World Economic Forum

KLAUS SCHWAB, Swiss philanthropist and recently retired professor of business, founded the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a nonprofit organization in 1971. This informal forum brings together political, business, and media leaders annually in the mountain resort of Davos, a southeastern Swiss town near the Austrian border. With the exception of the 2002 meeting in New York City, the WEF regularly meets in Davos, usually early in the year, and hence it is also referred to simply as Davos. In addition to annual Davos meetings, the WEF organizes regional gatherings in Asia, Europe, and Africa on a regular basis.

The mission of the WEF is to provide world leaders in politics, business, and media with an opportunity to discuss contemporary world affairs and to set the economic and political agenda for the year. In its founder's words: “Today, no one government or company or group, working alone, can solve a major issue. They all have to work together.”

The Davos meetings serve this ideal by laying down the foundation for a global corporate governance system. Not surprisingly, leading global megacompanies—Texaco, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/ Shell Group, Boots Company, Pfizer Inc., Roche Holding Ltd., McDon-ald's, Nabisco, Nestle, and Unilever to name few—have a prominent role in shaping the WEF agenda, particularly on globalization and liberalization.

Recently the WEF has broadened its membership to include selective representation from academe, from non-governmental organizations and the arts, and even from labor, to curb criticisms of its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the pro-business orientation of the WEF is not hidden and is further reinforced by the following two initiatives. The International Business Council (IBC), established in 2001 as an advisory body to the WEF, is made up of 100 chief executives of leading global companies. And the Global Institute for Partnership promotes public-private partnership as a method of privatization of public economic enterprises in industrial and developing countries.

Topics typically discussed at Davos meetings have been economics, environment, business and management, science, medicine, and technology. Subtopics within economics have run a wide range, from competitiveness, financial policies, and foreign investment to public policy, foreign trade, and exchange rate policies. Across the board there has been an emphasis on the expansion of globalization and economic liberalization in the name of economic democracy, defined in terms of a [Page 1188]free-market system. Since 2002, the WEF has explicitly focused on issues related to world poverty, and especially poverty in Africa. World leaders presumably have realized that the neoliberal world economic order of recent decades has contributed to persistent global poverty, which in turn fueled economic and social uncertainty.

At the 2002 meeting in New York City, the WEF focused on the economic, social, political, and ethical causes and consequences of poverty. Led by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, current director of Columbia Univer-sity's Earth Institute, and by Bono, the lead singer of the popular rock band U2, the WEF discussed aspects of poverty and HIV/AIDS, hunger, malaria, TB, and other diseases in Africa—specifically in sub-Saharan Africa, where about 300 million people (over 40 percent of the total population) live in extreme poverty, on less than $1 per day at Purchasing Power Parity, according to Sachs. The 2002 meeting ended with a verbal commitment by world leaders to use foreign aid to curb world hunger and poverty, a commitment that had to be repeated at the 2005 G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. The commitment was to some extent also a response to results of a 2004 Gallup Poll survey, carried out for the WEF, which showed that 44 percent of those surveyed agreed that poverty and hunger eradication should be the most important global priority.

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