This year’s St Gallen Symposium topic was on Capital for Purpose
The St Gallen Symposium is an international conference organized by the St Gallen Symposium Foundation with the generous help from generations of St Gallen University students (who take a year off to help organize the program). It is a unique event combining not just high profile guests, but also the inquisitive nature of the 200 young students and adults under 30 whom Symposium sponsors to attend every year. With a strong ethos of intergenerational dialogue, this event is truly unique. This year’s topic was “Capital for Purpose.” The Symposium is chaired by Lord Griffiths, vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, and Dominic Barton former Global Managing Director for McKinsey & Co. Every year, Singapore sends a high level delegation who spend significant amount of time mingling not just with senior executives and politicians at this event, but also with the students and younger adults. This year, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Heng Swee Keat attended the Symposium, alongside many other senior business, economic and political leaders from around the world.
Dominic Barton, Chairman of the St Gallen Symposium and former Global Managing Director at McKinsey gave a warm welcome to Choson Exchange volunteers and our DPRK guests. We are joined by St Gallen Symposium Foundation staff who helped us make this dialogue happen.
We are proud to have brought DPR Koreans to participate in a historic first at the St Gallen Symposium. This marks the first time we have brought Koreans not just to Switzerland, but to engage in an economic dialogue at a prestigious international event. The Koreans did not just listened to the interesting sessions at the event, but also mingled and discussed topics with fellow participants, met with a number of Choson Exchange alumni or friends at the event (who helped our Koreans feel comfortable at this event), and even hosted a session moderated by Choson Exchange on the topic of “Change” in DPR Korea. The interactions were helped greatly by the warm, open and relaxed atmosphere at the Symposium.
We are proud to have partnered with the St Gallen Symposium to make this happen. We hope that Koreans can continue to attend the Symposium and this unique event can become an open platform for DPR Korea to engage in consistent economic dialogue with the international community going forward, both learning from ideas from around the world, and also contributing their perspective on a vision for DPRK’s interaction and place in the world.
Thank you to all our partners who helped make this new platform for economic dialogue with DPRK possible.
The wonderful ASEAN folks who accepted our DPR Koreans as honorary Southeast Asians during this event!