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The YES! – Young Economic Solutions is a school competition for economic, social and environmental issues. The YES! opens doors for the ideas of the next generation by giving your students the chance to formulate their own ideas in an evidence-based way in cooperation with researchers, to present them in the context of a large conference and to discuss them with other school teams. Moreover, at YES! they not only get to know scientific institutes and researchers but also get to talk to high-ranking personalities from politics, business and society.

The idea behind the YES!

The YES! opens doors for the ideas of the next generation. It offers students a common platform and the tools to develop solutions for economic, ecological and social problems. Young people take responsibility, are the next generation’s voice, and discuss the present and future global challenges.

Food for thought for the next generation

The solutions they develop on their own responsibility are presented to the public by the pupils at regional finals during the competition. In discourse with high-ranking personalities from business, science, politics and civil society and other students, they not only sharpen their view of global interrelationships but also experience that they do not have to be mere pawns in the game of economic reality but can instead help shape it on their own responsibility.

We, the YES! team, are convinced that information literacy, the assumption of responsibility and economic education is indispensable for participation in the society of today and tomorrow. The YES! enables the next generation to actively participate in finding solutions to problems that will affect them the most.

The YES! is a project constellation that is unique in Germany because the students themselves decide in a democratic process which solutions should be pursued after the YES! – Young Economic Summit.

The YES! – Pioneers of Young Ideas

The entire YES! team and the numerous partners support the participating schools on their way to the competition. YES! – Young Economic Solutions is a joint project of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Joachim Herz Foundation under the patronage of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection. Since 2019, the YES! takes place in six regions nationwide.

From 2015 to 2022, the competition was called YES! – Young Economic Summit. As part of a visual change to the logo and corporate design concerning better barrier-free access to our offerings, we also took the opportunity to adapt the name of the competition.

From 2023 it will be called YES! – Young Economic Solutions. Especially in the years of the pandemic, it has become clear that the conference, the Summit, actually no longer reflects the core of our idea. Instead, the solutions of the young people primarily address economic problems and deserve to be honoured in the title of our competition.

The YES! Process