 Welcome to this press conference announcing the 45th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. In a moment I'll be introducing some of my colleagues. My name is Adrian Monk. I'm the head of public engagement here at the forum. But before I do that I want to hand over to our founder and executive chairman Professor Klaus Schwab to introduce the overriding theme and expectations of this critical 2015 annual meeting. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Adrian you just used the right word critical year. 2015 in my opinion is a year where we are at the crossroads with two possible directions. A world of disintegration, of hate, of fundamentalism and on the other hand a world of solidarity, of cooperation and we have seen both of those worlds last week in Paris. The first world was represented through the Terrorist Act. The second world was represented by the demonstration of solidarity last Sunday. I feel there will be a number of events this year which we really will determine in which direction we are going. So it's a year of destiny for humankind. Of course this will be reflected in the program of our annual meeting in Davos. And I just would like to say some words why this meeting is different from other conferences. It's a true multi-stakeholder meeting bringing together the key stakeholders of human society which means the business community in a very representative way, a majority of the large global corporations but also of the smaller ones will be represented in Davos. We will hear more about it. The second stakeholder of course governments and international organizations. The third stakeholder, civil society, very strongly represented. Then we have to add the best expertise, science, academia and finally very important in Davos is the young generation. We want to remain young, we want to remain forward looking and that's the reason why we always invite a strong contingent of young global leaders and of global shapers. You know the global shapers is a group of the World Economic Forum, the community of leaders from all walks of life between 20 and 30 years old. And I mention it particularly because yesterday we had a small celebration to celebrate the 400th HAP of our global shapers. So we are represented now in 400 different cities around the world. So World Economic Forum's annual meeting is also different because it's interdisciplinary. When you look across the lake you see the WTO, the World HO and so on all doing very useful work but all being departmentalized. We know that the global issues are interrelated. That's the reason when you look through the list of participants you will see that practically every major government is represented by a multiple of ministers integrating the different facets which we have, there's a different issues which have to be looked upon in a holistic way. The annual meeting is also different because it is forward looking. Usually you have today conferences to manage crisis. We of course we will look at the crisis areas in the world but we would like to look also at the future. The world has changed substantially. We are in a post-past crisis world. That's the reason why we have chosen for, as a theme for the annual meeting 2015, the new global context. Now people ask me how do you define the new global context? There are many elements. I just want to mention three. We are definitely living now in a multipolar world and this of course has an impact on many facets of our global governance system. Second, in my opinion, we are living at the beginning of a new technological revolution. Just think of the future of the internet. The impact of the internet revolution is only partially felt today. We will have the revolution of robotics and so on and I could go on. And all this will change our social life, our economic conditions. The third element of the new context which I would like to mention is of course the question, what's next in our economic development? You have seen the World Bank predicted for next year, which should have been a year of accelerated growth, a global growth rate of only 3%. Now if you take the 3% and you compare it with the 5% which we had pre-crisis, it looks a difference of 2% but accumulated. It has enormous consequences because with 3% you double global GDP only every 24 years. With 5% you double global GDP every 14 years. So the consequences for social inclusion, for job creation are enormous. So what do I expect personally from the annual meeting? First, I expect that we understand the new context. We understand that we are living in a new world and we look for solutions in the framework of this new context. Second, I expect that with the presence of practically all areas, all conflict areas in the world, we can make a contribution to confidence building efforts, possibly even to reconciliation efforts. Third, what I expect in Davos is that we make progress with the 10 big challenges, global challenges, and you will hear more about it. We are presently engaged in and those 10 challenges all require a strong cooperation between the public and the private sector. Now you may ask us how does the forum differ from again the international organizations? I just can say we are serving the international community because for many facets of the program, for many of our initiatives, we have a cooperation with one or more of the international organizations here. The World Economic Forum has become an international institution for public-private cooperation. What we want to show in Davos is that we can go into the direction of collaboration and not into the direction of disintegration. