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World leaders need to focus on economic challenges in 2014: WEF New Delhi: Widening income disparities, persistent unemployment, diminishing confidence in economic policies and a lack of values in leadership are some of the top 10 trends that world leaders will need to focus attention on in 2014, the World Economic Forum’s Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 report released Friday said. “Tensions in the Middle East and North Africa and inaction on climate change (are) also rated as top concerns,” according to a press release on the outlook, which is based on a survey of more than 1,500 global experts. These economic trends are accompanied by challenges such as an intensification of cyber threats, Asia’s expanding middle class, the growth of megacities and the rapid spread of misinformation online “that demonstrate the complexity and interrelatedness of the challenges for leaders in the year ahead”, the release said. “As well as indicating the emerging trends for the year ahead, the survey also attempts to map the connections between them, with the aim of helping leaders and policy-makers formulate effective responses,” it said. “The year 2014 is absolutely not the year for complacency,” Martina Gmür, senior director, head of the network of Global Agenda Councils, World Economic Forum, was quoted as saying by the release emailed from Geneva. “The global economy may be recovering from the global economic downturn but this survey shows there is an incredible amount of work to be done to turn the world to a sustainable footing, economically, politically and environmentally.” Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, said the “complexity of the trends that will shape the global agenda in 2014 and the nature of their interaction clearly demonstrate the need for cooperation on a global level... Such cooperation must be pursued as a matter of urgency if we are to mitigate the harshest effects of these trends and channel their positive momentum.” According to the report, widening income disparity was among the top three concerns across regions—North America, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Europe and Sub Saharan Africa. Unemployment was a major concern in Europe, Sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and Latin America. Rising social tensions was a top concern in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Europe, North America and Sub Saharan Africa, the report said. Pro-democracy protests in North Africa and the Middle East beginning late 2010— also known as the Arab Spring—swept across the region and toppled dictatorial governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. “In light of the growing political instability since, many have started to question these assumptions, and both the regional outlook and individual national trajectories have become more uncertain. There is now a growing consensus that the region is facing a time of heightened uncertainty, at the root of which is societal polarisation.” The Survey on the Global Agenda supports this viewpoint, revealing that experts all over the world consider rising social tensions in the Middle East and North Africa to be the biggest challenge facing the world in 2014, the report says. The effects of growing income inequality are also being seen within major nations, from large emerging markets like China and India to developed nations in the West, according to the survey. “Increasing inequality is the number one challenge facing North America. The incredible wealth created over the last decade in the US has gone to a smaller and smaller portion of the population, and this disparity stems from many of the same roots as in developing nations,” the report says. “First among them is a lack of access to high quality basic primary and secondary education for all segments of our society. Additionally, it has become prohibitively expensive for the average middle-income family to send their child to college in the US; higher education, once seen as the great equaliser and engine for economic mobility, is becoming unaffordable for far too many,” it says. On the issue of lack of faith in leadership, the survey finds that it is young people who “tend to have the strongest feelings on this issue; respondents under 40 told the Survey that they’re not at all satisfied with the attention governments give to a lack of values in leadership. And they have every reason to be critical. They look around them, they see where the nation is heading and they don’t want to go there. And yet they find they have no way of changing that direction because they’re considered too young and inexperienced to be important.” In the case of diminishing confidence in economic policies, the survey finds that “younger people tend to be especially critical of today’s economic policies– the Survey found that respondents under 50 think this issue is more significant than respondents over 50 and it’s the 18-29-year-olds who ascribe it the greatest significance. It makes sense that the boomers out there might not be quite so concerned personally—they stand to benefit from some very favourable government-supplied pensions and they’ve certainly done better than previous generations in terms of public healthcare and other welfare measures.”