| Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director

The Centre for the New Economy and Society aims to shape prosperous, resilient and equitable economies and societies that create opportunity for all. It provides leaders with an integrated platform to understand socioeconomic trends and to shape a better future.

The Centre and its Partners create insights, action frameworks and multistakeholder initiatives in five interconnected thematic areas:

– Economic growth, revival and transformation

– Work, wages and job creation

– Education, skills and learning

– Diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice

– Global risks

This work now impacts the lives and livelihoods of millions of people globally, and one of the World Economic Forum’s ambitions is to reach more governments, businesses and individuals with tangible opportunities.

The past two years saw economies, workplaces and communities ravaged by a global pandemic. That has been followed by the shock of war – a violent conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. Both global shocks have negatively affected the ability of economies to grow and improve living standards and have increased social polarization within countries, disrupted jobs and education, increased the cost of living and, without action, will leave long-lasting repercussions for poverty and inequality within and between countries.

The Centre’s work is ever more vital and to achieve impact, it leverages a plurality of methods to suit the complexity of the present. The approach is underpinned by key insight products, such as reports on gender, jobs and social mobility, as well as data tools to support evidence-based decision-making, keeping a focus on facts over ideology. The Centre develops action frameworks, such as Country Accelerators, that serve as a bridge between global best-in-class ideas and tangible implementation and action in countries and sectors. In addition, the Centre’s leadership alliances and consortia maintain strong links between the public, private and civil society sectors and between diverse countries and industries, proactively combatting silos over the course of the crises.

These impact methods support a growing coalition of leaders and their organizations in their efforts to keep a strong focus on the economic recovery and the urgent human capital investments and market innovations so crucial to future resilience.

The Centre’s strategic direction is guided by an Advisory Board, comprised of nearly 30 leaders from business, government and civil society. The board met four times in 2021-2022, focusing its guidance specifically on the economic recovery, building a new inclusive, resilient and sustainable growth agenda, embedding inclusion into the new economy, recovering losses in jobs and education, and leveraging the full power of the Centre to invest in human capital development.

Five of the Forum’s C-suite communities expanded their engagement, namely the Chief Economists, Chief Human Resources Officers (CHRO), Chief Learning Officers, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers and Chief Risk Officers from nearly 400 organizations. These groups continued to serve as peer learning communities for leaders grappling with similar challenges and to co-create new insights and action frameworks for the public good.

During the year, the Centre hosted several Global Future Councils, expert communities composed of over 100 leading thinkers and practitioners, to guide planning towards 2025 in six key areas: economic growth and recovery; fiscal and monetary policy; work, wages and job creation; education and skills; equity and social justice; and frontier risks. Their work is consolidated in the “Building Back Broader” white paper, a guide to driving greater quality growth and expanding opportunity for all in the economies of tomorrow.

In 2021-2022, nearly 30 new businesses joined as core Partners of the Centre for the New Economy and Society, bringing the total to over 150, indicating the increasing relevance of the socio-economic agenda to the business community. More broadly, across the Centre’s various insight partnerships, action initiatives and leadership alliances and consortia, over 400 businesses were involved, covering a plurality of sectors.

Nearly 30 governments engaged with the Centre through its Country Accelerators model, aimed at fostering innovation, skills, education, jobs and gender parity nationally. During the year, eight new governments joined the Global Accelerator Model with the launch of Accelerators in Cambodia (focusing on skills), Kazakhstan (focusing on gender), South Africa (focusing on education), Bangladesh (focusing on education), Japan (focusing on gender), Mexico (focusing on gender), Saudi Arabia (focusing on innovation) and the United Arab Emirates (focusing on the markets and jobs of tomorrow). In addition, the Government of Finland joined as a trusted Knowledge Partner for education.

Over 30 international organizations, civil society organizations, labour unions and university partners also formed part of the sphere of core engagement with the Centre to shape action and policy change on today’s most critical socio-economic issues.

Philanthropic organizations partner with the Centre and generously provide funding to support crucial work. In 2021-2022, five new funding agreements were signed and/or extended for education, skills, social mobility, and racial and social justice, allowing staff dedicated to specific projects to be hired and supporting the overall advancement of the Centre’s agenda.

The triple disruption of the pandemic’s aftermath, geopolitical change and technological acceleration formed the backdrop to the Centre’s work in 2021-2022, which aimed to address both short- and long-term responses. Select examples of the Centre’s work over the year follow:

The 17th edition of The Global Risks Report helped accelerate the identification of global risks so business, government, civil society and individuals gain a greater understanding of short-, mid- and long-term global risks, leading to active support for sustainable risk mitigation strategies. The report indicates that environmental risks have the potential to yield the most damage to people and the planet, followed by societal challenges, such as livelihood crises. “Debt crises” and “geo-economic confrontations” also appear in the top 10 risks by severity over the next 10 years.

Launched at the Jobs Reset Summit in June 2021, the Good Work Alliance is a global, cross-industry initiative to leverage the individual and collective power of companies towards building a healthy, resilient and equitable future of work. It embeds relevant definitions and standards of what constitutes “good work” across in-person, hybrid and virtual work as well as specific goals that companies commit to pursuing as part of their talent practices. The alliance aims to cover both employees and contingent workers. In May 2022, it launched the Good Work Framework to develop metrics and reporting guidelines for companies wishing to make progress towards a good job economy. The framework has thus far been piloted by 13 organizations globally, representing 1.2 million employees and their related supply chains.

In parallel, the Centre’s white paper, “Jobs of Tomorrow: The Triple Returns of Social Jobs in the Economic Recovery”, found that investing in education, health and care jobs can yield a triple dividend: boosting economic activity, expanding employment opportunities and generating social mobility. New modelling of the US economy suggests that every dollar invested would generate more than a twofold return: investing $1.3 trillion in the social jobs of tomorrow could unlock $3.1 trillion in GDP returns and create 11 million jobs by 2030.

During the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, the CHRO community mobilized the Refugee Employment and Employability Initiative. The initiative tested its work in Europe to support Ukrainian refugees and created the basis for system-wide global support from employers to refugees that extends across conflict contexts.

Additionally, the Jobs Consortium, a leading group of CEOs and ministers championing productive employment, growth in the jobs of tomorrow, new standards in the workplace and better wages for all in the economic recovery, was launched at the Annual Meeting 2022.

The Reskilling Revolution initiative aims to provide better education, skills and economic opportunities to 1 billion people by 2030. Over 250 businesses, along with over 20 governments and international organizations as well as leading academic experts, were involved over the last year. By its second anniversary at The Davos Agenda in 2022, the initiative had reached 102 million people with new skills, and the Reskilling Revolution Champions had agreed on the initiative’s 2022-2024 strategy. Among its projects, the Closing the Skills Gap Accelerators model was adopted by 11 countries and the Closing the Education Gap Accelerators model was launched at the Sustainable Development Impact Summit 2021 in September, with South Africa as the founding accelerator and Bangladesh joining during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2022 highlights both progress towards and backsliding on gender parity within and across countries. The time to closing the global gender gap stood at 136 years in 2021, a one-generation loss compared to 100 years in 2020, due to lost employment in the sectors hardest hit by workforce reductions, the disproportionate burden of care, and the unbalanced pipelines of male and female talent in growing sectors. The report is a widely used reference point for business, civil society, media and policy-makers, including in the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators, a public-private collaboration model to address economic gender parity, already adopted in 12 economies. In 2021-2022, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Japan and Mexico adopted the model.

The Partnering for Racial Justice in Business initiative is a global coalition of organizations and C-suite leaders committed to leveraging their individual and collective power to build equitable and just workplaces for professionals with under-represented racial and ethnic identities. More than 60 leading multinational businesses are operationalizing and coordinating commitments to eradicate racism in the workplace and set new global standards for racial equity in business. They worked together and with public-sector leaders during the year to advocate for inclusive policy change.

Launched in March 2022, the Global Parity Alliance is a cross-industry group of companies taking action to accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the workplace and beyond. The alliance seeks to drive better and faster DE&I outcomes, by sharing proven best practices and practical insights on creating equitable work opportunities, promoting supplier diversity and launching inclusive products and services. This year, the alliance worked to share identified DE&I lighthouses publicly and support their widespread adoption.

Explore Centre for the New Economy and Society initiatives here →