NSD Professors Invited to Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024
Apr 03-2024
Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024 was held on March 26-28, 2024. A number of NSD academics were invited to its official events. With the theme ‘Asia and the World: Common Challenges, Shared Responsibilities’, the Forum was attended by around 2,000 representatives from 60 plus countries and covered by over 1,100 journalists from 40 countries. Mr. Zhao Leji, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, attended the opening ceremony and delivered a keynote speech.
On the afternoon of March 26, Prof. Justin Yifu Lin joined the sub-forum on reducing trade fragmentation. The WTO warns that the increasingly serious trade fragmentation will incur enormous costs for the global economy, particularly that of developing countries. Prof. Lin believed that regional cooperation should be strengthened before the WTO forms trade rules of global consensus. In addition, he called on the developing countries to unite and make concerted efforts to address this issue so that they can safeguard the benefits of globalization. Prof. Lin is Honorary Dean of the NSD and Dean of both PKU Institute of New Structural Economics and Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development.
Prof. Huang Yiping participated in the dialogue between Chinese and American entrepreneurs on the afternoon of March 27. On Sino-US cooperation in facilitating the making of institutions and rules for AI governance, he combined the topic with practices in the financial sphere and set forth three challenges: algorithmic fairness, protection of individual rights, and possible risks in future applications. He said that as AI gains extensive use in economic and social realms, it brings many new opportunities and problems alike, to which sufficient attention should be paid. Prof. Huang is PKU Boya Distinguished Professor, Dean of NSD, and Director of PKU Institute of Digital Finance.
On the same afternoon, Prof. Lin took part in the sub-forum on global economic outlooks and presented his views on issues such as global development. He said that the developed countries have not achieved full economic recovery, which causes the continuous slide of the global economic expansion and trade growth. As the world’s largest export country, China has borne the brunt. The slow growth of export has given rise to surplus capacity and dampen the investment enthusiasm of private firms, which has negatively affected employment and household incomes and eventually dragged down consumption growth. To deal with it, he said that the government should adopt proactive fiscal policy and moderately flexible, loose monetary policy. Provided that policy potential is well tapped, traditional industries make good use of late-comer advantages, technological innovation gains traction, and some indispensable reforms are put in place, China still can expect its economy to expand by 5% this year and remain a major driver for global economic growth.
On the afternoon of March 28, Prof. Huang joined the sub-forum on the real economy’s path to break out of quagmire. He said that the sluggish economy has resulted from a cocktail of problems. Due to cyclical problems, the post-pandemic balance sheets of households, enterprises, and local governments have suffered various degrees of damage, and the rebound so far has been less than powerful. Structural problems, arising from geopolitical and geo-economic conflicts as well as the tightening of some domestic policies, have sapped corporate confidence and weaken business operations. He hoped that steady improvement will materialize.
On the same afternoon, Prof. Ma Jun hosted a roundtable on Belt and Road green financing and investment. It was attended by Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Chairman of Boao Forum for Asia and the 8th Secretary General of the United Nations; Mr. Zhou Xiaochuan, Vice Chairman of Boao Forum for Asia, Vice Chairman of the 12th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and former Governor of the People’s Bank of China; and Mr. Eddie Yue Wei-man, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. They had in-depth discussions on the difficulties and challenges confronting green financing and investment in Belt and Road countries, the institutional construction needed for green projects, the infrastructure for green finance market, and the mobilization of market forces to allocate resources towards green and low-carbon development. Prof. Ma is Co-Director of PKU NSD Macro and Green Finance Lab, Co-Chairman of Belt and Road Green Principles Steering Committee, and President of Institute of Finance and Sustainability.
