Rae Kwon Chung was speaking on February 10 at a symposium entitled “The post-Covid era: redefining and redesigning the global economy”.

    He told the gathering that securing carbon-neutral status by 2050 was a requirement in order to ensure the long-term development of the world economy.

    “We have to shift from extreme short-termism…to long-term investment. Climate change, the pandemic Covbid-19, social infrastructure, these are all long-term goals and the world economy…has made all the people and all the economic policy-making focus on short term profit maximising short-term production. This is the paradigm which we were stuck in,” he said.

    “And if we move away from it, resolving the climate crisis issue, the pandemic issue, then we have to shift to a long-term issue, a long-term investment paradigm, a long-term goal. But that cannot happen unless we have a very strong political commitment.”

    Rae Kwon Chung said achieving zero CO2 emissions was far more than a stated aim – this goal must be legally enshrined for the business sector – most importantly, for large-scale industry.

    The symposium was organised by the St. Petersburg State University of Economics (UNECON), the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee (RBWC), the Hamburg Institute of International Economics and the Jacob A. Frenkel and Mortimer B. Zuckerman institute for Global Economics.