WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

The 'World Economic Forum' (WEF) is a Geneva-based foundation whose annual meeting of top business leaders, national political leaders (presidents, prime ministers and others), and selected intellectuals and journalists is usually held in Davos, Switzerland. There are also regional meetings throughout the year. It was founded in 1971 by Klaus M. Schwab, a business professor in Switzerland.

Operations

According to its supporters, the World Economic Forum is an ideal place for dialogue and debate about the major social and economic problems of the planet because: representatives of both the most powerful economic organisations and the most powerful political organisations are present; intellectuals also participate; and there is a generally informal atmosphere encouraging wide-ranging debate. Journalists have access to most session at the Annual Meeting in Davos and the majority of sessions are webcast live so that the debates can be open to a wider public. In all about 600 journalists from print, radio and TV take part in the meeting.
Whilst business and political leaders make up the majority of participants, NGO leaders from groups such as Amnesty International, Transparency International, Oxfam and various UN organisations attend, as well as trades union leaders and religious leaders.
According to its critics, the World Economic Forum is really just a business forum, where the richest businesses can easily negotiate deals with one another and lobby the world's most powerful politicians, and that the aim is profit-making rather than solving economic problems such as poverty. It has also been criticized as an elitist forum for circumventing democratic politics, and for encouraging non-transparent, secretive decision-making.
In 2006 the WEF opened represenative offices in Beijing China and in New York (World Economic Forum USA). Incorporated as a Swiss not-for-profit foundation it is impartial and not-for-profit. The Forum is not tied to any political, partisan or national interests. Its highest governance body is the Foundation Board consisting of 20 members including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Geographic balance

The WEF's membership, the membership of its board, and the attendance at its annual meetings is heavily composed of representatives from Europe, the USA and industrialized Asia.
The main 1,000 member companies are invited to the WEF based on annual revenues of over $1 billion (as of 2002). (This has led to claims that companies from poorer countries are inevitably under-represented. The WEF claims that 200 companies, mainly from the developing world, are invited to join the WEF membership and events.)
In the 2002 WEF Annual Meeting, 75% of participants were from Europe (39%) and the US (36%), which together represented approximately 17% of the world's population. West Asian participants were about five times over-represented relative to their population, i.e. they constituted 4% of participants while representing 0.8% of the world's population.
While 60% of the world's population live in Asia, about 7.7% of the participants at the 2002 Annual Meeting were Asian.

Gender balance

Until 2001, the main World Economic Forum decision making boards - the Forum Board of Directors and the Council Board of Directors - were 100% male. Of the nine new members in 2001, only one was female. In 2001 the World Economic Forum started its 'Women Leaders Program' with the stated aim of increasing the participation of women in WEF activities and involving them as members in World Economic Forum communities. From 2001 to 2004 the WEF estimates that it has increased the participation of women leaders in the Annual Meeting from 8 to 13%.

Participation by politicians

In 2000, 33 national leaders attended the Annual Meeting, including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, King Abdullah Il Ibn Hussein of Jordan, Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, Aleksander Kwasniewski former president of Poland, South African president Thabo Mbeki and Argentinian president Fernando de la Rua. In 2002, 27 elected national leaders, three members of royalty, nine US senators and nine members of the US House of Representatives were expected to attend.

Membership fees

As of 2002, each member company pays a basic annual membership fee of $12,500 and a $6,250 Annual Meeting fee. However, to take part in deciding the agendas of the Annual Meeting and the regional meetings a company must pay $250,000 a year to be an ''Institutional Partner'' and/or ''Knowledge Partner'', and $78,000 to be an ''Annual Meeting Partner''. The WEF describes the selection of Partners as being based on ''ability to contribute to and benefit from the mission of the Forum''.
WEF's income in 2001 was $104 million. $38 million of this was from membership fees.

Media access

At any Annual Meeting or regional meeting of the World Economic Forum, journalists participate in most of the formally scheduled panels and events. Indeed, a large proportion of journalists (250 at the Annual Meeting in Davos) are given complete access to every session organized by the Forum, having the same access rights as any of the paying participants. However, they are excluded from the many private and informal industry-wide workshops and meetings between corporate executives, political leaders and leaders of international financial institutions. Since these informal private meetings - not organized by the World Economic Forum - happen without access either by the mainstream media or authorisation by national parliaments, critics consider them to be undemocratic in nature.

