A chronic gap between rich and poor was yawning wider, posing the biggest single risk to the world this year, even as economies in many countries began to recover, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said last week. Its annual assessment of global dangers, which will set the scene for its meeting in Davos this week, concludes that income disparity and attendant social unrest constitute the issue most likely to have a big impact on the world economy in the next decade. The forum warned of a "lost" generation of young people coming of age in the 2010s who lacked jobs and in some cases adequate skills for work, fuelling frustration. This could easily boil over into social upheaval, as seen already in a wave of protests over inequality and corruption from Thailand to Brazil. So far, the massive fiscal and monetary stimulus that has helped stabilise and revive economies has had little impact on the poor, the unemployed and the younger generation.
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