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to introduce some of my colleagues here to talk about some of the themes that Professor Schwab mentioned. We're hearing from Rick Sammons, who heads our Centre for the Global Agenda on the theme of the meeting and the work the forum is doing on some of the key global challenges that Professor Schwab outlined. From Emma Loads, from our program development team, on the program innovations and some of the key personalities. From Helena Laurent, who heads business engagement here at the forum on the business participation and some of the big companies who will be present in Davos. From Philip Rusler, who heads the Centre for Regional Strategies on some of the political leaders from countries around the world. And finally from Saadia Zahidi, who heads our gender parity and human capital work. Saadia will be talking to us about the representation of civil society. But first I'm going to turn to Rick Sammons and ask Rick to outline for us some of the global challenges that relate to this theme of the annual meeting 2015, the new global context. Thank you, Adrian, and good morning everybody. Thank you for coming here to Koloni. As Professor Schwab has mentioned, we are an international institution for public-private cooperation and we over the years have been thinking ever more systematically about how an informal platform like ours that is cross-disciplinary, that involves different ministry portfolios as well as different stakeholders, public, private, academic, and the like, where does the work of the world use some concentrated additional public-private or multi-stakeholder cooperation that would make a difference? So this year's annual meeting, while framing the overall theme as the new context, the world is changing in many dimensions, we particularly within that overall theme have been identifying specific areas where we not only want to provide an interesting conversation and to enlighten and refresh people about the extent of change, we specifically want to create an environment in which these leaders come together and provide some added momentum to progress on those issues by particularly working on the public-private interface of them. Now, we've identified 10 which we think deserve our institutional emphasis because there is a very important added need for public-private cooperation. I'm not going to go through all 10 of them, but I'll highlight a few for you today. First, perhaps that I would highlight is an area where the forum has not previously had a strong program, at least in respect of public governance and cooperation, and that is the future of the Internet. In Davos next week, we will be launching a new institutional effort to make our cross-disciplinary multi-stakeholder platform available to advance progress and particularly to build trust on some of the very difficult and challenging aspects of Internet governance. As you will know from having observed events over the last year or two, there is a growing fear that the Internet, which is now a globally interoperable system that helps to enable human potential and facilitate commerce and investment, may balkanize, may fragment, and that's because of some declining trust about privacy considerations, security and surveillance, and the like. While there has been for years a very rigorous effort to build the technical governance of the Internet and there are specialized institutions that do that, now that the Internet has moved into being a major engine of commerce and investment and education and social and cultural exchange, these are raising policy issues, social policy issues, political, economic issues. While all countries have an interest in maintaining an integrated global system to maintain the scale of the Internet, at the same time countries have different preferences with respect to social policy and social issues, cultural matters, economic regulation, and the like. The challenge that the world is facing is how does one maintain trust in maintaining that global interoperability while still allowing the space for countries to be able to manifest their own policy preferences in this area. This cannot be done just with ICT or information and communications technology ministers or just by IT companies. This now affects many different industries as well as many different areas of policy and the forum as an informal cross-disciplinary platform thinks that we can make a potential contribution to the international community for specific projects as well as dialogues to strengthen confidence and trust in this area. So you will see in the program a range of sessions on cyber security and risk, on the Internet of Things, on various types of economic regulation in this domain. A second area that is an example of how we are seeking to use the institution to further international progress on challenges that require a public private dimension is in the domain of climate change. Over the last several years, we have been working closely with the United Nations, with key governments that have a stake in the outcome of this issue, to encourage some specific economic and technological cooperation on matters that would make a difference for emissions and that would build confidence in a policy environment that will scale the transformation in industrial and energy activity that's necessary to help the world lower its trajectory of emissions. This year will be no different. Next year in Paris at the end of the year, there will be another attempt at developing an international consensus on a forward framework for climate change. The French government has invited the World Economic Forum to work with it and to help build an outcome, a harvest of significant public private collective action initiatives in various areas of the economy that could make a difference to the world's progress on the issue. The third challenge that I would highlight is on infrastructure and development finance. The world has a very large appetite for mobilizing much more private investment for various economic development purposes, notably including infrastructure investment, which has a strong contribution to growth on the one hand and to living standards improvement because infrastructure investment is very employment intensive. The challenge has been that much of the private investment community has been reluctant to engage particularly in developing countries but even in developed countries in this domain