World Economic Forum 2017: Donald Trump Skips Davos Meeting, Oxfam Releases New Report

As the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) kicks off Monday, the ski town of Davos, in the Swiss Alps, hosts more than 3,000 prominent participants, including for the first time President Xi Jinping of China and the new Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres.

Originally founded as an academic, economic and management conference titled the European Management Symposium by academic Klaus Schwab in 1971, the conference evolved into its present day avatar — the World Economic Forum — in 1987. This year’s theme outlined by the 78-year-old founder and executive chairman Schwab is “Responsive and responsible leadership.”

“In 2017, I see four primary objectives to respond to major societal concerns: first, to strengthen economic growth; second, to make market-based systems more inclusive; third, to master the Fourth Industrial Revolution; and finally, to reimagine international cooperation,” Schwab was quoted saying ahead of the four-day conference that begins Tuesday and ends Friday.

This year’s guest list includes monarchs, world leaders, and titans of industry. Prominent names include King Philippe of Belgium and his wife, Queen Mathilde, Norway's Crown Prince Haakon and Princess Mette-Marit, political leaders such as newly elected British Prime Minister Theresa May, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, Columbia's President Juan Manuel Santos, and many others, according to USA today.

Though he is expected to be a big talking point, President-elect Donald Trump will not be making an appearance at WEF this year, due to his inauguration Jan. 20. Although many significant members of the Trump transition team are also expected to miss the conference, including former Goldman Sachs president and current head of National Economic Council Gary Cohn, hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, named as an assistant to the president-elect is expected to attend the conference.

An unidentified senior member of Trump's transition team told Bloomberg the perceived backlash generated by being associated with a gathering of millionaires, billionaires, political leaders and celebrities prompted them to not send many representatives.

Some of the titles of the discussion panels at the WEF that also illustrate the sentiment behind this include: "Squeezed and Angry: How To Fix The Middle-Class Crisis," "Politics of Fear or Rebellion of the Forgotten?" and "Tolerance at the Tipping Point?"

Ahead of the conference which also aims to discuss rising inequality, anti-poverty organization Oxfam release Monday a report that suggests eight billionaire men collectively own the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population. These eight names, according to the order of ranking, include Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Amancio Ortega, the Spanish founder of fashion house Inditex; financier Warren Buffett; Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim Helu; Amazon boss Jeff Bezos; Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg; Oracle’s Larry Ellison; and Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

The report is a revision of an earlier report released last year that said that the 62 richest people, owned wealth equal to the “bottom half of the population.” However, the findings were revised to their current form following new inputs by Swiss bank Credit Suisse.