As described in Section 3 of The Future of the Global Financial System: A Near-Term Outlook and Long-Term Scenarios, the World Economic Forum’s scenario methodology begins with a series of interviews, workshops and research efforts focused around identifying the “driving forces” that could impact the central question of interest.

This document serves as a reference to the definition and core characteristics of selected driving forces, in particular those that were judged to be critical uncertainties (i.e. having high impact on the outcome of the central question whilst also being highly uncertain in terms of the range of possible values the force variable could take).