because of the risk profile of many of these investments, the regulatory environment in particular, but other factors as well. And so we will have an infrastructure investor summit in Davos this year bringing together different parts of the investment value chain, different types of investors in the private sector with some of the public finance institutions like development banks, like the World Bank and others, to try to find solutions to create blended investment opportunities whereby the taxpayer does not have to finance dollar for dollar or Swiss franc for Swiss franc each investment but rather that public finance element can be targeted to change the risk profile for the investment such that most of the investment would be covered by private investors themselves. That is a good outcome potentially for the world, a much more efficient use of the capital for development purposes, for creating jobs and improving living standards than what has traditionally been the approach to development finance. So I cite just these three examples of areas in which we will be in Davos this year looking at the meeting not just as a meeting but as a point in an ongoing process where we try to facilitate much deeper, much more practical and concrete public private outcomes that contribute to the public good. Thank you, Adrian. Thanks, Emma. Your team has been taking this theme and turning it into some 250 plus sessions. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process and also about some of the highlights from that program? Absolutely. Thank you, Adrian. So how do we go about designing the annual meeting program? This is really a year round iterative process and we basically are collecting input constantly from our various networks like the Global Agenda Councils and our communities. And we are constantly connecting these ideas across disciplines and across different sectors to eventually sort of really curate what we feel is a series of questions that are absolutely relevant and critical for the agenda but also inject inspiration into the conversations as well. And this has led to over 280 sessions as part of the official program this year and really the majority of our participants are actively engaged in roles in the program. Over 100 of these sessions, you'll be able to watch live online and join the conversation via social media as well. So this is how we really go about designing the program. We can't do this alone. I think we've already mentioned that we engage a number of experts in that process. And actually I'm excited that we've got 13 Nobel Laureates from the worlds of science and economics joining us this year. We also engage various artists and cultural leaders as well. And in fact, we'll be kicking off our annual meeting 2015 this year with our 21st annual Crystal Awards, which really honors artists for their commitment to improving the state of the world. And just to name who the honorees are this year, we have Shigeru Ban, who's a Japanese architect for his architecture for the dispossessed. We're also honoring tenor Andrea Bocelli for his work with the disabled and excluded. And also Angelique Kijo, who's a singer-songwriter for her work supporting girls' education in Africa. So this sort of gives you a flavor of who's coming, but it's not just about putting the right issues with the right people together. It's also absolutely critical for us to ensure that we create the right environment to really help stimulate the kind of open dialogue and debate and really facilitate interaction and exchange as well. And this is where I think this year in particular, we've introduced a number of exciting new session formats and series to support this. And I'd like to just highlight a couple of these. Our Ideas Lab series. This is where we've worked with 12 leading universities and research institutes around the world to help bring really the latest developments and research that's going on in the labs into the conversations in Davos. For example, we're going to be looking at the future of robotics and what that means with Carnegie Mellon University. We're also looking at some of the latest developments in synthetic biology and how that's impacting not just business but society at large with the European Research Council. And another example is actually looking at the convergence of our physical and virtual worlds with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Another example is we've actually worked closely with a number of brain science experts on our human brain series, where we're going to be really looking at deconstructing some of the knowledge around neuroscience, mental illness, behavior. But it's not just about engaging experts. We've also made a really conscious effort. And I think it was mentioned already to really bring the next generation into the conversations too. And this is where our shaping Davos series this year is an innovation to the program, where we've worked in collaboration with our global shapers community around the world, who are young leaders under the age of 30 doing incredible work in their local communities. And this shaping Davos series is where we're going to be connecting live to 40 cities worldwide, from Gaza to Colombo to look at what are some of the local solutions going on? And how are they helping to tackle global challenges? In addition to this, we'll feature again our open forum where we will continue to invite the public to join a number of debates on current issues, everything from exploring the the role of religion and its connection to conflict. We're looking at how to close the employment gap. We're looking also at the future of democracies, just to name but a few. And then the last highlight I'd like to just mention is actually an initiative that we've launched this year called the Davos Challenge Walk for Education. And this is an initiative to help shorten the travel time for children in rural areas of many parts of the world to help them get to school. So for every six kilometers at Davos participant walks, UBS in