Post date: Oct 10, 2011 3:45:20 PM
Former British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, joins economy and foreign ministers to discuss the state of the global economy at the World Economic Forum in Abu Dhabi.
ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (OCTOBER 10, 2011) REUTERS - The World Economic Forum's (WEF) Summit on the Global Agenda opened on Monday (October 10) in Abu Dhabi to cautious words from officials and world leaders who emphasised the significant challenges that lie ahead.
"We are gathering here today at a very important time, with the scale of economic and political change witnessed in recent years. There need for new models to address the world's challenges have never been greater," said Sultan Bin Saeed Al-Mansouri, UAE's Economy Minister, in his opening speech.
Around 800 thinkers and business leaders gathered in the UAE's capital to come up with new solutions and models for the global economic crisis and to establish stable future economic structures.
The forum's founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, urged the delegates to look to the future and not to focus too much on the short-term.
"Meeting here, you the best minds from all over the world and from all disciplines. Our responsibility is not to look at the world in the normal or short-sighted way, but a chance to break out of conventional modes and traditional silos and to look in much more systemic, much more strategic and much more collaborative way at what's happening in the world today," said Schwab who set up WEF in 1971 with the main purpose of 'improving the state of the world'.
Abu Dhabi's meeting will also set the agenda for the main and the most high profile of the WEF forums in Davos in January 2012.
Also speaking at the opening ceremony was former Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer to the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, who gave a lively speech in which he stressed out the importance of banking on world globalisation in order to avoid strict protectionism,
"Global cooperation is even more necessary today because we are facing, in my view, a new but avoidable downturn and either we cooperate and write a new chapter in the history of international cooperation to deal with the economic problems that arise this year, or I am afraid that we will face a disorderly retreat into a new kind of protectionism that will damage our ability to build on the successes of globalisation over recent years," said Brown.
On Monday U.S. stock index futures rose on hopes a resolution to the euro zone's debt crisis was progressing, while the leaders of Germany and France promised to unveil new measures to solve the euro zone's debt crisis by the end of the month, as international pressure built for bold steps from Europe to avert a global economic backlash.
Brown said it was clear that Europe has to take drastic steps to save the single currency and pull itself out of the current political stalemate.
"It was America who in 2008 its banks were failing, I think people now recognise that Europe not only has a fiscal problem, but we have a banking problem and we have a growth and competitiveness problem and that the euro in its present form will not survive and will have to be reformed, that Europe's banking system will have to be recapitalised, that Europe will have to find a strategy to fund the different needs of the different countries that are finding it difficult to raise funds from the international markets," he said.
On Monday it was announced that a meeting of European Union leaders due to take place on October 17 is likely to be postponed, EU sources said, with ongoing uncertainty over how Europe will shore up its banks and cope with Greece's debt mountain.
The meeting, which was set to discuss the economic crisis, is now likely to happen at a later date, one of the sources told Reuters. A second source said the delay was, in part, because a report of EU and IMF inspectors about Greece's progress in tackling its debt problems is still outstanding.