family Minister Lisa Paus and Christine Herntier, the mayor of Spremberg. And the globalization panel on Wednesday with Adam Tooze, Moritz Schularick, Daniela Schwarzer, Rob Johnson and Nicola Brandt. If you want to get a quick impression of the inputs in 11 minutes of video, you can find a compilation of short videos with Dani Rodrik, Branko Milanovic, Maja Göpel, Shahin Vallée, Eric Lonergan and Frauke Thies here.

Over the next few days, we will also be posting more and more information, presentations, individual session recordings and summaries of sessions on the event page. Stay tuned.

And what comes after that? Plenty of material to formulate in detail what was naturally only set out as a guideline for the new paradigm in the Berlin Declaration.

Have a great weekend,
Thomas Fricke

This text is from our bi-weekly newsletter series. To subscribe, click here.