Which country hosted the 2023 World Economic forum meeting ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q39 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q39 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer