World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a Geneva-based foundation whose annual meeting of top business leaders, some national political leaders (presidents, prime ministers and others), and selected intellectuals and journalists, about 2000 people in all, 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, and has helped fund his family foundation, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Operations

According to its supporters, the World Economic Forum is an ideal place for dialogue and debate regarding the major social and economic problems of the planet, since representatives of both the most powerful economic organisations and the most powerful political organisations are present, since intellectuals also participate, and since there is a generally informal atmosphere encouraging wide-ranging debate. Journalists have access to every 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 like poverty. It is also seen by some critics as unelected, non-democratic, elitist, and secretive.

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 some to claim that companies from poorer countries are inherently underrepresented. 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 5x overrepresented relative to their population, i.e. they constituted 4% of participants while representing 0.8% of the world's population.

Also, while 60% of the world's population live in Asia (as of 2002), 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. In 2001, of nine new members, 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, South African president Thabo Mbeki and Argentinian president Fernando de la Rua. In 2002, there were 27 elected national leaders, 3 members of royalty, 9 U.S. senators and 9 members of the US House of Representatives 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, in order for a company to be able to participate in deciding the agendas of the Annual Meeting and the regional meetings, the company must pay $250,000 each year in order to be an Institutional 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, where $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, they are excluded from the many informal industry-wide workshops and private meetings between corporate executives, political leaders and leaders of international financial institutions. Since these informal meetings 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:

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".

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 alternative 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 Allegre 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. 300 members of the public able attended 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. The European Competitiveness Summit planned for October 2003 in Dublin, was cancelled. Protestors hypothesise that the Dublin meeting was cancelled because city authorities and/or WEF organisers were worried about holding the meeting in the face of protest. However, the official reason for cancellation was that a report, the European Competitiveness Report would not be ready in time for the Summit. A much larger European meeting was held in Warsaw, Poland a few months later, where the European Competitiveness Report was launched.

Networked Readiness Index

The World Economic Forum publishes an annual report called the Networked readiness index. It focuses the propensity for 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 2005-2006)

External links

The Official World Economic Forum Site
Davos Diary - A daily updated account of the 2006 World Economic Forum from Foreign Policy Magazine correspondent, David Rothkopf

Critics