RIP Davos Man, long live globalization

Governments may be struggling to pay down pandemic debt and buttress inflation pain, but good luck finding a WEF panel about equitable taxation policy, despite cries from NGOs.These multiple versions of Davos talked across each other instead of pulling in one free market direction.Where once it was manufacturing supply chains that were globalized, now it’s more often rules and regulations — from ending corporate tax loopholes to mandating a carbon-neutral future.“Our concept of risk has expanded,” said Arancha González, the former executive director of the U.N.’s International Trade Centre, and a former foreign minister of Spain. We [in democracies] have to find ways of working with countries that don’t fully share our values,” she said.While political fears about China are rising in democracies, there’s no widespread momentum to substantially alter trade relations based on human rights or intellectual property concerns.U.K. Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan told POLITICO she would continue to raise concerns, but said “we have a very substantial bilateral trade relationship with China, and our businesses want to continue to grow that.”While Western governments worry about energy supply chains and the rise of China, that’s not top of mind for the rest of the world, which often feels marginalized in Davos.“For most of Asia, China becoming number one is a given: a return to the natural state of 1,800 of the past 2,000 years,” said Kishore Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and an open admirer of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s a profound change, which I think is going to be a lasting one.”The bigger risk to globalization may come from the rising expectations that democratic governments and the businesses that call these countries home should cut ties with unsavory regimes.A special Edelman Trust Barometer report published Monday found that businesses are now subject to extensive geopolitical demands: 95 percent of respondents said that they expect companies to act in response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion by publicly speaking out, applying political and economic pressure or exiting the aggressor country’s market.“When businesses shut down in Russia they were not making that decision about Russia alone,” said Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, who argues that withdrawal from Russia was a message to all authoritarian regimes, and an implicit acknowledgment that they may be forced to withdraw from other markets.The WEF itself was forced to freeze its relations with Russian organizations and executives in March, under political pressure and to avoid litigation over breaking sanctions.As with other large global businesses, WEF must now confront difficult questions about where it draws its moral lines.