Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, is launching a rival to the World Economic Forum’s annual gatherings in Davos, aimed at addressing a changed global order in which China’s rise challenges the primacy of the US.
The financial data billionaire has enlisted two long-term China watchers, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, to design the New Economy Forum. They have partnered with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a self-described “think-tank with Chinese characteristics” which is overseen by the central planning ministry and led by former vice premier Zeng Peiyan. The forum will hold its first two-day meeting in Beijing in November.
Davos has become a shorthand for a global elite of business leaders and policymakers since Klaus Schwab’s WEF held its first meeting in the Swiss ski resort in 1974. But Mr Bloomberg told the Financial Times his event would be more focused on getting private and public sector leaders from developed and emerging economies to work together on finding “actionable solutions” to challenges from economic inclusion to environmental sustainability.