Video: Professor Klaus Schwab on Davos 2015

The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2015 will take place from 21–24 January in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.

In this video, Professor Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, talks about the theme of this year’s meeting, The New Global Context, and the main issues that will be discussed in Davos.

You can watch the full video at the top of this page. Here are some key quotes from the clip:

On restoring trust

We will look in Davos at all the burning issues like geographical conflicts, the future of the economy, social inclusion, and so on. But the key factor is trust. How can we restore trust in our future in our institutions?

Trust is not only related to ethical behaviour. Trust means a leadership responsibility, where you respond to the needs of those who have trusted you with leadership, and here we have to start in Davos. We are leaders in Davos, so we should show our trustworthiness in caring for those who are outside the Congress hall.

We also have to restore trust between the public sector and the private sector. As we have seen in statistics, the trust between those parts of society never have been as low as it is now.

On the New Global Context

We also have to recreate confidence in our future. Pessimism has become too much the zeitgeist of our time. We have so many opportunities, but we have to recognise that the world has fundamentally changed, and that’s the reason why we have given to this Annual Meeting the theme of the new context.

So we will explore, what are the fundamental forces at work technologically, socially, economically which require new dimensions for our decision making and here I think we should particularly concentrate on the opportunities, and not only on the threats.

Image: The Congress Centre in Davos, Switzlerland, is seen from the air in this World Economic Forum picture.