collaboration with the World Bicycle Relief will be donating a specially designed bicycle to a school child in rural South Africa. So these are just a few of the highlights I'd like to share with you and also who we're looking forward to coming and how we design the program. Emma, thank you very much. We'll turn to Helena LeRan from Business Engagement to tell us about some of the business participation in Davos this year and also about some of the initiatives that'll take place with that business community. Thank you, Adrian. Thank you, everybody. Welcome to Colony. It's wonderful to have you with us at the start of a very busy week. We have more than 1500 business participants who will be joining us next week. And there is exceptional interest. We have participants joining us from all around the world. In fact, we are seeing that a third are from North America, a third from Europe, and a third from the rest of the world. In particular, the Mint, what's known as the Mint, that's Malaysia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, there's additional interest there, Japan, and not only from a regional perspective do we have diversity, also from a sectoral perspective. 25 sectors from agriculture to telecommunications. And within that, perhaps sectors that are really part of the changes in our lives right now. The global technology leaders, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Alibaba, Facebook, but also the technology pioneers in areas like Airbnb in the sharing economy, Bluebird Bio and Gene Therapy, Rethink Robotics, the creators of Baxter, of course, and then many others, renewable energies, cyber security, and all the way to home care for the elderly, for example. So really representing the issues that we are experiencing. Now, as you know, business participants come to Davos to meet with leaders from government, from NGOs, from civil society, from academia. They're there to share perspectives. They're there to work together to share solutions on the global challenges. And I'd like to share just three of those with you, because we're quite excited about the progress. The first is on agriculture. As I'm sure you know, by 2050, the world's population of nine billion will need 60% more food than we consume today. How do we meet that demand sustainably? In that realm, we have seen this year 2014, we've seen agriculture ministers in Southeast Asia ask the forum to provide a platform for them to form partnerships. This initiative is called Grow Asia. It's generated four country-led partnerships in Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Philippines. It's focused on finding partnerships that really drive and support small holder farmers and environmental sustainability. It will follow the model that we've seen in Grow Africa. That's work that we've done over a number of years, which has by now generated pledges of 10 billion in investment in 10 countries involving 160 companies, 350 organizations overall, and is within the context of our work on new vision for agriculture. In Davos, you'll see conversations answering that question about food security and agriculture that is cross-continent. Second on infrastructure, I think my colleague Rick shared that beautifully to give the context. Perhaps just to add to that, we're looking forward to that mix of participants at the Infrastructure Summit, which will also draw on work that's been done in Africa to support the program for infrastructure development in Africa. 51 mega infrastructure projects. An example of that is the Central Corridor, which goes from Tanzania to the DRC. It's about an 18 billion multimodal project. Examples from that of cross-border project management. How do you make that work effectively can be brought into that infrastructure summit. Finally, on anti- corruption and transparency. It's a hugely corrosive force. If we're talking about public trust, it's one of the key things that undermines public trust. The World Bank estimates that about a trillion is the cost of bribery alone is one trillion US dollars. This time last year, in this very press conference, we announced the launch of the partnering against corruption vanguard. A group of companies that commit to not just saying that we will combat corruption, but that they will drive it out of the system, that it is intolerable. This year, the B20, that's the group of companies, the official group of companies that provide input to the G20, have taken their recommendations and asked the Pachi vanguard to take those on and asked the forum to provide a platform ongoing so that those recommendations live and can be put into action. In Davos, we will have those CEOs talking about the new CEO imperative to drive corruption out of the system. We are very excited about the participation. We're very excited about the business involvement in the global challenges that we've talked about. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Elena. That theme of the new global context inevitably has a big geopolitical and political element. Philip, can you talk us through the political engagement in this year's annual meeting? Thank you again, ladies and gentlemen. A warm welcome from my side as well. The World Economic Forum is the foremost institution for public private cooperation and for sure we have a strong participation by the business leaders but we have as well a very strong and exciting participation by the public sector. We have more than 300 public figures, in particular around 50 heads of state and heads of government from all over the world and what is much more interesting rather than the record number we achieved this year is the broad variety of different portfolios. I mentioned this because that means that we can indeed create in all the different sectors, in all the different challenges, a real multi-stakeholder community and multi-stakeholder community means for us private sector as well as a public sector but private and public is not only public figure and business because private sector means business as well as