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.

How the YES! works –
our short introduction video

English captions available

A Year at the YES! – we followed a team from the kick-off to the award Ceremony

English captions available

The Organisers

The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics is the world’s largest research infrastructure for economic literature, online as well as offline.
Its disciplinary repository EconStor provides a large collection of more than 127,000 articles and working papers in Open Access.
EconBiz, the portal for international economic information, allows students and researchers to search among nine million datasets.
The ZBW edits two journals in economic policy, Wirtschaftsdienst and Intereconomics, and in cooperation with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy produces the peer-reviewed journal Economics based on the principle of Open Access.
The ZBW is a member of the Leibniz Association and has been a foundation under public law since 2007. It is affiliated with the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. Several times the ZBW received the international LIBER award for its innovative work in librarianship. The institution currently employs a staff of approximately 280.

The ZBW supports economists and students in their learning, researching and publishing processes.
We provide the infrastructure so that researchers can concentrate on their publishing activities. Whether it is the technical support for an e-journal or the implementation of databases for primary research data – the ZBW conducts projects for the science community.
We continually increase our own research activities in order to provide students and researchers in economics and business administration with excellent research support.

Homepage: https://www.zbw.eu

The Joachim Herz Foundation in Hamburg, Germany, promotes education, science, and research in economics and the natural sciences as well as the personal development of teens and young adults. In these areas we also fund small, innovative third-party projects.

Since 2017, additional funding has been granted to support research projects in the fields of medicine, law and engineering technology. The Joachim Herz Foundation was founded in 2008 after the death of German entrepreneur Joachim Herz. It is one of the largest private foundations in Germany.

Back in the early 1980s, Joachim Herz and Petra, the woman who would later become his wife, began talking about the possibility of setting up a foundation, discussing mission statements and areas of activity. In 2003, Joachim Herz wrote down these considerations as detailed instructions to be carried out in the event of his death. The Foundation’s mission statement, statutes, and inaugural Board of Trustees were all listed in his will. Just two months after his passing, the Joachim Herz Foundation was established in accordance with his wishes and using his and his wife’s assets.

On July 24, 2008, Petra Herz was joined at Hamburg City Hall by then mayor Ole von Beust as she announced the formation of the Joachim Herz Foundation, the 1,100th charitable foundation to be set up in Hamburg. Petra Herz has led the Foundation ever since in her capacity as Chairwoman of the Executive Board.

Homepage: https://www.joachim-herz-stiftung.de

The Team

The Steering Committee

The Steering Committee regularly deals with the strategic orientation and the operational framework for the YES! and consists of project members of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Joachim Herz Stiftung.