World Economic Forum: a calculated risk for Covid-safe Singapore
- The forum’s switch from Davos, Switzerland, to the Southeast Asian country is a PR coup and promises a boon for the troubled business tourism sector
- But as the shelved Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble shows, Covid-19 fortunes are fickle and an international conference is a ‘high stakes event’
But the one-off switch in location for the forum’s Special Annual Meeting in May 2021 was also seen as something more: a shot in the arm for the section of Singapore’s tourism industry known as “Mice”, or meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions.
Singapore’s S$3.8 billion (US$2.8 billion) Mice industry, which supports about 34,000 jobs and accounts for nearly 1 per cent of gross domestic product, has been hit hard as the coronavirus pandemic puts the brakes on international travel.
The city state suspended all mass participation events in March, but has recently been ramping up efforts to restart the sector, allowing events of up to 250 people to take place from October. While it has already seen limited success, with some government-run conferences having already taken place, hosting the WEF forum is a breakthrough on an entirely different scale.
The event, which each year attracts about 3,000 of the world’s heads of state and other movers and shakers in the business world, has been held outside Davos only once in its 49-year history.
Lawrence Loh, an associate professor of business administration at the National University of Singapore, said the news was “a very significant vote of confidence” in Singapore’s handling of the pandemic and one that would create an “immediate multiplier effect” as other organisers began to see the city state as offering a safe haven during the pandemic.