- Home
- Working Paper Series
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Policy Briefs
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Policy Briefs
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs provides thought leadership through its UN DESA Policy Briefs series, presenting timely and relevant analysis and policy guidance on global economic and social issues.
ISSN (online):
27081990
Language:
English
1 - 20 of 99 results
-
-
Enhancing Public Institutions’ Risk-informed Communication to address Multifaceted Crises for Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Climate Action
Publication Date: January 2024More LessRisk-informed governance and a strong risk management framework are essential for ensuring disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience in rapidly changing and complex world. Governments and public institutions can use risk informed strategies for efficient decision-making and policy formulation in a world characterized by emerging challenges such as climate change, economic volatility, food insecurity and global health crises. Risk management is a key strategy to implement the principle of sound policy making, one of the 11 principles of effective governance for sustainable development. “Effective risk communication along the risk policy cycle is considered highly relevant for successful risk management, from prevention to response, preparation, review and monitoring of diverse risks.”
-
-
-
Accelerating Middle-income Countries’ Progress Towards Sustainable Development
Publication Date: November 2023More LessMiddle-income countries (MICs), defined in terms of gross national income per capita, are a large and heterogeneous group of countries that differ across a broad range of development indicators. Despite their differences, MICs have common aspirations and contend with similar challenges. The recent confluence of crises has caused severe setbacks that have compounded longer-term development bottlenecks. Many MICs require international support to address current and long-term challenges. Eligibility criteria that rely only on income per capita limit available support – including access to concessional finance – without accounting for MICs’ multidimensional development needs.
-
-
-
Financing the Sustainable Development Goals Through Mission-oriented Development Banks
Publication Date: September 2023More LessThere is an urgent need for channeling long-term risk-tolerant finance towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper argues that National Development Banks (NDBs) and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can play a crucial role in mobilizing the needed capital but only if an outcomes oriented ‘mission-oriented’ approach is adopted to galvanize, catalyze, and crowd in substantial global public and private finance (scaling it up from billions to trillions). Missions help transform broad SDG related challenges, like global health and climate change, into investment pathways where strong publicly set goals crowd in private investment. Key is to make sure that strong conditions around reciprocity determine equitable and just partnerships and direct public and private finance towards inclusive and sustainable outcomes. Low-income countries which continue to face stringent international credit conditions can benefit from diverting resources from debt repayment towards development goals, while high-income countries can unlock financialised and hoarded capital for sustainable development.
-
-
-
India Overtakes China as the World’s Most Populous Country
Publication Date: June 2023More LessThe latest estimates and projections of global population from the United Nations, indicate that China will soon cede its long-held status as the world’s most populous country. In April 2023, India’s population is expected to reach 1,425,775,850 people, matching and then surpassing the population of mainland China. India’s population is virtually certain to continue to grow for several decades. By contrast, China’s population reached its peak size recently and experienced a decline during 2022. Projections indicate that the size of the Chinese population will continue to fall and could drop below 1 billion before the end of the century. Taking account of future population trends in national development planning is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, those related to poverty, food security, health, education, gender equality, decent work, inequality, urbanization and the environment, and for ensuring that no one is left behind.
-
-
-
Population, Education and Sustainable Development
Publication Date: May 2023More LessEducation is a key determinant of levels and trends of fertility, mortality and migration. In turn, coverage and investment in education are influenced by the rate of growth and the age structure of the population. Education and training over the life course are critically important to sustain socioeconomic development, especially in modern economies increasingly driven by innovation and productivity growth. From a macroeconomic perspective, a well-trained and well-educated workforce reinforces the positive impacts of the demographic dividend and tempers the fiscal and economic challenges associated with rapidly ageing populations, while contributing to the achievement of various Sustainable Development Goals and to the realization of the Vision Statement of the Secretary-General on Transforming Education. This policy brief summarizes some policy implications in these and other interlinkages between population, education, and sustainable development.