Participation by NGOs

The WEF has attempted to create dialogue with critics by inviting representatives of NGOs to participate in Annual Meetings.
In the 2000 Annual Meeting, participating NGOs included:

★ Save the Children

★ Amnesty International

★ World Wide Fund for Nature

★ Transparency International

★ Oxfam

★ Friends of the Earth

★ Focus on the Global South
In the 2001 Annual Meeting, while most of these NGOs were invited again, Friends of the Earth and Focus on the Global South were not invited. Critics claim that these two NGOs were not invited in 2001 because their criticisms were too strong and clear.
In 2001, other NGOs were invited, including those from poor countries:

★ Martin Khor of the Third World Network in Malaysia

★ Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India

★ Vicki Tauli of Indigenous People's International in the Philippines
and from rich countries, such as:

★ Public Citizen.
However, none of these were invited back in 2002. According to critics such as the Financial Times, "the Forum says it is not inviting organizations that contribute only negative views and do not support its "mission" to narrow global divisions".
Greenpeace spent two years trying to cooperate with the WEF on the issue of global warming, but withdrew from the 2002 Annual Meeting because it found the WEF uncooperative. In a letter to Greenpeace, Klaus M. Schwab responded that the demands made by Greenpeace to the automobile industry at the 2001 meeting "led to problems".

Criticism

While once thought of as a serious endeavor, the WEF has been increasingly criticized by economists for moving away from serious economics and instead becoming a large media circus that lets celebrities and politicians have feel-good discussions on a panoply of political causes while accomplishing little of substance. For example, many question the extensive involvement of NGOs that have little or no expertise in economics. Instead of a discussion on the world economy with knowledgable experts alongside key business and political players, Davos now features the top media political causes of the day (such as global climate change and AIDS in Africa), with participants such as U2 rock star Bono. The second type of discussion has its place (and the issues are important), but calling it a World Economic Forum is a misnomer in the eyes of some critics.
Other criticisms include:

★ that the WEF costs the state millions a year to guarantee safety against protesters, criminals and terrorist threats (as a private happening, the WEF should bear its safety costs itself)

★ Davos and its surroundings are a military security zone during the WEF: the right to congregate is cut drastically

★ that the total costs of US$60 million would be better invested in actual development aid

★ that the WEF as a forum - many statesmen meet each other - is not democratically legitimated, but important decisions are made nonetheless

★ only a very small part of the people at the WEF are actually from developing countries, and the role of NGO is minimal

World Economic Forum responses to critics

At the 2001 Annual Meeting, the Swiss Authorities spent $5.4 million on security. In the 2001 Annual Report, Klaus M. Schwab compared the threat of violent anti-globalization protestors to the threat of terrorists. Some critics judge that these type of reactions amount to a refusal to accept and respond to the criticism, however the Forum has always made it clear that is happy to engage with peaceful critics, indeed there have been a number of dialogues with groups from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and the Open Forum was started to help foster this dialogue.
The World Economic Forum claims that it wishes to open up dialogue with critics. Starting during the 2003 Annual Meeting in January in Davos, an Open Forum Davos 2003 was held in parallel with the main Annual Meeting. The Open Forum was attended by 300 members of the public free of charge, and the World Economic Forum hosted the Open Forum again in 2004, 2005 and 2006.
In 2001 the World Economic Forum started a series of 'initiatives' with the purpose of engaging business in tackling problems that concern business and its critics. The World Economic Forum's portfolio of active initiatives in 2006 include corporate citizenship, global health, global governance, greenhouse gas and water.

Regional Meetings

The World Economic Forum holds between five and ten regional meetings per year, enabling close contact between corporate business leaders, local government leaders and NGOs. The mix of regions varies from year to year, but the meetings in Africa, China and India have been held consistently over the past decade.

Networked Readiness Index

The World Economic Forum publishes an annual report called the Networked Readiness Index. It focuses on the propensity of countries to exploit the opportunities offered by information and communications technology. It also ranks countries by number on these criteria.

Research Reports

The forum produces a number of research reports on economics:

★ Global Competitiveness Report (Global Competitiveness Report 2006-2007)

External links

★ The Official World Economic Forum Site

★ The Official World Economic Forum USA Page

★ Palgrave Macmillan, official publisher of the Global Competitiveness Report

★ Davos Diary - A daily updated account of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2006 from Foreign Policy Magazine correspondent, David Rothkopf

★ The Davos Conversation - The Davos Conversation "blogregation" - promoting openness at the Annual Meeting - started in 2007

Critics

★ Stop the World Economic Forum in Warsaw 28-30.04.2004

★ wa29 coalition | Warsaw April 29

★ Alternative Economic Summit | 28-30.04.2004 Warsaw

★ WEF regional meeting Ireland cancelled in October 2003

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