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Description
Simon Evenett is a globally-recognised expert on trade, investment, and geopolitical dynamics who can relate these developments to companies and governments.
Simon works closely with companies (managements and boards) as well as governments and international organisations to make sense of this fast-changing and complex world. Although university-based, where he is an economics and strategy professor, Simon has engaged actively with decisionmakers, analysts, and the media.
A distinctive feature of Simon's approach is that he has established--with fantastic colleagues and supporters--initiatives that collect up-to-date information on policy, legal, and regulatory developments affecting the cross-border flows of trade, investment, capital, and data.
Simon created the Global Trade Alert (GTA) in 2009, which is now the point of reference for trade policy monitoring. In 2020 he created with Johannes Fritz the Digital Policy Alert. Subsequent initiatives include the Essential Goods Monitoring Initiative (launched during the pandemic) and the recently-launched New Industrial Policy Observatory.
Along with the Max Schmidheiny Foundation and University of St. Gallen, Simon created the St Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade. Simon firmly believes that companies and officials are likely to make better decisions when public policy is more transparent and evaluated objectively. Simon also believes that the solution to pressing societal and global challenges cannot be found within any one nation--economic nationalism is the enemy of progress.
Simon also created the Crux of Capitalism initiative to shed light on how profitable companies really are--going beyond traditional measures of accounting profit and constructing a modern version of an age-old concept, economic profits. This initiative, launched publicly in 2023, is yielding important insights about the performance of 21 economies worldwide and of key sectors, such as the renewables sector.
In 2023 Simon was appointed Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Trade and Investment. He is now serving a second two year term. In August 2024 Simon joined the faculty of IMD Business School, moving there from the University of St. Gallen where he was happily based for 19 years.
Simon was educated in economics at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He has taught at Oxford University and was the first Director of Economic Research at the World Trade Institute. Simon was for 8 years the Co-Director of Europe's most established group of researchers in international trade.
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