Il WEF it does so by reversing the roles, inducing the powerful to show themselves for what they are, including excesses.
Hence, in search of commercial visibility, a quiet mountain village, its hotels and even its shops attend the vanity fair of the participants for a week, who flock, pay and overpay for commercial spaces and lodgings to show themselves a better 'other, thus confirming, not implicitly, that the congress strategy of the man from Davos, Professor Klaus Schwaab, the founder of the meeting, is the right one and that an examination of conscience is dutiful, legitimate and, we will see shortly, therefore necessary.
Because it is from a comparison between the role of who has, who has not, who assists and who waits, that decisions can be elaborated for a whole series of initiatives that will subsequently effectively revolutionize the life of the civilized world, the only stakeholder to represent himself
To confirm the media interest of the event, let's start by saying that almost 1900 economic, governmental and public administration world leaders are present in Davos.
Among these, for example, the video connection of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the absence of the Soviet delegation, and the presence of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the EU president Ursula von der Layen, and the Chinese deputy premier Liu He are confirmed.
The USA, absent President Biden, will be represented by climate envoy John Kerry and Commerce Representative Katherine Tai.
For the Italian political world, the Minister for Education Giuseppe Valditara will be present, while Paolo Gentiloni participates as European Commissioner for EU economic affairs.
As in the past, today's 53rd edition of the WEF in Davos also summarizes the by now well-known problems that agitate our historical period. The pandemic was followed by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, to which were added production blockages, energy shortages, inflation, climatic emergencies, a prelude to important migratory phenomena still in progress.
These elements are now inflaming a financial world which, in search of resilience after the stock market crisis of 2008, found itself flooded with abundant monetary liquidity and zero interest rates, which created the premises for another crisis which was only waiting for a pretext to manifest itself in the issues we are now discussing and which the programmatic agenda of the Davos Forum 2023 intends to address.
The re-foundation of global balances, the WEF reiterates, in fact passes through dialogue and cooperation between the public and private sectors, so that the "Cooperation in a fragmented world" which will inspire the meetings of the coming days and which should inspire the participants' activities for the next twelve months.
Let us therefore examine the five challenges proposed by the WEF in Davos 2023 edition.
“Addressing the current energy and food crises in the context of a new system for energy, climate and nature”.
These are interdependent problems, which once again urge the capitalist model to self-awareness and an industrious repentance to remedy some of the mistakes of the recent past: the bursting of the subprime bubble, the indiscriminate production relocations to low-cost countries, accompanied by ever higher wages for the executives themselves who had decided on them.
And here we are at the point, to the collective conscience to which the WEF addresses its message: to remember that, in addition to being the cause of it, today the capitalist system is required to develop concrete solutions, because inertia would endanger its very existence, even before that of the stakeholders. Climate change and the imperatives linked to the energy transition by 2030 are the clearest examples of the dilemma in which our development system is now struggling, also prompted by the renewed need for social equity renewed by constantly evolving migratory phenomena.
“Addressing the current high-inflation, low-growth, high-debt economy in the context of a new system for investment, trade and infrastructure”
Consequently to the premise described in the previous paragraph, let's now elaborate on the same issues in the context of public budgets: by inverting the factors, the result does not change. The political authorities today discover that they have limited fiscal space, and are struggling between the need for an industrial recovery that they would like to continue to favor with low rates and high liquidity, while market needs impose restrictive fiscal policies to stop inflation. The first to pay the consequences, not only in environmental terms but in terms of repayment of the loans received, are the developing countries, the factories of the world which thanks to their low costs have been convenient for our consumption models. Paradoxically, the protectionist measures following Covid-19, to begin with, now first and foremost complicate global trade, the free market that has been the bedrock of global trade for the last three decades. But there is more: the pandemic has impoverished 120 million people and, as if that were not enough, has made the underfunding of critical infrastructures stand out in all markets. Hence, while changing the perspective of analysis, in a multipolar world, today the need for collaboration between interested parties is reconfirmed, i.e. the stakeholders addressed by the conferences of the Davos Forum, to reprogram new models of prosperity and development economic.
“Addressing the current industry headwinds in the context of a new system of leveraging frontier technologies for innovation and private sector resilience”: this chapter too is only the consequence of the programmatic intentions examined so far. Digitization, the new dialogue that has been established especially in the last two years between artificial intelligence-AI and human needs, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution-4IR, in addition to the fragmentation of international political dialogue and environmental needs, today also imposes to the industry a repositioning of objectives, strategies and methods, so that the long-awaited resilience does not become an end in itself, but is translated into an objective to address so that the efforts we will have to make towards future socio-environmental prosperity are accepted and perceived as shared even on a global level.
"Addressing current social vulnerabilities in the context of a new system of work, skills and care”.
It is one of the critical points of the post-pandemic economic model, and underlines an apparently inexplicable contradiction: on the one hand, economic needs require recovery; the workforce responds to these needs with a great resignation, mass resignations, in search of simpler and more satisfying models of life, despite a resurgent inflation which we delude ourselves to respond to by resorting to state subsidies that have comforted us during the problematic, interminable periods of the health lockdown. Once again, the weakest link in the social chain is paying the price, the social strata who live in emerging markets and who until the arrival of the pandemic made their livelihood by producing goods and services at low cost that were of no interest more to mature economies. Also in this area, the conscience of the world's powerful to whom the WEF conferences are addressed is urged to prepare a new social contract which will relaunch investments not only in the industrial sector, but also in education, skills and health care and also that in the short term intercept the unsatisfied social needs at the basis of great designation, and thus lay the foundations for social mobility that gives certainty to the future of the global economy that we all perceive as a need.
“Addressing current geopolitical risks in the context of a new system of dialogue and cooperation in a multipolar world”. It was inevitable that the Russo-Ukrainian war would also become a contributing cause of today's economic situation.
After the beginning of the Eastern European conflict, devices such as the commercial one, which brought benefits to the international community, were used as weapons to penalize the adversaries and objectives that were foreseen to become a model of collaboration between states, such as climate change, today we find ourselves at the forefront of combat in an improper war, in a mediated, indirect form, between opposing blocs. The cooperative global order established in the last 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall has now dissolved and international geopolitics, relations between states, have regressed from a cooperative model to a competitive one. It is therefore indispensable, warns the WEF Davos, that the economic system imposed on us by resilience today recovers consensus, rather than developing antagonism among global stakeholders.
Credit Images World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico
