Global Issues: Poverty and Development - Davos

The latest Davos meeting - the World Economic Forum - is of obvious relevance to the ‘Poverty and Development’ topic in regards to issues such as global inequality and how it might be tackled.

The BBC has a special Davos 2011 page with up to date coverage and comment.

The is an excellent article in the Guardian by Tim Garton-Ash - The optimists of Davos past now face a world whose script has gone awryHe contends that liberal capitalism’s crisis has led to neither total collapse nor great reform. But others are beating the west at its own game. Here is a brief exerpt: Western capitalism survives, but limping, wounded, carrying a heavy load of debt, inequality, demography, neglected infrastructure, social discontent and unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, other variants of capitalism – Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian – are surging ahead, exploiting the advantages of backwardness, and their economic dynamism is rapidly being translated into political power. The result? Not a unipolar world, converging on a single model of liberal democratic capitalism, but a no-polar world, diverging towards many different national versions of often illiberal capitalism. Not a new world order, but a new world disorder. An unstable kaleidoscope world – fractured, overheated, germinating future conflicts.