KUALA LUMPUR, July 9 — Malaysia will host the world’s first Good Capitalism Forum this December, a three-day conference set to lay the groundwork for an ambitious project: to make businesses see making money and social development as mutually beneficial.
The event would bring some of the world’s most influential and powerful economic figures together and brainstorm for solutions to globalisation’s most pressing problems such as income inequality and environmental degradation.
Guests will include politicians, business tycoons, renowned economists and scientists. Pending confirmation, among those invited are former US president Barrack Obama, his former vice-president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and television magnate Oprah Winfrey.
“The GCF2019 is about understanding and spreading the idea of social capitalism,” the organiser, the Good Capitalism Forum Council, said in a press release.
“Making money and ensuring that societal development is part of the process.”
The GCF2019 and the GCF are initiatives of the Sekhar Institute and the PETRA Group, and is the brainchild of their chairman Datuk Vinod Sekhar, whom the late Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro described as a “social capitalist”.
“Capitalism is the only way forward...but we need sustainable wealth creation,” Vinod told the forum launch press conference held at the posh Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
“I am a businessman and I sell products and services to the people to make a profit...but the people must be able to buy.
“That means we need to have more middle-class folk,” he added.
The planned forum comes amid growing calls for world leaders to act swiftly to address global wealth inequality, which economists say continues to widen at a drastic rate.
The world’s richest 1 per cent is twice as wealthy compared to half of the world’s poorest in 2018, according to the World Inequality Report.
The wealth gap has already caused social upheavals, most notably in the West where it has helped fuel the rise of right wing populism and trade isolationism.
Deputy Defence Minister Liew Chin Tong, who spoke as the main guest at the forum launch today, said there was a need to recalibrate capitalism so that it shares prosperity not only within a small pool of elites, but with all.
And this condition has spanned nearly two generations since the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which Liew said ushered in an era when governments were “conditioned to think” of little regulation, low taxes, free movement of money, the financialisation of housing property, and cheap labour, as being good for capitalism.
“But while these conditions have made some capitalists very rich, it has resulted in very unequal societies with widening rich-poor gap,” Liew, a senator and a trained economist, said as he addressed the audience.
“I am here to support the Good Capitalism Forum in the hope to redefine what is good for capitalism for the benefit of the many, and not merely what is good for capitalists.”
The DAP leader said unregulated capitalism has done terribly from the point of sustainability both socially and environmentally.
The GCF2019 will take place in December at the Mandarin Oriental for three days.
Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is expected to open the conference. Senior Cabinet ministers are also expected to attend.