civil society and public sector means politicians, public figures as well as international institutions and organizations and we have around 50 heads of these kind of institutions starting with WTO, WHO, until ICRC, ILO and so on. That shows that we can indeed create these kind of multi-stakeholder community and your context from a geopolitical point of view is indeed a real global challenge because in the Cold War era everybody has known to whom he belongs. Then we have the lifting of the iron curtain and then we all expect a beautiful time of peace and understanding. What we now see is a time of uncertainty maybe the question is there any leadership and a lot of crisis zones around the global and we try to deal with all the different challenges we try to contribute with for example three initiatives I would like to highlight for example the Geneva-Ukraine initiative. We bring people together which means business leader as well as politicians in regard of the Geneva-Ukraine initiative and to deal with the crisis. We have the breaking the impasse. We bring together Palestinian Israel business leader to contribute to the crisis as well. We always cover without any question the South China Sea we have for example Chinese Japan breakfast so we can be there we can contribute with our multi-stakeholder community and you for us is the geopolitical approach. We have two very important sessions on Saturday I will highlight it's the future of military given the total new kind of conflict as well as the future of intelligence services and all these initiatives and sessions have one thing in common they indeed again a multi-stakeholder gathering because to deal with all these geopolitical or geoeconomic sessions you need trust and the best way to create trust is to bring people together in these kind of multi-stakeholder community so we are very excited very proud that we have again a record number of public figures public officers and that we can contribute to all the issues given due to the new context. Philip thank you very much. I'm going to turn finally to my colleague Saadi Zahidi who leads our work in gender parity in human capital just to bring us up to date on civil society engagement in Davos this year and also some of the initiatives the forums engage within in her particular areas of interest. Thank you Philip you mentioned the multi-stakeholder nature of the forum as one of the core founding principles of our institution and one of those stakeholders is of course civil society. This year we'll have almost a hundred and fifty leaders from civil society joining us at Davos part of those are NGOs some of the big global household names that you're all familiar with Oxfam Amnesty International some of the other major organizations that I think we're all familiar with and that have played a key role in taking forward the work on human rights on education on environment on other sectors but we also have with us this year a number of the new players within the NGO and civil society world so that includes organizations like Avaz, organizations like change.org, organizations like Purpose that are using technology in a wholly different way to mobilize society in particular young people. A second community within the civil society groups is the faith leaders. I think we all know that part of the answer to extremism part of how we're going to be able to deal with it is to mobilize and engage faith leaders who have a new narrative about their their religions and about their faiths and are willing to engage with each other. So we'll be having all of the major faiths in the world represented at Davos. And finally a third aspect of the civil society communities is labor unions so we'll have a number of the global umbrella bodies but we'll also have some of the sectoral bodies so the building and woodworkers union the transport workers union and some others that will be present with us in Davos. As the world has brings in more women into leadership in positions in government and business civil society and other constituencies we of course reflect that too and we're pleased that this year the participation of women has been going up but at the same time I think we all know that there is a major gap around the world not just in terms of leadership but really at the core of our societies and of our economies. So that's the approach that we are taking at the forum treating this as a long-term global challenge that requires ongoing year-round work that we're dedicated to. We're doing that in several ways one is benchmarking gender gaps around the world so assessing how countries are performing making it very clear who's moving ahead who is not. This past year we launched our ninth global gender gap report and this particular year will be our tenth one so we have almost a decade worth of information on how progress is happening and why it's happening what are the policies that are making the changes. Another way we're looking at this issue is of course trying to mobilise stakeholders in certain countries running the right kind of experiments to try to see if we can help close those economic gender gaps. We're doing that in Mexico, Turkey, Japan and Korea and two years into these three-year task forces most of the countries have made progress. Prime Minister Abe of Japan has made this one of his goals for 2020 to try to get 30 percent women into leadership positions and in the other countries as well there has been progress. A third aspect of the work on gender is of course what is happening within different industry sectors. So how are employers reacting to this momentum for gender parity? In some industries there are a lot of women in the high-skilled incoming talent in other in other industries not so much. So we'll be launching this year at Davos our industry gender gap project which is going to try to get very specific about what to do about the challenges that are being faced by different industries as they seek to integrate female talent. And then finally moving on to employment more broadly