-
-
-
Why Indigenous languages Matter
Publication Date: February 2023More LessLanguages are one of the most significant emblems of human diversity, revealing how we can perceive, relate to, and understand the world differently. Languages are vehicles of our cultures, collective memory and values. They are an essential component of our identities. Out of the 6,700 languages spoken worldwide, forty percent are in danger of disappearing. Indigenous Peoples make up less than 6 percent of the global population, yet they speak more than 4,000 of the world’s languages. Most of the languages that are under threat are Indigenous languages. This dilemma is human-made and is exacerbated by ongoing assimilationist policies, social pressure, demographic change and the emphasis on a homogeneous nation State model that shares one culture and one language. The loss of global language diversity has been greatly accelerated by colonization and globalization. Other significant factors in the erosion of Indigenous languages are the dispossession of lands, territories and resources; repression and assimilation; genocide and shrinking ageing communities in which language is not passed to next generations.
-
-
-
Economic Well-being at Older Ages
Publication Date: January 2023More LessWorldwide, populations are ageing rapidly due to gains in life expectancy and declines in fertility. The trend towards a growing number and share of older persons is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. As the number of older persons grows, their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics will evolve as well, with implications for economies, societies and public budgets. While long-term trends are hard to predict, assessing the characteristics of current and future cohorts of older persons provides important insights into the future of our ageing world. On the one hand, future cohorts of older persons are likely to be healthier and more educated—and therefore more productive—than those of today, despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Continuing scientific and technological innovations, including medical and pharmaceutical advances, will allow many to enjoy healthier and longer lives. On the other hand, the information presented in this brief indicates that successive cohorts of youth and adults are increasingly insecure in the labour market and more and more unequal in both developed and developing countries with available data. Without swift and bold policy action to counter this trend, future cohorts of older persons may be more unequal than those of today.
-
-
-
Promoting Youth Participation in Decision-Making and Public Service Delivery through Harnessing Digital Technologies
Publication Date: January 2023More LessThis Policy Brief examines how public institutions can more effectively engage youth and promote their participation in decision-making and public service delivery to build more inclusive and resilient societies. It first examines the challenges public institutions face in meaningfully engaging youth in decision-making and public service delivery, as well as the behaviors and characteristics of young people that can be relevant to policy dialogue and participation. It then explains how digital technologies can be harnessed to effectively engage young people in decision-making and delivering public services. Lastly, it provides a set of policy recommendations on how public institutions can overcome engagement challenges and build an enabling ecosystem for youth participation.
-
-
-
Beneficial Ownership Information
Publication Date: January 2023More LessDomestic public finance is essential to financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), providing public goods and services, increasing equity, and helping manage macroeconomic stability. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda places domestic resource mobilization at the core of the actions that countries need to take to deliver sustainable development. Countries have been working to increase revenues so that they can invest in the SDGs, but tax avoidance, tax evasion and corruption are undermining countries’ efforts. Illicit financial flow (IFF) is the term that covers these activities (see Figure 1) that cross borders and reduce the availability of resources for financing sustainable development, including recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Agenda, Member States committed to eliminate IFFs. Since 2015, they have taken many actions to boost transparency and combat IFFs, but there is more work to be done. Eliminating IFFs will require further actions across the sphere of national and global governance as well as international cooperation. Transparency about the actors in economic and financial matters is an essential component in the ability of country authorities to enforce the law, reduce corruption and ensure taxpayers pay all taxes that are due. Increasing the accuracy and transparency of beneficial ownership information is an important component of solutions for reducing tax avoidance and evasion and combatting corruption and money-laundering.
-
-
-
Old Age Inequality Begins at Birth
Publication Date: January 2023More LessOld age disadvantage begins at birth. Much of the inequality between older persons has its roots in early life conditions. Without policies to prevent it, disadvantages reinforce one another through peoples’ lives, leading to large disparities among older adults. A life course perspective on ageing is critical to improving people’s health and well-being throughout the life course into old age. The onset and severity of disability – affecting either physical or mental health – profoundly impacts the lives of people and their families and incurs large economic and societal costs in terms of health care and caregiving needs. Disability is a key outcome of unequal ageing as it has been tied to both early life conditions, such as childhood poverty and later life risk factors, including health behaviors, occupation and chronic stress. Examining physical functional limitations as a measure of disability lends itself to cross-national comparisons of inequalities in health in old age as it measures difficulties that people face in carrying out tasks in their daily living, and does not depend on access to health care and medical professionals for diagnosis, as is the case for examining differences in the prevalence of diseases, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
-
-
-
Why Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration Matters for Sustainable Development
Publication Date: January 2023More LessInternational migration is an integral part of the development process in countries of origin, transit and destination. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes several targets related directly to international migration or migrants. The most explicit among them is target 10.7, which calls on countries to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies. Other migration-related targets in the 2030 Agenda include strengthening and retaining the health workforce in developing countries (target 3.c), providing scholarships for study abroad (target 4.b), respecting the labour rights of migrant workers (target 8.8), reducing the costs of transferring remittances (target 10.c), ending human trafficking (targets 5.2, 8.7 and 16.2), establishing legal identity, including through birth registration (target 16.9) and disaggregating data by various characteristics, including migratory status (target 17.18). In addition, international migration can facilitate the achievement of other Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda, including those related to eradicating poverty, facilitating access to health care, education and decent work, and promoting economic growth and gender equality.
