Elsewhere in Davos....Sir John Sawers, chief of M16 until last year, has appeared on a panel at Davos to talk about the future of intelligence agencies.

Jill Treanor writes:

Sawers said the way technology companies reacted to the criticism which followed the Snowden leaks has led to reduction in corporation with the security services and added to the threat posed to society.

He told the audience in Davos the securities agencies performed a “public good” and insisted that friend-on-friend collection of the kind exposed by Snowdon was a “very small proportion” of the surveillance conducted by the agencies.

He said there needed to be discussion about the supervision and oversight of agencies. He said the laws had been strengthened to give he parliamentary committee chaired by Sir Malcom Rifkind greater oversight, more power to two judges providing oversight. “It’s like having an on-going judge-led inquiry into the work of the intelligence agencies,” said Sawers.

He said the reduced cooperation from technology companies in the wake of Snowden leaks meant “intelligence collection was not as good as before”.

But he defended the need to collect data. “Our lives would be much simpler if they used a simple system badguy.com”.

It was not just about collecting data,he said, as people still mattered, as did having a diverse workforce, They individuals involved, he said, were phenomenally brave and committed.

It is not the first time he has spoken since leaving the agency. He told the FT last week that there should be restrictions on the ­availability of totally encrypted communications that are inaccessible to governments.

“We’ve never wanted to have no-go areas for the police in our communities but [totally private means of communication] would be creating no-go areas for evil doers of any sort online — terrorists, criminals, paedophiles — to carry out their business,” he said last week.

Heads-up, UK readers. Mark Carney just told Davos two significant things about UK monetary policy and future interest rate rises.

We currently have very low inflation in the UK (just 0.5%).

We have the will and responsibility to look through this period of low inflation, and we will get inflation back to target in the forecast horizon.

And secondly, Carney adds that “It is not lost on us that wages are picking up, as we forecast, in the most recent data”.

That adds up to a hint that UK interest rates may not stay at their current record low for as long as some in the markets now expect, I think.

Mark Carney also cites the adjustment in the energy markets that we have all seen.

He says: it is realistic to expect....that oil is lower for longer. Given where cash costs actually are across the globe and given where demand is likely to be.

That creates an opportunity that is considerable and possible undervalued for the global economy.

In Europe, there is a transition from everything being about monetary policy to everything being about stuctural policy.

And in the UK, there is a transition from household spending driving growth to investment driving growth, he adds.

Mark Carney says he is cautiously optimistic about global economic prospects this year - if the IMF is right that the world GDP will increase by 3.5%.

He cites the prospect of a rise in US interests as a crucial factor (assuming it happens).

As the BoE governor puts it:

The increased diverge in monetary policy will lead to a benign increase in volatility and will test capital flows across the global economy, including to emerging economy.... And it will test the strength of the financial system.

Kuroda also insists that Japan is making pretty good progress in implementing Prime minister Shinzo Abe’s third arrow, of structural reforms.

He cites progress in getting more women into work, new laws to increase competitiveness are coming. We hope people are slightly more patient.

We should not be patient, the IMF’s Min Zhu shoots back, taking the opportunity to give Kuroda an economics lesson.

Japan has received a big stimulus from the fall in oil prices, he points out:

I think there is a good window for Japan to firmly implement structural reforms. I think the Japanese should not be that patient.

And you are also also very sensitive to rises in borrowing costs, the IMF senior policymaker warns. Another reason to ast fast.

That’s quite a ticking off for Japan from Zhu. Larry Fink, the moderator, jokes that he hopes he’s as strict with other countries too.

Kuroda responds. Yes we shouldn’t be too patient when pushing these structural reforms through. But the impact will take time..

Governor Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan says delegates have been too gloomy this year.

He welcomes the ECB’s new asset-purchase scheme, and also points to the drop in the oil price. Together they could “greatly improve global economic outlook”

Next question to Mark Carney - will the ECB’s new QE programme fuel financial instability?

The Bank of England governor welcomes the ECB’s move, but warns that it might cause more risk taking.

We know that stimulus packages can lead to excessive risk-taking, Carney agrees. His concern is that people may make two false assumptions.

1) That there is a “central bank put” (which means that a central bank steps in to save the day when markets tumble; the original was the Alan Greenspan put).

2) That there is an illusion of liquidity in certain markets. We have seen sudden moves to illiquidity in some markets, even the US Treasury markets

What’s the solution?

Steps have been taken, Carney continues. We have shored up the banks at the core of the financial system, with recapitalisation and stress tests.

And Carney, as head of the Financial Stability Board as well as the Bank of England, he can get a mark-to-market view of the major banks each day.

And we must reduce the amplification channels from the core of the system outwards.

First question goes to the ECB’s Benoît Coeuré, just two days after the new Quantitative Easing programme was announced.

Its been a pretty momentous week, Coeuré smiles. It was clear that we had to do something about inflation.

We learned from the QE packages in US, UK, Japan, but those experiences aren’t really comparible as the ECB is setting monetary policy over 19 countries.

And the ECB cannot do anything to raise Europe’s growth rate in a lasting way, he warns. Only structural reforms and government action can do that.

Bells are ringing across the conference hall - it’s nearly time for the session on the Global Economic Outlook.

