Participants meet amid concerns over global economic outlook
| Author | Vasuki Shastry |
| Position | IMF External Relations Department |
| Pages | 53-55 |
Page 53
In the last week of January, several heads of state, chief executives of some of the world's largest corporations, academics, and senior officials of international organizations met in Davos, a small Swiss Alpine town, to discuss the state of the world. The occasion was the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based foundation that famously serves as a vehicle to bring together governments, the corporate sector,multilateral institutions, and civil society. The IMF was represented by First Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer. Also present in Davos this year were hundreds of people protesting globalization.
They believed the main players in the international community are not acting in the best interests of the world.
Security, both inside and outside the Congress Center, was exceptionally tight, but this only added to the uncertainty of the participants. If euphoria was the defining feature of the 2000 Davos meetings, which took place against a backdrop of an unprecedented surge in the share values of technology stocks, this year's meeting was characterized by a sense of gloom. The reasons for this were not hard to uncover. The meeting's four main themes were a slowing U.S. economy and an uncertain global economic outlook;Page 54 the pros and cons of globalization (with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Fischer emphasizing the benefits of open markets and free trade, while representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claimed that globalization disproportionately benefited rich nations and rich people in poor nations); poverty reduction and debt relief; and efforts to start a new round of multilateral trade negotiations.
At a session entitled "Steadying the Course of the Global Economy," Fischer noted that world economic growth is weakening, with key factors being a slowing U.S. expansion and a waning of recovery in Japan. However, Europe's growth prospects for 2001 were promising, he said, and this could help prevent a major global slowdown.
Nevertheless, global growth projections for 2001 are being revised downward, Fischer said. In September 2000, the IMF forecast global growth of 4.2 percent for 2001, but it is now revising its projections, with a new forecast likely to be in the range of 3.5 percent.
"We are a long way from global recession," Fischer...
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