-
-
-
On the Importance of Monitoring Inequality in Life Expectancy
Publication Date: December 2022More LessIn recent decades, all regions of the world have seen substantial progress in life expectancy at birth, which was estimated to be at 72.8 years in 2019 compared with 64.2 years three decades ago. As importantly, life expectancy has increased at all ages such that a person at age 65 in 2019 was likely to live 6.2 years longer than in the early 1950s (United Nations, 2022). But life expectancy differs significantly across countries and within them. Inequalities in health and in life expectancy across countries have received attention from the international community, which recognized that such inequalities are unfair and beyond an individual’s control. Assessing country-level inequality in life expectancy is therefore useful to examine whether outcomes in countries with high increases in life expectancy differ by their social and health policies. For instance, reducing inequality in life expectancy across countries points to the role that health policies play in controlling a wide range of diseases responsible for disparities in child and maternal mortality.
-
-
-
Moving Beyond GDP and Achieving Our Common Agenda with Natural Capital Accounting
Publication Date: December 2022More LessThe world has changed enormously over the past 80 years—we are richer and more interconnected than ever before, yet we also face unprecedented challenges, notably the climate and biodiversity crises. The Earth is hotter than it has ever been, with the warmest seven years occurring since 2015. The state of biodiversity is doing no better, with roughly a quarter of species assessed facing a high risk of extinction in the near future. Despite the brave new world that humanity now faces, one thing has remained steadfast over these past 80 years—our use of gross domestic product (GDP) in decision making. Gross domestic product is perhaps the most well-known and used statistic in the world. Virtually all countries compile GDP, which is derived from the System of National Accounts (SNA). However, over time GDP has been wrongly interpreted as a proxy for overall wellbeing and welfare rather than what it is—that is, a summary figure for economic activity. Unfortunately, this misuse of GDP has been at great peril, particularly to the environment.
-
-
-
Caregiving in an Ageing World
Publication Date: November 2022More LessPeople in almost all countries are living longer. Globally, babies born in 2022 are expected to live 71.7 years on average, 25 years longer than those born in 1950. Rapidly ageing populations have increasing health and long-term care needs. As the forthcoming World Social Report 2023 discusses, however, today’s care and support systems for older persons are insufficient, requiring greater policy attention. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed existing weaknesses across countries in approaches to long-term care and showed how these weaknesses can aggravate inequalities. Poor quality and underfunded care facilities, insufficient provisions for care at home, low wages and precarious working conditions for paid care workers all contributed to increasing the already significant threat of Covid-19 for older persons (United Nations, 2020). The speed of change and the scale of the crisis have strengthened the call for fundamental reform of approaches to long-term care. Failure to do so will harm today’s older persons and those who care for them, as well as future generations of older persons.
-
-
-
Old-age Poverty Has a Woman’s Face
Publication Date: November 2022More LessThis year marks the 20-year milestone of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, a landmark agreement in which Governments committed to “building a society for all ages”. The Madrid Plan of Action contains a broad range of objectives, including that of reducing poverty among older persons. Poverty is a particular risk for older persons. Most people work less or stop working altogether at some point in old age, either for health reasons, family responsibilities, because they must or want to retire at the statutory retirement age, or because discrimination undermines their employment opportunities. While many older persons remain productive, many of their contributions to their countries’ economies, to their communities and to their families are not formally recognized or paid. Their economic well-being depends on the availability of public income support, affordable health care, family support and savings to a greater extent than that of the working-age population. Because of the disadvantages they experience throughout their lives, older women may suffer from higher levels of poverty than old men.
