Swiss Hostesses open the World Economic Forum 2016. Valeriano Di Domenico/Flickr. Some rights reserved.“Committed to improving the state of the world” is one of the aims of the World Economic Forum, which holds its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week. The world’s rich and powerful will be well represented in this sleepy alpine town, but what actual progress will be made towards the goal of improving the state of the world?
One simple step that could be taken, perhaps in the time allocated for a networking coffee break, would be to change the shameful banking policies of the host country, Switzerland, which disproportionately hurt the world’s poorest countries.
Switzerland has long been a haven for those looking to hide money from the authorities. Billions of dollars from around the world end up in Swiss banks each year, far out of view for most tax authorities. Last year’s SwissLeaks scandal exposed the scale of the system, as details of more than 106,000 HSBC client accounts from 203 countries were leaked to the media.
