Klaus Martin Schwab (German: [klaʊs ˈmaʁtiːn ʃvaːp]; born 30 March 1938) is a German mechanical engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He was the WEF's chairman from January 1971 until his resignation in April 2025.
Klaus Martin Schwab was born on 30 March 1938, to Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht in Ravensburg. His parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany where his father assumed the role of director at the Swiss Escher Wyss AG turbine factory.
Although he has three Swiss grandparents and two Swiss brothers, he is a citizen of Germany and attempts to confer honorary Swiss citizenship have failed.
Schwab attended first and second grades at the primary school in the Wädenswil district of Au, Zürich, in Switzerland. After World War II, Schwab attended the Spohn-Gymnasium in Ravensburg until his Abitur in 1957. In 1961, he graduated as a mechanical engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with a doctorate in engineering, with a dissertation titled Der längerfristige Exportkredit als betriebswirtschaftliches Problem des Maschinenbaues (Longer-term export credit as a business problem in mechanical engineering). He also earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg, and a Master in Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. While attending Harvard, Schwab found a mentor in future national security advisor and secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Schwab was professor of business policy at the University of Geneva from 1972 to 2003, and since then has been an honorary professor there.
World Economic Forum (1971–2025)
In early 1971, Klaus Schwab – together with his then employee and later wife Hilde Schwab – organized the first European Management Symposium in the newly built Congress Centre in Davos. The event, held from January 24 to February 7, brought together 444 managers, entrepreneurs, faculty members, and media representatives from 31 countries under the motto “Let’s meet the American challenge”.
Financing the meeting proved difficult, and Schwab contributed funds from his own savings and received financial support from his parents. A few days after the first meeting, Schwab founded the non-profit European Management Forum Foundation, which was renamed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1987. He financed the foundation's capital of 25,000 Swiss francs from the profits of the first event in Davos, which generated total revenue of approximately two million Swiss francs.
The inaugural meeting in Davos was described as an unexpected success, but the following year the event saw a significant decline in attendance to below 300. Pierre Werner became the first sitting head of government to participate, presenting his so-called Werner Plan for the creation of a European Monetary Union.
In 1972, Schwab refused a management position at Mannesmann and Gutehoffnungshütte and instead accepted a part-time professorship in business policy at the University of Geneva. He held this position until 2003 and has since been an honorary professor there.
At the third meeting in 1973, participants adopted the Davos Manifesto, a code of conduct based on Schwab's stakeholder concept, which states that "The professional function of corporate management is to serve customers, employees, investors, and society, and to balance their conflicting interests."
The events of 1973, namely the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate mechanism, the Yom Kippur War, and the first oil crisis of 1973, significantly increased international attention to the Davos meeting. As a result, the number of participants rose to 780 in 1974 and reached 860 in 1975.
In 1978 Schwab invited Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who was leading China on a course of economic liberalization. Although Deng did not attend the forum in person in 1979, Beijing sent for the first time a delegation of high-ranking Chinese economists.
In April 1985, Schwab convened the first regional India Economic Summit in New Delhi with the new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In November 2009, then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged Schwab's role in the context of India's economic opening: "When the history of India's globalization and liberalization is written one day, you (Klaus Schwab) will be represented in the most prominent place."
In 1986 Schwab arranged a first public meeting between Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal and Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, personally inviting both leaders to appear on the same panel in Davos. “That the meeting took place at all is thanks to Klaus Schwab (…) a man with an uncanny knack of bringing together unlikely partners», wrote the Financial Times. Two years later Schwab used shuttle diplomacy to bring the two leaders who were on the brink of war over Cyprus back to Switzerland, where they negotiated and signed the Davos Declaration aimed at normalizing relations.
At the 1987 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher appealed to the West to reach out to the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. "Let's take Gorbachev seriously. Let's take him at his word!" Genscher said in his speech, which is considered a turning point in the end of the Cold War. "There was no better place for this speech than Davos," Genscher wrote more than 20 years later. Regarding Schwab, he wrote: "This man is a phenomenon (...) A man full of ideas who gets things done without holding public office; getting things done in the sense of achieving them."
During the 1992 World Economic Forum annual meeting, Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid activist and chairman of the African National Congress (ANC), appeared outside South Africa for the first time alongside President F. W. de Klerk and the Chief Minister of KwaZulu-Natal, Mangosuthu Buthelezi. To facilitate this historic meeting, Schwab travelled to South Africa several times to negotiate the terms of participation. President Mandela later stated that his time at the WEF had been instrumental in convincing him of the benefits of a market economy.
Schwab and his wife Hilde created the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 1998. Schwab founded the Global Shapers Community in 2011 within the WEF to work with young people in "shaping local, regional and global agendas." In 2015, the WEF was formally recognised by the Swiss Government as an "international body".