since the last time we spoke to you that initiative has really grown and is trying to address various aspects of the employment skills and human capital challenge. On the one hand there is massive unemployment particularly affecting youth. Almost a quarter of the world's youth are neither in education nor in any form of employment. And on the other hand we're also seeing from business leaders a major scarcity of the talent that they need. So how do these two things come together? And we also know that these patterns are going to be exacerbated as technology disrupts labor markets. On the one hand it will create a lot more opportunity for new kinds of jobs and on the other hand it is going to disrupt some of the more traditional jobs and occupations that have existed. So our project is going to try to one benchmark human capital around the world. So how are countries investing in and deploying their human capital. Second try to understand what the future of jobs will look like. So how can we get specific about what the future of jobs might look like for 10 different industry sectors and 20 different economies. That's going to be a public good project that we're also launching at Davos this year and will hopefully hopefully provide the kind of public information that allows everybody to take better decisions. And then a third aspect is to try to understand what can actually be done in the short term. What are the measures we can take today without waiting for some of those disruptions to happen. We're launching again at Davos this year and publicly a few weeks later a report on disrupting unemployment. So business led solutions for trying to either close skills gaps, foster entrepreneurship or connect talent to markets better. And then finally there's a practical application of this work which is through our regional skills initiatives in the MENA region, in the Africa region and in India. Sorry, thanks very much. Thanks to all the colleagues here. One thing the forum isn't short of is experts. And so lucky enough for our question answer session to be joined by some of them in the front row. I would say that if you want to follow the annual meeting and you can't join us directly in Davos you'll be able to see over a hundred sessions broadcast online, live. You'll be able to follow us in Arabic, in Spanish, as well as in English through platforms like WeChat, through Facebook, through Twitter and a variety of different mechanisms. So you'll be able to keep up to date with all of the different issues and sessions that have been identified here this morning. If I can just ask for those in the room to show a hand if you have a question to tell us where you're from and we'll start with the gentleman just over there. We're going to get microphones to you so you'll have a chance to... I heard Tom Miles from Reuters. I was really hoping to put a question to Professor Schwab but he seems to have done a runner. So is he available to take a question? Professor Schwab is actually, oddly enough, in the run-up to this meeting rather busy. So he's moved on to another engagement but I have here plenty of colleagues who can answer in detail any question you have Tom. I really think he should be here to take questions. I think my colleagues from the media would agree with me that he's the figurehead of this. He's the guy we're going to quote, apologies, but we'd really like to hear from him the answers to our question. The question I'd like to put to him is, I mean he was talking about this as a year of destiny and the world is at this crossroads. But the big issues are issues about the underdog, like immigration, inequality, human rights which Bankimoon has said is fueling the terrorism problem. Is this really the right forum which is kind of famously closed and cozy for the rich and powerful? I know you've got some disruptors and some NGOs but I mean, is this really the place that those issues are going to be tackled? Well, let me just answer your first question and get one of my colleagues to come in on it. But I mean you're absolutely right that inequality is a key issue and as someone who's probably followed the forums work religiously in the previous years, you'll know that four years in a row is identified in our global risk report as one of the key issues and the forums played a really big part in helping to push that on to the global agenda. I think you're seeing with Winnie Binyama from Oxfam on the co-chairs how importantly we think that issue is. And I'm just going to turn to Rick to just come in on the inclusivity agenda that's going to be answering some of those questions. Sure. I mean, you say is it the right platform which, you know, has within it a premise that there is a right all inclusive platform for dealing with the range of poverty, exclusion, marginalization issues in the world. My response to you would be that these problems are so large that it's very clear even to those who've been working the longest in these issues from the public interest side or from the civil society that we need to mobilize resources from wherever we can find them. And so this platform does not presume to be the exclusive all encompassing answer to any particular solution. What it is, however, it's a platform where we try to encourage various parties who have expertise in resources that are relevant and can be brought to bear on major public challenges like the ones you've just highlighted to focus on them much more systematically. That's the general answer. The more specific one is that we will this year in response to request from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon be placing a special cross-cutting emphasis in the Davos program which will be reflected in over 40 different sessions on the post 2015 development agenda and the climate change agenda. So we'll have a range of different things. My colleagues have hit some aspects of this for agriculture, to corruption, to other aspects. So that's part one. Secondly, and here I do think we may be one of the most importantly appropriate