UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Working Papers

Research suggests that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can open up market opportunities worth USD 12 trillion in the four largest sectors that represent 60 per cent of real economy – food and agriculture; cities; energy and materials; and health and well-being. While the concept of the SDGs creating a win-win situation for all is growing increasingly trendy, further evidence needs to be accumulated to better chart the important discourse on the private sector’s engagement with the SDGs. To this end, this paper aims to shed light on three questions: (i) How is the private sector currently engaging with the SGDs in these sectors?; (ii) What are the key areas of opportunities in which companies can foster long-term value in support of sustainable development?; and (iii) What transformations are needed to enhance the contributions of the private sector? Noting the shift towards a more inclusive, green and circular future requires policy, institutional, technological and human capabilities and political will, this paper provides concrete policy recommendations on some of the first steps required to move towards such transformations.

While migration and population displacement has always been part of the human experience, the context within which it occurs today has materially changed. Migration has become an important part of economic globalization and closely related to countries’ development process. Conflicts, poverty, natural disasters and climate events are also forcing people to migrate in an ever-increasing number. For many low-income countries with large number of internally-displaced people, on the other hand, the high economic costs are making it more difficult for them to invest in SDG implementation. Developing countries also host most of the externally-displaced people at high economic costs, which similarly affects their ability to achieve the SDGs. The political costs of hosting large number of refugees in developed states have also been significant in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis. The refugee crisis triggered intense politicization of migration and sharp rise in anti-immigration sentiments and support for populist parties in many countries of the region, leading some governments to tighten their borders, introduce more restrictive immigration policies and retreat from multilateral migration efforts. There is at the same time growing recognition that population displacement and migration is a contemporary global challenge that can only be solved through effective multilateral cooperation. In this context, it becomes important for states to build on the current nascent governance architecture such as the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Migration so that the benefits of migration and population displacement can be more effectively harnessed for the achievement of the SDGs.

As the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development enters its fifth year of implementation, it is opportune to ask how governance is understood and implemented around the world. In fact, one can go further to probe the extent to which governments are cognizant of the principles undergirding effective governance. This paper examines the ways in which governance has been operationalized by countries, major groups and other stakeholders since the first round of Voluntary National Reviews at the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) of 2016. It does this based on the qualitative overview of the Synthesis reports of Voluntary National Reviews (2016–2029), and the quantitative analysis of three SDG databases: Voluntary National Reviews, SDG Good Practices and the SDG Acceleration Actions. It starts with a literature review of the multidimensional concept of governance. The three databases are then scoped through a series of keywords associated with the SDG16 governance targets. It finds that although SDG 16 is catalytic to progress on all other SDGs, its governance dimension does not receive due focus. The article concludes with several action areas to mainstream the governance dimension of SDG16 in sustainable development.

This paper briefly takes stock of two decades of e-participation initiatives based on a limited review of the academic literature. The purpose of the paper is to complement the results of the e-government Survey 2020. As such, the emphasis is on aspects that the e-government survey (based on analysis of e-government portals and on quantitative indicators) does not capture directly. Among those are the challenges faced by e-participation initiatives and key areas of attention for governments. The paper maps the field of e-participation and related activities, as well as its relationships with other governance concepts. Areas of recent development in terms of e-participation applications are briefly reviewed. The paper selectively highlights conclusions from the literature on different participation tools, as well as a list of key problematic areas for policy makers. The paper concludes that while e-participation platforms using new technologies have spread rapidly in developed countries in the first decade of the 2000s and in developing countries during the last 10 years, it is not clear that their multiplication has translated into broader or deeper citizen participation. Beyond reasons related to technology access and digital skills, factors such as lack of understanding of citizens’ motivations to participate and the reluctance of public institutions to genuinely share agenda setting and decision-making power seem to play an important role in the observed limited progress.

Productive and technological capabilities matter. The more conventional strands of the literature have emphasized them as major engines of export, growth and development. But how they matter is less clear, and many open questions remain on how capabilities influence export dynamics at microeconomic level. This paper empirically investigates their role on export dynamics in 40 developing countries between 2002 and 2012. In doing so, the paper exploits a country-sector-year database containing exporter-level statistical information. The empirical analysis shows that, within sectors, countries with higher productive capacities have more exporters, and the exporters are larger and charge higher prices for their products, even after controlling for level of development, size of the economy, commodity-dependency and other variables. The results also confirm a positive relationship between technological capabilities and diversification: within sectors, exporters in countries with stronger capabilities tend to export a higher number of products and to more destination markets. Finally, technological capabilities play a specific role in high-technology sectors, such as electronics, electrical machinery and equipment and pharmaceuticals. In these sectors, exporters from countries with higher R&D investments are more diversified in terms of destination markets. Thus, the paper shows that, even comparing exporters’ behaviour only among developing countries, stronger productive and technological capabilities are significantly related to the “extensive” and “intensive” margin of exports, diversification across products and destinations, and product quality; all crucial aspects of developing countries’ insertion in global markets. Overall, the paper underscores the role of capabilities not only on developing countries’ macroeconomic resilience to trade shocks, but also on their medium-term development prospects.