On the panel....Bank of England governor Mark Carney, his Japanese counterpart Haruhiko Kuroda, IMF deputy managing director Min Zhu, the ECB’s Benoît Coeuré and Brazil’s finance minister Joaquim Levy.

There’s a live feed here:

The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard has collared some of the experts on the Davos cybersecurity panel, and found little time for David Cameron’s push to let security services access encrypted data.

He writes:

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, a cyber-expert whose country was subjected to a crippling attack for 24 hours in 2007, said Mr Cameron’s plan is pointless unless it is part of a co-ordinated global push by all the main powers. “It is not going to make any difference if Britain does it alone,” he told the Telegraph.

And Microsoft’s Brad Smith also warned that encryption is too important to mess with:

The path to Hell starts at the back-door. It compromises protection for everybody on everything.

Some of the world’s top scientists have been talking at Davos today, explaining their challenges and goals.

Professor Mario Molina, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the damage that CFCs cause to the ozone layer, warned that scientists must do more to help the public understand the threat of climate change.

Speaking to former US vice-president Al Gore, Molina warned that the environment is vulnerable, while the climate system is complex.. It doesn’t take much to do a lot of damage.

Molina also called on fellow scientists to speak out:

“We in science are doing a lousy job in communicating the extent of the risks we are facing.”

Molina also called for a global solution to tackle global warming, which would force companies around the world to pay for their carbon emissions.

Climate change has been a major theme at Davos, ahead of a major conference on Paris.

Yesterday, French president Hollande urged businesses to help tackle the threat of climate change. He called for a “huge investment” in green tech to help tackle the biggest challenge of the 21st Century.

But finding solutions for such huge problems take time. As Brian Schmidt, Professor, Australian National University, Australia, put it:

Science is this great tool for predicting knowledge, but it’s not guaranteed to come up with solutions fast enough.

And science can suffer because research progresses at a slower pace than politics, warned Konstantin Novoselov, Research fellow at the Mesoscopic Physics Research Group at the University of Manchester:

“Scientific research works on a longer cycle than the election cycle....We have to fight for the money from the people who don’t get the benefits.”

Unilever chief executive Paul Polman is also banging the drum for gender equality today, alongside Melinda Gates.

He’s making some unarguable points, that companies simply have no excuse for not treating women completely fairly, especially if they want to perform well:

Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves has defended telling his citizens to put sticky tape over the webcams on their computers to thwart hackers.

Last April, Ilves claimed that surveillance was enabled in every computer and iPad unless you taped over the camera.

He’s unrepentant about recommending this DIY approach to cybersecurity, which he apparently follows too.

He told the Davos panel on cybersecurity that:

My domestic newspapers laughed at me and made me look like an idiot. I said “tape over the camera”....and they went <he chuckles>. And, yeah, well....<shrug>.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain, moderating the session, is with President Ilves; I tape over my camera too, he says.

Microsoft’s Brad Smith, and internet security guru Eugene Kaspersky, do not.

We have special functionality to make sure the camera is turned off, Kaspersky declares, adding:

I smile, I smile to the camera.

The session is online here.

The recent Sony hack shows the perils of not setting up your security properly, Kaspersky adds.

It seems that it was not a very sophisticated attack. The enterprise was protected, but it was not protected in the right way.

But saying that, banks spend an awful lot of money on IT security and they are still occasionally the victim of very sophisticated hacks, he says.

The game has changed. Fifteen years ago, cybercriminals were working alone, targeting individuals

I said before there is criminal malware, and there is state-sponsored malware, and the difference is between a car and a space shuttle, reiterates Kaspersky, adding:

And now, unfortunately, the evolution of cybercrime has come to a level where they are very professional. And they develop extremely complicated, highly professional attacks, and that makes my work more difficult.

It’s been clear this week that some of our readers have a pretty mediocre view of Davos.

The whole concept of powerful people gathering to “improve the state of the world”, or fret about problems which are either beyond their control..or their fault, certainly grates with some.

My colleague Larry Elliott has been coming to WEF since the 90s. He writes that one problem with Davos is that most people have a shared world view:

There was nobody at this year’s WEF, for example, arguing that Europe would be better off without the euro. Nobody gives it to the status quo with both barrels. Al Gore on climate change was as radical as it got.

This groupthink is potentially dangerous but perhaps inevitable. For Davos man and woman, life is pretty sweet. Which is why there are some who say the true motto of the WEF should be: committed to improving the state of the world provided nothing much changes.

Good morning from Davos. It’s the fourth and final day of the World Economic Forum, the annual shindig of leaders, businesspeople, campaigners and economists.

It’s a quieter day, really. No big keynote speeches by world leaders are scheduled

But we do have one setpiece event - a big session on the World Economic Outlook at 2pm CET, or 1pm GMT.

On the panel, Bank of England governor Mark Carney, his Japanese counterpart Haruhiko Kuroda, IMF deputy managing director Min Zhu, the ECB’s Benoît Coeuré and Brazil’s finance minister Joaquim Levy.

There are also various discussion groups and debates happening around the Davos conference centre, on issues such as cybercrime, science and inequality.

We’ll be covering the main events as we can, and also trying to work out what - if anything - Davos has achieved this year.