Last Day at Davos

February 1st, 2010

“I know first-hand in Kenya, where farmers have seen their income grow by as much as 30% since they started using mobile banking technology and one World Bank study found that a typical developing country, a 10% increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones led to an almost 1% increase in per capita GDP. Put this into context, that would for India translate into almost $10Billion a year.”

Hillary Clinton, Sec of State

The last day has been good. Wrap up with the technology pioneer WEF team. We gave them feedback on how they could improve the program. Mostly about communications and preparation before the event. They have a buddy system but some buddy’s were more helpful than others. It is essential that you prepare for the event ahead of time since once you are here there is too much going on to set up all the meetings you want on the spot.

We also recommended trying to get the technology pioneers a little more involved in the larger events. We discussed the value of that to WEF and to the pioneers. It was clear that making that happen was non-trivial. They coached us on how to get ourselves more engaged with WEF and an indirect result could be more involvement with sessions.

I went to two sessions – one was a CNBC live broadcast on Gender equality in the workforce. The picture above is the CEO of Coke talking about how Coke is aggressively pursuing more women at all levels. He seemed genuine and committed. That being said there are many complex issues with workplace, culture, and home. Others on the panel were COO of Facebook, CEO of Booz. Good job for traditional global inc. issues, not as great on international issues or SME issues. Nothing about access to capital.

The other was the Global Economic Outlook. What follows are my notes. Very brief and may be of interest. I am sure you can go online and get more comments from WEF. Larry Summers was articulate but talk about unemployment of MEN in the US. They should get someone to media train this guy. It was embarrassing that someone that high up in the US government was so politically incorrect.

A good day. I am very tired from a long week but this was the best conference I have ever been to. All the technology pioneers felt the same.

—————————-

Notes from Global Economic Outlook session.

India. Growth is strong. need policies to bring down deficite – slowly. Complex. Investment needs to be increased. Financial reform.

Japan. Change structure of economy. Lehman shock gives us the opportunity. More focus on local consumer. Capitalism needs reform to prevent these speculation drivers of growth (subprime crisis). International regulation.

China. 8.7 percent. Consumption growth is strong. Regional disparity getting better. Structure change and deal with over capacity. 33 percent investment growth. 15 percent consumption growth – need this to get larger – closer to 33. Overcapacity big issue. Pure export driven has to change. Structural issue. Need international cooperation.

DB CEO – legacy assets – still may be an issue. Regulatory issues – have to deal with these. Regulators part of the solution.

US – Summers. Statistical recovery, human recession. Moderate gdp growth rate expected. Unemployment is a Big issue. 1 in 5 not working. Recovery will mean 1 in 7 or 8. Job creation and credit access esp for med size business is key. Optimistic about US commitment to global economy (immigrants implied here)

Strauss – Kahn. Improving re-balancing. Growth – now looking at india and china to fuel growth. US will not. Corporate cross border banking.