Dr Soogil Young, chair of KOPEC was appointed by President Myung-bak Lee of the Republic of Korea as Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth (www.greengrowth.go.kr), with the responsibility to co-chair the work and meetings of the Committee with the Prime Minister.
The Committee is Korea’s highest-level policy-deliberation body on all matters related with Korea’s climate-change mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies, promotion of green economy and its growth, and contribution to green growth in the developing world. The Committee currently consists of 36 authoritative civilian experts on those issues and 14 Ministers from the relevant Ministries, holds its formal ‘Reporting Meetings’ in the presence of the President.
Dr Young will supervise the work of the Secretariat for the Committee which consists of more than 60 staff consisting of senior officials seconded from the individual Ministries and energy- and environment-related public institutions. Directed by a Vice-Minister-level official Mr. Ki-Jong Woo, formally at the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, the Secretariat coordinates closely with both the Blue House (the Presidential Office), and the Prime Minister’s Office.
Dr Young has led PECC work on international labor mobility, finance, and trade policy. He was coordinator of the task force on international labor mobility, was the founding coordinator of the PECC Finance Forum and the PECC task force on trade in manufactured goods - the pre-cursor of the Trade Policy Forum.
He is concurrently the President of the National Strategy Institute (NSI), an independent think tank on economic reform and national governance, in Seoul, a position he has held since March 2006. Dr. Young served as a senior economist at four governmental economic think tanks during 1978-1998, including as a senior fellow for the Korea Development Institute (KDI), as President of the Korea Transport Institute (KOTI), and as President for the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP). He served as Korea’s Ambassador to the OECD in Paris during 1998-2001 where he concurrently served as Chairman of the Advisory Board on the OECD Development Centre.
He earned his PhD in economies from Johns Hopkins University.
Dr Soogil Young (far right) speaking at the PECC-ADBI-IDB Conference on
"A Post 2010 Trade Agenda for the Asia Pacific"