-
-
-
A Just Green Transition: Concepts and Practice So Far
Publication Date: November 2022More LessAchieving the transition to an environmentally sustainable and climate-safe future is a matter of justice in itself—people in vulnerable situations, poor countries and future generations stand to suffer the most from climate change and environmental degradation—but how it is done also matters. A green transition is already taking place, creating jobs and economic opportunities, and its potential in the medium—and long-term is much greater. Inevitably, however, a transformation on the scale necessary to contain climate change also implies losses of jobs, livelihoods, and public and private revenues in many areas and not necessarily where the benefits will accrue most directly. It also entails changes in the way energy and food needs are met and land is used, generating other types of social and environmental challenges. Breaking the inertial high-carbon development paths requires strong political support worldwide and at all levels. Greening strategies that do not take into account the political economy of the transition and the economic and social well-being of affected communities are therefore likely to be politically fragile and vulnerable to stalemates and reversals. In this context, calls for a just transition have been increasingly prominent in global, national and subnational policy circles.
-
-
-
A World of 8 Billion
Publication Date: November 2022More LessOn 15 November 2022, the world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion people, having grown by 1 billion since 2010. This is a remarkable milestone given that the human population numbered under 1 billion for millennia until around 1800, and that it took more than 100 years to grow from 1 to 2 billion. By comparison, the increase of the world’s population over the last century has been quite rapid. Despite a gradual slowing in the pace of growth, the global population is projected to surpass 9 billion around 2037 and 10 billion around 2058 (figure 1). This rapid growth of the human population is a testament to achievements in public health and medicine, such as improvements in sanitation and disease control, better access to clean drinking water, and the development of vaccines, antibacterial drugs and other effective medical therapies. Together with improved nutrition and rising standards of living, such achievements lowered the risk of dying, especially among children, and generated an unprecedented growth of populations throughout the world.
-
-
-
Strengthening Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Climate Action through Risk-informed Governance
Publication Date: October 2022More LessGovernments that consider risk in policymaking and successfully integrate risk management into their governance frameworks and development have a better record of DRR and resilience building. Climate change is already changing the frequency and intensity of natural hazards, as well as increasing the vulnerabilities of countries in special situations including Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Ensuring risk-informed governance for climate action requires citizen-centric approach through the whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches including the leverage of government innovation and frontier technologies for DRR and resilience. Emerging trends globally show that there is a stark upsurge in the number of disasters in this century compared to the previous one. Over the past two decades, climate-related disasters have nearly doubled compared to the preceding twenty years, affecting more than 4 billion people.
-
-
-
Improving the Criteria to Access Aid for Countries That Need It the Most
Publication Date: July 2022More LessThe COVID-19 crisis has resulted in significant output contractions, deteriorating social conditions and worsened debt sustainability. Some countries that had previously attained higher income status and deemed no longer to need grants and concessional finance in the form of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are once again in need of heightened international support. This includes countries that slid back to a lower income category as well as higher income vulnerable countries, such as numerous small island developing States (SIDS), who have found it difficult to respond and recover from the pandemic without support. Access to ODA, including through concessional finance windows at multilateral development banks (MDBs), is generally linked to gross national income (GNI) per capita. As developing countries attain higher income per capita status, access to grants and concessional windows declines. As a result, countries’ average cost of borrowing generally becomes more expensive, with shorter maturities, which can widen financing gaps in normal times. In times of crises, these gaps are magnified, underscoring countries’ need for support. Recognition that the need for support is often linked to factors that are not measured by income has led to MDBs, in particular, to include important exceptions in eligibility criteria, including incorporating vulnerability. However, it has often been ad hoc and not based on a full analysis of risk factors. This policy brief outlines the criteria to access ODA, why it needs to improve and suggests a way forward.
-
-
-
Ensuring SDG Progress Amid Recurrent Crises
Publication Date: July 2022More LessSDG progress has been set back, and the outlook faces uncertainty given the cumulative and amplified impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and climate change. This brief examines the channels through which these three shocks are impacting the SDGs and their implications for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through recurrent crises. COVID-19 is estimated to have caused nearly 15 million deaths globally and brought the economy and people’s lives to a standstill for long periods in many parts of the world. The pandemic and the containment measures to control it significantly slowed economic growth, increased unemployment, raised poverty and hunger, widened inequality, and caused additional adverse impacts on women and children in many countries around the world. With uneven access to vaccines and treatments, and the continuing emergence of new variants, the pandemic continues to exert a malign influence on sustainable development.
-