Davos, eastern Switzerland is the place where the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, a non-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland, is held every January. In 1971, German Professor Klaus Schwab founded the European Management Forum in Geneva, which was renamed the World Economic Forum in 1987. The World Economic Forum promotes a business environment that responds to globalization by indexing and publicizing the competitiveness of each country.

The World Economic Forum has played significant role in the international community. In 1988, the main theme of the annual meeting that year was the reform of the global financial system in the wake of the financial crisis affecting emerging markets, particularly Asian markets. To tackle the problem, it was proposed to establish an organizational body consisting of 10 countries each from developed and developing countries, for a total of 20 countries. In late 1998, a meeting, later known as the G20, was held in Bonn, Germany.

The World Economic Council then launched "Women's Engagement: Measuring the Global Gender Gap. From this groundbreaking effort to measure gender equality, the Global Gender Gap report was published for the first time in 2006. A growing number of specialized working groups in various countries are collaborating with the public and private sectors to monitor the gender gap in order to promote gender parity.

From Japan, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs have often participated in the annual meeting of the forum. The late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended twice, in 2014 and 2019, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is scheduled to attend the Davos Forum in January 2023. He will be the first incumbent prime minister to attend in four years.

The promotion of trade and investment liberalization is essential for the sustainable growth of the Japanese economy as well as the global economy. In the area of trade, the maintenance and strengthening of a regime that brings legal stability and predictability to international trade, as well as deterring protectionism, remains an important issue. For these reasons, Japan is focusing on promoting international rule-making and policy coordination, and is an active participant in the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum as part of this effort.