platforms on the question of exclusion and inequality which you've emphasized. There, as you probably will know, there's been a rolling robust debate on this issue that has gathered force in the last couple of years. However, while everyone seems to agree that we need a more inclusive model of economic growth, there's been very little in the way of concrete policy guidance to emerge from that. The forum over the course of 30 years has developed a very particular world-class competence, and that is cross-country benchmarking and a dispassionate, rigorous dissection of how you can move economic policy in different dimensions to get toward better growth. What we have done, and we'll be releasing in the next several days, over the last year, given the emphasis on this in the meeting last year, an equality issue, we have put together a similarly rigorous dispassionate effort to dissect what are the different levers you can pull as a society and your economic policy to render your growth model much more socially inclusive. And it is the most wide spectrum, wide angle view of the different possibilities in this regard. We will issue that as a discussion paper as a way not only to acknowledge that it's a legitimate issue, but to move the debate into a much more concrete domain. So bottom line is I've just given you a couple of examples across different areas of development and inclusion. The forum is a relevant platform. It is a place that is attempting to compel the attention of leaders of various sectors of society to work much more rigorously on this. And indeed, in certain cases where we have a competence to provide some thought leadership in this domain as well. So I think, yes, it's an absolutely appropriate platform to engage these issues. Tom, I know you've got a second question. There's a couple of people I want to bring in as well. So can I just hear your second question? And we'll take in. It's just about people who are coming. I wonder if there's anybody from either the Syrian government or opposition movements that are coming in any exiled Russian dissidents such as Holikovsky or Kasparov. Sure, thanks. Gentleman at the back and somewhere in the middle. Thanks. Simeon Bennett from Bloomberg News. I agree with Tom's comment about Professor Schwab. I should just point out, Tom, that both Bloomberg and Reuters will be interviewing Klaus before the annual meeting. So you'll have plenty of opportunities to put questions to him then. But coming with your question. A question about security, just in the light of events in Paris last week. Obviously, we know that the forum has very tight security. Anyway, but are you taking any extra measures in light of what happened last week? We don't talk about security specifically. That's something we do in collaboration with the Swiss government who host us. If you've any specific questions on it, then my colleague Alois Fingi can answer them in more detail. But I would just say we typically would refer you to the Swiss government for their response. They've always provided extremely thorough and comprehensive security arrangements for the annual meeting, dealing with a range of crises over some 40 years. So we've always been very grateful for their support. And I think people see Davos as being somewhere that is well catered for in terms of security. Sure. Lady, yeah. Chinese journalist from Tsinghua have two questions for Mr. Summons. The first one, as you mentioned, the 10 global challenges. So could you explain, based on word standards, did you select the 10? And do you think the upcoming Davos meeting will found effective solutions to all of them? The second question is about the Chinese economy. Given the ongoing economic reforms taking place in China, what's your expectations for China's economy and its outlook? Thank you. OK. So, Tom, I'm going to direct you afterwards to Merrick Dusek on those specific questions about attendance. He heads up our Middle Eastern engagement. In terms of 10 global challenges, Rick, the process by which you evaluate those challenges and how you put together the forum's work in respect of all of them, just the probably the big picture. And maybe if I can turn to Philip afterwards just for a few words on Premier Li Keqiang's engagement and the prospects for the Chinese economy. So. Thank you very much for your question. We, as in everything we do here, it's a combination of demand by our constituents and members what they are interested in engaging in on the one hand. And on the other hand, where we as an international institution think there's a particular opportunity for contribution. And so we apply that those two filters to a range of questions that have come up over the years in our meetings. And for the time being, this is not a fixed permanent list, but for the foreseeable future, we thought that these are areas where in particular there's a need for an added component of public-private cooperation. We fully respect the role that the intergovernmental processes play. But we believe that in each one of these 10 areas, there is a piece of progress that hasn't yet been fully captured because we haven't organized ourselves properly across different disciplines and different stakeholders. So that's basically our thought process, if you will. Will we have solutions to all of them and Davos candidly not, of course? However, what I do want to emphasize is that, and I think this is significant when it goes to Professor Schwab's opening points, is that it's important not to view Davos as a one-off single event. Maybe 30 years ago, in the early years of the organization, it was widely perceived that way as the world's most important, and it still is the world's most important leader-level multi-stakeholder summit. But in fact, Davos, as you've heard from all of my colleagues, is part of an institution. That is to say, it's part of ongoing processes that try to build progress, that have milestones during the course of the year and indeed over a couple of years. So we're not looking ourselves to produce