For two years the world has struggled to get to grips with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its tragic consequences. The focus of many governments and business leaders has inevitably been on the short term political, societal, health and economic implications of the crisis. However, from the outset there were others who believed the pandemic could be a catalyst for re-structuring the entire functioning of the global economy and with it, inevitably, ‘globalization’. The World Economic Forum (WEF), the non-governmental lobby organisation under the leadership of Klaus Schwab, has led the calls for change and dubbed this proposed transformation ‘The Great Reset’.
According to the WEF, the pandemic offers an opportunity to ‘improve’ the economic system and replace it with ‘responsible capitalism’.
The aspiration has three main themes:
- The encouragement of stakeholder capitalism i.e. a system which delivers ‘fairer’
outcomes - Underpinning economic development with sustainability and
- Harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)
