How Davos works:It's claustrophobic and intense. The Indian presence evokes badly-concealed envy and fear.Reputations are made and broken, advertising deals won and lost. When it comes to reality shows, Big Brother has nothing on Davos.

Davos is rarely, if ever, the setting for a landmark breakthrough in business or politics, however. The open sessions and seminars on Olympian subjects such as A Business Manifesto for Globalisation infrequently create real news. The deals that matter take place quietly in corridors or hotel suites and often only become public weeks or months later - and sometimes not at all.

But the forum can sometimes capture a moment. Pick any hot issue or booming business and the chances are that a good scattering of the big names will be in Davos. Last year was the coming out of the new behemoths of the global economy - China and India.

The Indian government and industry confederation in particular shovelled a lot of money at some worthy meetings and very good parties, and despatched iPod Shuffles marked "India Everywhere" (made in China, ironically) to the participants.

The forum itself has adapted to this changing world: Klaus Schwab, its founder, says that 10 years ago half the participants would have been European, a quarter American and the remaining quarter from the rest of the world; today it is more like a third each.

The most likely issues to get the same kind of attention this year are climate change and, surprisingly enough given the state of suspended animation into which the Doha round was put last year, international trade.

The US has pronounced a conceptual shift on policy towards climate change, as signalled in president George W Bush's call in his state of the union address to reduce American petrol consumption by 20 per cent by 2010. That at least gives the Davos delegates, who include a clutch of chief executives from oil companies, a live issue to pick over.

Similarly, tomorrow's meeting of trade ministers is likely to be more of a consultative session than the moment for a make-or-break decision.

But if the EU and US can agree a common position on agricultural reform, the meeting will have something substantive to discuss. Or, at the very least, with the looming expiration of the White House's authority to negotiate trade deals concentrating minds, it can set a timetable for advancing the Doha talks with a harder deadline than last year's talks-about-talks agreement, which fell apart almost as soon as it was announced.

Have there ever been real breakthroughs on environmental and trade issues at Davos? Stretching back over more than three decades of memories, Schwab says that a seminal and controversial report dominated the forum in 1972. The Limits to Growth, a study by a group of economists and environmentalists, questioned the very idea of economic development, saying it was incompatible with sustaining the global environment and with limited natural resources.

Such radical views never became part of the mainstream, but they did influence environmental and development thinking throughout the 1970s. It seems, though, to have been a launch at the Smithsonian museum in Washington rather than the discussion at Davos that got the report the most publicity at the time.

And in 1983, Schwab says, a small group of trade ministers met informally to discuss the prospects for a new round of global trade talks. Evidently they were not launched at that point, or they might well have been called the "Davos round" and provided Schwab with tens of millions of dollars' worth of free advertising for the next decade.

Instead it took until 1986, when the so-called "Uruguay round" began in Punta del Este in the eponymous Latin American nation. And while the ministerial talks at Davos in 1983 may have been a staging post, it would be stretching a point to call it a landmark: the meeting was not significant enough to feature in John Croome's account of the Uruguay round from uncertain start to tortured finish, Reshaping the World Trading System.

Perhaps it is looking for too much to expect cataclysmic events to happen just because a collection of big names has gathered in a small Swiss ski town. And unlike Big Brother, even if underperforming attendees get voted out, the total number of contestants never falls. - (Financial Times service)