With the report's perspective of a 10-year horizon, key risks highlighted in this year's report include the following: Fiscal crises and continued unemployment; Underinvestment in infrastructure; and Chronic diseases. Global Risks 2010 stresses that the financial crisis continues as issues such as unemployment strain countries as they come out of the recession, and that non-economic risks must also be responded to even if they do not seem as imminent or as pressing as the fiscal crisis.
The annual report identifies major global risks, assesses their economic impact, and recommends mitigation solutions. The 2010 Report presents the global risks against a backdrop of a higher level of systemic risk, global governance gaps, and potential impacts of "creeping risks" such as transnational crime and corruption and biodiversity loss, the impact of which may not be fully recognized. Highly interconnected risks, if not managed with a view to each risk's inter-connections, will have much further and deeper implications than most decision-makers realize.
The Global Risks Network urges policy makers to address and understand risks in the context of the wider economic system and to consider policies that encourage long-term infrastructure investments to foster resource efficiencies, particularly for energy and agriculture.
Sovereign default is the main threat facing the world economy in 2010, according to the World Economic Forum. John Drzik, CEO of Oliver Wyman, looks ahead to this year's WEF in Davos, Switzerland.
