LONDON, Jan 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The World Economic Forum’s gathering of global political and business elites in Davos, Switzerland took place online this year because of COVID-19 and was covered less avidly than usual by the media.
But, through its digital platform, the forum’s organisers laid out an agenda more ambitious than usual, invoking the need for a “great reset” around the world in the wake of the pandemic.
What does the reset look like? Here are key talking points you may have missed:
Billionaires benefit
The economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic lent a new urgency to this year’s WEF conference.
At least 225 million jobs vanished worldwide over the past year — losses that were four times larger than those endured in the 2008 global financial crisis — according to a report published Monday by the International Labor Organization.
Oxfam, the anti-poverty nonprofit, separately found that while the world’s 1,000 richest people recouped their losses during the pandemic in a matter of months, it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from its economic impact.
