Christian Kastrop

CEO and Partner

Christian Kastrop began his role as Managing Partner of the Global Solutions Initiative in September 2023. Previously he was a State Secretary for Digital Society and Consumer Policy within the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection. 

In his former role, he initiated many projects and initiatives that aimed to build an empowering and effective digital society, individually and collectively. He was responsible for the recent digital European and German regulation and took a leading role in shaping the debate around the EU Commission’s AI regulation, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, The Data Governance Act and the German Network Enforcement Act.

Christian Kastrop was the driving force behind several research projects – in cooperation with the OECD and other research institutions – to empower civil society and consumers in the digital age. These projects aimed to achieve individual and collective digital sovereignty as well as adequate distributed property rights within digital global value chains, making an important contribution to the vision of a digital society that leaves no one behind.

Before being appointed State Secretary, Christian Kastrop served as the European Director of the Bertelsmann Foundation with a focus on rebuilding Europe, in particular development of relevant European Common Goods including digital transformation, defence, border control, foreign policy and combatting the Covid pandemic.

Prior to that, he served the OECD in Paris as the Director General of the Policy Studies Branch of the Economics Department (ECO-PSB), where he conducted microeconomic, macroeconomic and fiscal projects. He also supported the OECD study “Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth” as well as the OECD Initiative “New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC).”

Christian also worked for four years as President and Vice President of the Economic Policy Committee (EPC), preparing the meetings of ECOFIN Ministers Council and the Eurogroup in Brussels.

During his time in the German Federal Ministry of Finance from 1989 to 2014, he was Deputy Director General in the Economics Department, the European, the International/G20 Directorate and the Money and Banking Department.

Christian Kastrop is Professor for Public Finance at the Free University Berlin and Fellow at the Hertie School, Berlin. He holds a Ph.D in Economics from Cologne University, where he also lectured and worked as a researcher at the Cologne Institute of Public Finance.