The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos started out in 1970 as a cosy gathering for a handful of European business executives in the Swiss Alps, but has since turned into a key annual event for more than 2 000 business and world leaders.
Within four years, the exchanges about best management practices had given way to discussions on economic and social problems with colleagues from around the world. They were later joined by the political leaders who manage the world economy.
From January 23 to 28, the WEF’s annual meeting is expecting 2 150 executives, ministers or presidents, and intellectuals from 99 countries to consider how to build trust, in the wake of corporate scandals such as the failure of US energy giant Enron or tensions between western and Muslim societies.
”Davos is maybe the only comprehensive platform where the stakeholders meet to look at the solutions together,” Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the WEF, said.
”It’s not a decision-making body, not a place to negotiate, it’s a place you go to brainstorm, where you court new ideas, where you distill new ways,” he added.
Since the end of the Cold War, opponents have challenged the elite meeting’s role in an increasingly globalised economy. They believe it allows big business to unfairly influence government policies away from public scrutiny.
”The World Economic Forum’s slogan this year is ‘Building Trust’ yet many of its participants are chief executives of the companies responsible for the very worst ravages of corporate globalisation,” Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said.
Today WEF is an organisation with paying members from 1 000
corporations.It estimates that 60% of the participants at Davos are business executives.
Some 15% of those invited are political leaders, about the same number academics and intellectuals. Only 12% of those who will take part are women. One quarter come from developing countries, 30% from North America and 40% from Europe.
Among its achievements, WEF lists the first meeting between ministers from North and South Korea in 1989, a key meeting in 1990 of the then East German prime minister Hans Modrow and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl which helped on reunification, as well as meetings between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
It also claims to have helped launch business initiatives for social and health projects, and an informal gathering of 17 trade ministers in 1982 which spurred on the process that led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). – Sapa-AFP