Davos: If your name’s not down, you’re not getting in
With only a week to go until kick-off, the organisers of the 41st World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, have just announced the programme based around this year’s theme: ‘Shared Norms for the New Reality’.
So who will be in the snowy Alpine resort of Davos to discuss this ‘new reality’ and, we hope, lead the way in putting forward solutions to the most pressing global risks of the day?
A popular ski resort at other times of the year, Davos is a closed shop to outsiders during the WEF. The barbed-wire barriers, endless security checks and snipers on rooftops are a reminder that, among the 2,500 politicians, businessmen and representatives from media, charitable organizations and religious groups, there are some pretty important people.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will deliver the opening address. Other G20 leaders in attendance will include: Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico; David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK; Angela Merkel, German Chancellor; Herman Van Rompuy, Council of the EU; Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France; Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia; and Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa.
Other confirmed participants include Timothy Geithner, U.S. Secretary to the Treasury; Eric I. Cantor, Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives; Chen Deming, China’s Minister of Commerce; Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Minister of Finance; Bronislaw Komorowski, President of Poland; Lars Lokke Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark; Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, President of Iceland; and George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece.
From the banking world, Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, Credit Suisse’s Brady Dougan, HSBC’s Stuart Gulliver, Goldman Sach’s Gary Cohn, Citi’s Vikram Pandit, Deutsche Bank’s Josef Ackermann and Eric Daniels of Lloyds Banking Group will, according to the Daily Telegraph, be pulling on their snow boots for this year’s meeting.
The list of notable business leaders who will be in Davos includes Tesco’s Terry Leahy, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, BP’s Carl-Henric Svanberg and Nike’s Mark Parker.
Three-and-a-half questions for the Davos gurus
For the last several years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has published an annual report on global risk, as part of the run-up to the storied annual meeting in Davos. The 50-page report makes for gloomy reading: it is a dense collection of some of the major threats to the world’s security — from asset price collapse to weapons of mass destruction — and the interconnections between them. And they’re all carefully mapped in terms of their perceived likelihood and perceived economic impact.
You’ve got hand it to WEF: their report is thorough and sobering, and makes a great reference tool for later in the year. Last year’s report said that “there is a rising risk of sovereign defaults,” and that proved more accurate and expensive than anyone wished.
Yet for all its insistence on a big-picture, global perspective, the WEF risk report can seem internally contradictory or just hollow, as if pieces of cloth were produced in separate quarters with no one sewing them into a coherent quilt. And so, for those who want the big picture to be even bigger, here are three-and-a-half major questions raised, but not answered by the WEF risk report.
Why do global institutions break down? The WEF is very worried about the failure of “global governance.” This is unsurprising, since the WEF is very similar in outlook to other global-reach institutions, like the IMF, World Bank, United Nations, etc. The report finds “a growing sense of paralysis in responding to global challenges,” and cites as examples ineffective UN climate change negotiations; the stalled Doha round of trade talks; lack of progress on some UN Millennium Development goals; the ineffectiveness of Security Council reform and moves to curb nuclear proliferation.
Yet the WEF is much less clear about what is causing these institutions to fail. It is temperamentally prone to blame individual nations, and in some instances (such as nuclear proliferation), that may well be appropriate. But what about trade and currency policy? The report acknowledges that enforced economic globalization in emerging markets might harm employment and “potentially threaten social stability.” Why, then, should emerging nations want to inflict political and economic damage on themselves that their more enlightened developed brethren would never accept? Another way of saying this: maybe global governance isn’t working because the cures global institutions offer (and sometimes enforce) are often worse than the disease.
How can they be fixed? (Half question.) Reading the report, you get the strong sense of a circular argument along these lines: “My tools are broken. How will I fix them? I will use my tools!” About as close as the WEF gets to a solution for broken global governance is “a well-informed and well-mobilized public opinion sharing norms and values of global citizenship.” Yes, well … good luck with that.
Where does inequality come from? This year’s report makes a big deal about “economic disparity,” which it helpfully defines as “wealth and income disparities, both within countries and between countries.” We used to call this “inequality.” The WEF report rightly points to OECD data indicating real income growth of the top income quintiles in wealthy countries (Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the United States) was twice as large as that of the bottom quintiles between the mid-1980s to mid-2000s. The poor may not be getting poorer, but the rich are getting richer at a much faster pace than everyone else. That situation is not only immoral, but dangerous, as it can lead to open conflict between nations and internal political turmoil.
a glib globacrat Reagonomic response would be “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”.
But thats too simple.
The global governance system has become the special domain of transnational capitalism which is unique
Journalist Nicholas Shaxson (Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens) and professor William I Robinson (Crisis in Global Capitalism and 21st Century Fasicism) tell us more.
During decolonisation, with the creation of many new member states the UN had a renaissance with all sorts of proposals for creating a more just and sustainable world order.
Guess what, all of those proposals where shutdown and sidelined. i.e. Reagon on UNESCO for instance.
Vijay Prishad details this in The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
Iran’s foreign minister joins the Davos Debates
Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Manouchehr Mottaki discusses the aims of, and his thoughts on, the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Marathon day for Greece in Davos
It’s truly a marathon. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou are in Davos to tell the world that they are serious about reducing their huge deficit.
UK finance minister Alastair Darling, who passed by, tapped the PM’s shoulders, saying: “Are you doing the rounds? Good luck!”
Below you see how our team of text reporters and Reuters Insider television prepping for an interview with the finance minister, inside the congress hall in Davos.
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Resident Davos Expert
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You forgot to mention that an awesome group of global technology pioneers will be at the conference. 2010 and 2011 Technology Pioneers will be there representing the companies who are hot but also are game changers for economic and social conditions. Included in the group are
Twitter, Playfish, Aura Biosciences Inc., Energy Innovations, Vihaan Networks Limited (VNL), RingCentral, Obopay (of course).
for full list http://www.weforum.org/community/technol ogy-pioneers