The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum gets under way this week, with businessmen, politicians and academians gathering to discuss possible solutions to current financial woes facing numerous countries throughout the developed world. The discussion will be about growth and jobs; the impact of commodity price rises and the risks of inflation. But the headlines will focus on the extent of growth or the degree of uncertainty depending on where in the world you live, reports London’s Telegraph.
Organizers of the five-day event are optimistic the debates among some 2,500 world leaders, business heads and others can provide a crisis roadmap of sorts. But critics note that while the annual gathering is a key stop for executives and national leaders, it failed to foresee major events such as the European sovereign debt crisis last year.
Among those attending through Jan. 30 are Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Banks will be in the spotlight on their reform agenda and in particular are they moving fast enough to address the underlying problems that sparked the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis.
One other dominant theme will be food and water – a problem not that visible in the UK but which affects many parts of the world. The debate will focus on how to improve food supplies at a time when the world population is expected to grow by more than a billion people in the next 20 years. But as the Telegraph asks, is all of this debate worth the effort? How effective is it really?
For more than four decades, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has pitched its annual shindig in Davos as a chance for powerful leaders in business, politics, media and academia to convene in one spot to trade ideas on how to solve the pressing global problems of the day.
And for about as long, critics have dismissed the invitation-only event as nothing more than a glorified networking get-together for elites, or, as U2 singer Bono once called it, a meeting of “fat cats in the snow,” reports Reuters.