BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 39 of 142

Correct — B, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting for 2023 was held at Davos-Klosters in the Swiss canton of Graubünden from 16 to 20 January 2023, under the theme 'Cooperation in a Fragmented World'. Switzerland is not merely the venue but the Forum's home: the WEF was founded on 24 January 1971 by the German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, originally as the European Management Forum, and it is registered as a Swiss non-profit foundation with its headquarters at Cologny in the canton of Geneva. The Annual Meeting has been held at the Alpine resort of Davos almost every January since, drawing some three thousand members and invited participants — heads of government, chief executives, economists, academics and journalists — across roughly five hundred sessions in about five days. The Forum has left Switzerland exactly once in its history: the 2002 meeting was moved to New York City as a gesture of solidarity after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Two other recent disruptions are worth holding, because they are what makes a candidate hesitate about 2023 specifically. The January 2021 in-person meeting was cancelled outright in the pandemic, and the 2022 edition, deferred in late December 2021 because of the Omicron variant, was eventually held at Davos from 22 to 26 May 2022 rather than in January — the meeting at which Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a special address and no Russian delegation attended for the first time since 1991. The 2023 meeting was therefore the first to return to the ordinary January slot after three irregular years, and it returned to the ordinary place. Note that the stem prints 'World Economic forum' with a lower-case f; that is the Commission's own typography, reproduced here as printed, and it changes nothing about the body being named.

• (a)Germany — The most reasoned wrong answer, because the Forum's founder Klaus Schwab is German and it began life as the European Management Forum. Germany does host major gatherings that get confused with Davos — the Munich Security Conference every February, and the G7 summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria in June 2022 — but it has never hosted the WEF Annual Meeting.
• (c)Canada — Nothing connects Canada to the Forum's Annual Meeting. Canada is a G7 member and hosted that summit at Charlevoix in Quebec in 2018, which is the likeliest source of the association, but the WEF has held its Annual Meeting outside Switzerland only once, in New York in 2002.
• (d)Japan — The sharpest trap of the three, because Japan really did host a headline summit in 2023 — the 49th G7 summit at Hiroshima from 19 to 21 May 2023. A candidate who remembers 'a big international meeting in 2023' without remembering which one can be pulled straight to this option. The G7 rotates among its members; the WEF does not rotate at all.

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss-registered non-profit foundation and think tank, not an intergovernmental body: it has no treaty, no member states and no power to bind anyone. It is funded mainly by about a thousand partner corporations, and it works by convening — putting business leaders, ministers, regulators, academics and civil-society figures in the same room. Its visible outputs are the Annual Meeting at Davos each January, a set of regional and industry meetings held elsewhere during the year, and a stream of flagship reports: the Global Risks Report released just before Davos, the Global Competitiveness Report, the Global Gender Gap Report, the Travel and Tourism Development Index and the Future of Jobs Report. Those reports are the WEF's main appearance in Indian competitive examinations, which is why candidates must be able to tell a WEF publication from an IMF, World Bank or UNDP one — the World Economic Outlook, for instance, belongs to the IMF and not to the Forum despite the similar name.

This question is decided by one fact and one habit. The fact is that the Annual Meeting is fixed at Davos, so 'which country hosted the WEF meeting' has the same answer in almost every year the examiner can ask about. The habit is not to confuse the Forum's stationary annual meeting with the summits that rotate: the G7 and the G20 move host country every year by design, while the WEF stays put. Build the year-by-year table for the rotating bodies and leave the WEF out of it — 2022 G7 Germany, 2023 G7 Japan, 2023 G20 India, 2024 G20 Brazil — and the confusion disappears. The one exception to memorise is 2002 in New York; the two irregularities to memorise are the cancelled January 2021 meeting and the May 2022 meeting. If a question ever names a year and a non-Swiss country together, 2002 is the only pairing that can be right.

• The WEF Annual Meeting 2023 ran at Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, from 16 to 20 January 2023 on the theme 'Cooperation in a Fragmented World'.
• The Forum was founded on 24 January 1971 by Klaus Schwab as the European Management Forum and is headquartered at Cologny in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland.
• Davos itself is an Alpine resort in the canton of Graubünden in eastern Switzerland; the meeting gathers around 3,000 participants across roughly 500 sessions.
• The only Annual Meeting ever held outside Switzerland was in 2002, in New York City, after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
• The 2022 meeting was postponed from January and held at Davos from 22 to 26 May 2022; it was the first since 1991 with no Russian delegation present.

• Assuming the WEF rotates its host country the way the G7 and G20 do. It does not; Davos is effectively permanent.
• Answering Germany because Klaus Schwab is German and the Forum began as the European Management Forum.
• Confusing the WEF's Annual Meeting with the World Social Forum, a separate anti-globalisation gathering that genuinely does move country to country.

BPSC asks this as a one-line current-affairs recall — which country, which city, which body released which report — and rewards a candidate who has simply memorised Davos and Switzerland together. UPSC has historically asked the same material one step sideways: where Davos is, who founded the Forum, which award or report belongs to it, and in the pair format where 'Davos: Denmark' is offered as a plausible-looking mismatch.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Global Gender Gap Report is published by

  • (a)the United Nations Development Programme
  • (b)the World Bank
  • (c)the World Economic Forum
  • (d)the International Labour Organization

  Answer(c) the World Economic Forum — it has issued the Global Gender Gap Report annually since 2006, scoring countries on economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting has been held outside Switzerland on only one occasion. That meeting was held in

  • (a)London
  • (b)New York
  • (c)Singapore
  • (d)Cape Town

  Answer(b) New York — the 2002 Annual Meeting was shifted there in solidarity after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Every other Annual Meeting has been held in Switzerland, at Davos.