The Covid-19 pandemic caused extensive disruptions across the global economy and was unprecedented in its scale and reach. Apart from affecting millions of lives and livelihoods, the outbreak severely disrupted global supply chains, curtailing production and output levels.
The International Monetary Funds (IMF’s) October 2020 World Economic Output (WEO) report continues to project a deep recession in 2020, although a less severe one, relative to its earlier June forecast. As per the report, global growth is projected to contract by 4.4% during 2020, while a rebound is expected in 2021 with world output projected to expand by 5.2%.
While there have been large scale impacts of the pandemic, owing to swift and collective policy responses from global policymakers and government from countries around the world, the setbacks have been contained significantly and an incipient recovery is possibly underway.
However, apprehensions about the pandemic continue as various regions of the world face a second wave of infections and reinstate social distancing measures. A high level of uncertainty is thus expected to prevail through the coming year and the path to recovery will be a challenging task ahead.
As nations and businesses can learn much from each other, the time is critical for global institutions, international policymakers and governments across the globe to come together to keep the growth momentum going through a coordinated approach. Continued international cooperation along with well designed policies is the need of the hour to mitigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic and set the path of global economic recovery.
Given this backdrop, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in partnership with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, is hosting The Partnership Summit 2020 as a vibrant global platform for deliberations on global economic cooperation.
Organized every year since 1995, the Partnership Summit is CII’s flagship event, which is being held this year in conjunction with the commemoration of CII’s 125 years as a national organization committed to India’s development in a global context. The theme of this year’s summit is “Partnerships for Lives, Livelihood and Growth”.
The four-day summit, from 15-18 December, will be held over a virtual platform for the first time this year, and will offer the unique opportunity to bring together eminent speakers and a large audience from across the world from different walks of life including leaders from governments, industry and other experts.
This year’s summit would be chaired by Mr. Piyush Goyal, Hon’ble Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, and Railways, Government of India.
The summit will provide an opportunity to look at how both advanced and emerging economies can collaborate and build new bridges to foster balanced and equitable growth and will also help in forming new partnerships through high level networking and structured Business-to Business meetings.
This special event would cover a wide and diverse array of topics this year. The overarching themes would focus on areas including geopolitics, technology, sustainability, economics and finance, health and Covid-19, investment, trade, sectoral and state level opportunities, etc.
Renowned experts will speak and deliberate on important and relevant issues covering topics on international trade and trade policy, global cooperation on healthcare, role of technology and learnings from Covid-19, sustainability in the post-Covid world, role of geopolitics in reshaping the global order, among others.
Through such dialogue and exchange of ideas, the platform would provide the chance to navigate solutions for the multi-faceted challenges posed by the pandemic and setting the global growth trajectory.
This Partnership Summit will provide a global platform for dialogue, debate, deliberation and engagement and would be a thought provoking series of sessions that will converge all geographies on common challenges.