specific outcomes at the end of the meeting next week. That end the story. We're looking to produce solutions that we build on going forward. And I'm happy offline, bilaterally, to give you a little bit more concrete illustrations of what we do and do not expect to happen by the end of the week. On China, just lastly, it's really not our place, you know, it's the place of IMF and other institutions to render opinions about the future course of the Chinese economy. So I would prefer not to say anything institutionally, it's just not the role that we tend to play. We have both the Governor of People's Bank of China, I think, and Premier Li Keqiang in China. Can you just tell us a little bit about the Chinese engagement in Davos this year? Yes, so the annual meeting is a great opportunity to frame the entire discussion over the course of the next year or incoming year. So when the chairman mentioned the economic outlook and the reduced growth, we have to expect. And so that leads automatically to the question, what about the growth in China? So we are very happy that the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will make the opening speech on Wednesday. And I'm sure he will talk about the economic development, the currency, but as well the entire development, even some addressing of our global challenges. Thank you. Lady there, and there's someone at the back and gentlemen in the middle. Let's try and take three if we can. Squeeze everyone in. Merci. En français, si c'est possible. Sinon, parce que mon anglais n'est pas très bon. Blécyque de l'Agence France-Presse. Je pose une question concernant les événements de Charlie Hebdo et la Manif. Dans quelle mesure ces événements ont-ils bouleversé l'agenda du Forum économique mondial? Monsieur Schwab en a légèrement parlé. Il a dit, bon, il y a quelque chose qui s'est passé. On est à la croisée des chemins. Mais concrètement, qu'est-ce qui a changé par rapport au programme initial? OK, question regarding Charlie Hebdo and the programme. Thank you, gentlemen. My name is Peter Kenyo from Independent Newspapers of South Africa. I see you, it relates to this last question actually. I see you've got an open forum section here on religion of pretext for conflict and you've got Archbishop Mahoba from South Africa and the Muslim academic. I'm just wondering if you have been leaving the role of religion in society as too peripheral if you consider that you've got hundreds of children massacred in Pakistan and we've seen Nigeria and now Charlie Hebdo. Is it going to remain a peripheral issue and how do you think you can engage more in it? OK, and do we have one last question at the back? No? OK. So just to take both of those questions just beginning, just a reminder, I suppose, from Digi into forum history, actually participation by faithly, this has always been a strong part of the forum. In fact, if you go back to the 1970s, Don Camaro, the famous liberation theologist, came to Davos and played a very important part in reminding some of the people there present of the responsibilities they owed to the community he represented. So there's actually a very long tradition in Davos of acknowledgement of that through leaders like Archbishop Tutu and a whole variety of different faiths represented which Saadia can probably go into far more detail on. In terms of the events in Paris, we're very grateful for the presence in Davos of President Hollande and apart from the evident shock and of all terrorist attacks, I think the program of the forum is focused on the kind of long-term key challenges that we've been outlining here today. It's not a forum that responds to current events and to the everyday breaking news agenda. The underlying issues that we've referred to are all part of this tapestry of events that we've laid out this morning. I think, though, we can perhaps talk a little bit more about France's engagement in the meeting, perhaps Philip and also Saadia perhaps just to mention the role of faith in the annual meeting. So the headline New Context means also fight against violent extremism. So we will have on Friday, indeed, President Hollande, beginning in the plenary with a huge speech. Then we'll have the King of Jordan to have the same discussion issue. We also have then the Premier of Iraq and at the end of the day, we will have John Kerry. And so the entire Friday is related to the purpose fight against violent extremism. Thank you. Saadia, can you just say a few words about the engagement of religion, the role it plays in the kind of agenda in doubles? Sure. I mean, one aspect is, of course, that we are engaging a number of different faith leaders and, as I mentioned earlier, from all of the world's major faiths. A second aspect is, of course, the issue of faith itself and how that feeds into extremism. We're going to be having a number of public and private dialogues that are going to try to address this, both within the faith community itself as well as engaging others' stakeholders because I think for 80% of the world ascribes to one faith or the other, and so there are going to be other leaders present that because of their own faith conviction will also be joining those conversations. And then, of course, we'll be integrating faith leaders into the broader conversations around extremism, around employment, around education. Because, of course, while faith or the provision of faith may be one part of the answer to extremism, there's also the fact that there are large numbers of disenfranchised youth that are not in education, that are not in employment, and so we're also going to be touching upon those issues and engaging faith leaders within that. Thank you. We're running out of time. There will be time afterwards for some one-to-one follow-up on some of those issues. Can we just see if there's anyone with a question outstanding before we go into one-to-ones and draw things to a close? Thank you all very much indeed. We look forward to seeing you in Davos next week and thanks for joining us here this morning. Thank you.