The recognition by Pope Francis and others that surging income inequality is an urgent political problem marks an important shift.

Chrystia Freeland

Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament

Everyone sees the gap between the claims of the Brazilian miracle and the reality of daily life. People want more accountability to fix Brazil's institutions.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Former President of Brazil; Member of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council

It is ironic that the 'most wired' society is picking up pen and paper once again.

Seung-yoon Lee and Daniel Tudor

It is political suicide for any American politician in office to speak of America and number two.

Kishore Mahbubani

Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy

Extreme poverty has dropped by half since 1990. In that same time, the number of children who die each year has plummeted more than 40 percent.

Bill Gates

Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

If we make the right investments in the health sector today, we could achieve universally low rates of infectious, maternal and child deaths by 2035.

Larry Summers and Gavin Yamey

National security and economic prosperity are prerequisites for the emergence of a democratic regime. Destroying the infrastructure of a nation through harsh economic sanctions and war will not bring about a transition to democracy.

Akbar Ganji

Iranian journalist and human rights activist

All our key challenges in the next decade are interlinked. In order to meet them, we need to fully understand how they are related.

Dileep Padgaonkar

WORLDPOST editorial board member

The evolving growth map of the global economy is reasonably clear. Overall, the global economy is struggling back toward better balanced and more sustainable growth patterns in the medium term.

Michael Spence

Economist and Nobel Laureate

The period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Great Recession saw the profoundest reshuffle of individual incomes on the global scale since the Industrial revolution.

Branko Milanovic

World Bank Economist

After the 2008 international financial crisis, global trade and investment protectionism has again been resurgent. Policy barriers are becoming more covert, populism and provincial politics are causing greater disruption and policies are increasingly being made in a self-centered way. This trend deserves our high alert.

Ding Xuedong

Chairman, China Investment Corporation

Big challenges lie ahead for the emerging economies. To avoid serious social and political pressures, growth has to be not only rapid, but broad based and equitable, in the sense that if there are steep income increases for some accompanying rapid growth, they must be perceived as deserved by effort and job creation, and not due to exploitation of rents or political favours.

Kemal Dervis

Vice-President and Director for Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution

We should not underestimate how the forces of demographic growth, urbanization, middle class formation, economic openness, institutional modernization, and infrastructure renewal have been and can become ever more the foundations of robust worldwide growth.

Parag Khanna

Leading global strategist, world traveler and best-selling author

The WorldPost is a product of the idea that the most foundational challenges of our era, from the perils of climate change to the epidemic of youth unemployment, can neither be understood nor addressed through the traditional frame of the nation state, but require collective efforts spanning geography and cultures.

Peter S. Goodman

Executive Business and Global News Editor, The Huffington Post

Basic education and learning is too often neglected when dividing up aid and young boys and girls are held back for years - if not a lifetime - by the absence of good schooling mindful of the life skills and employment skills that will serve them well.

Sarah Brown

Co-Founder, A World at School; Executive Chair, Global Business Coalition for Education

The current fortunes of global advertising and marketing services businesses are a window not into the future of the world economy, but what's going on right now. So, too, perhaps, with the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.

Sir Martin Sorrell

Founder, WPP

Reports, panel discussions and media reports still focus overwhelmingly on measuring the participation of women in what has traditionally been the world of men. But it is equally important to measure the participation of men in what has traditionally been the world of women.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

President and CEO, The New American Foundation