UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Policy Briefs

There 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.

Education 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.

Worldwide, 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.

Domestic 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.

International 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.

The 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.

This 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.

On 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.

The 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.

Discrimination, or unjust differential treatment on the basis of, for example, sex, race or ethnicity, age, income or wealth, disability, caste, sexual orientation, religion, or migrant status, causes harm and drives exclusion in social, economic, political and cultural life. Where it occurs in the delivery of public services, it further undermines public trust and confidence in public institutions. In recent years, growing evidence of discrimination has brought the issue to the forefront of many societies and provoked both individual and collective reflection. Although the principles of equality and non-discrimination are widely entrenched, discrimination affects public administration as it does society in general. There is no comparable data across countries that fully sheds light on the level and extent of discrimination by public administration. This may be due to factors such as the difficulties of measuring discrimination, under-reporting of incidents of discrimination and the limited public availability of such reporting, and how broadly non-discrimination is approached (for instance, which groups are protected and to what extent). A limited amount of information is available for some countries and country groupings (mainly developed countries), and some social groups.

Over the last two years, the world economy has been rocked by multiple non-economic shocks, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine. Climate-related disasters continue to increase in frequency and severity. Together, these events have had enormous socio-economic consequences due to the interrelated nature of economic, social and environmental risks. But not all countries and people have been impacted in the same way, in part because a financing divide is sharply curtailing the ability of many developing countries to respond to shocks and invest in recovery. The outbreak of COVID-19 delivered a seismic shock to the global economy, but developed countries were able to respond with aggressive macroeconomic policies.

Seven years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, many countries still rely on out-of-date and incomplete data to inform its implementation. Millions of people globally are not covered by existing data sources and are therefore excluded from decision-making and policies. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the critical importance of having reliable, timely and disaggregated data to save lives and livelihoods, and exposed the limitations of traditional sources and methods used to produce them. In this context, there is an increased sense of the urgency to use innovative approaches to better meet the data needs to accelerate action towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and build agile and resilient data and statistical systems. Heeding this call, the Data For Now initiative is supporting countries in developing their capacity to leverage innovative sources, technologies and methods to deliver better, more timely and disaggregated data for sustainable development.

World population continues to grow and is expected to peak at a level of almost 11 billion around the year 2100. Most of this growth will take place in low-income and lower middle-income countries.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times. Sport plays an important role as part of the solution. Sport is a key social platform that can reach and influence millions of peoples worldwide and raise awareness on climate change, promote a culture in favour of climate action, and champion sustainable behaviours. The sport sector can contribute to tackle climate change by reducing sport organizations's climate footprint while governments and international organizations facilitate this goal by setting right policies and guidelines.

Documenting more evidence around post-COVID 19 transport measures can provide useful references in revamping transport systems. It is paramount, however, that governments and the private sector revisit such short-term policies with a view to ensuring that any emergency-based actions that may have had inadvertent negative consequences on sustainable development would not become permanent measures.

INFFs have an important role to play both in the immediate response to the current crisis and in rebuilding better. Integrated financing strategies can serve as a starting point for locally driven reform processes, providing a foundation for action. The INFF methodology puts forward discrete steps to improve financial policymaking.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed new demands on development cooperation in its various forms: finance, capacity support, policy change and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The ongoing challenge of the pandemic and its consequences has also shown the durability and adaptability of development cooperation.

Development strategies that focus solely on urban development and leave rural communities behind are not adequate to overcome the development challenges we face. The in-situ development of rural economies and societies must be a central objective of development if nations are to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda. A precondition for substantial rural transformation and growth is higher agricultural productivity and the subsequent reallocation of productive resources towards expanding the non-agricultural rural sector. A dynamic local rural economy can benefit from and complement urban growth, alleviate poverty, and reduce migratory pressures on growing cities. Country examples show that it is possible to accelerate in-situ development by investing in infrastructure, offering educational opportunities, expanding financial services, and speeding up the adoption of technologies in food and non-food producing sectors. These investments help create a virtuous circle of agricultural productivity and non-agricultural development.

This policy brief reviews trends and impacts of wildfires on sustainable development, in all its environmental, economic and social dimensions. It provides an analysis of the key drivers of wildfires and proposes measures to reduce the risk and impacts of future wildfires.

Global progress towards SDG 1 had already slowed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the world was not on track to achieve this goal by 2030. The prospect of achieving SDG 1 by 2030 has been further dimmed by the impact of COVID-19. The global extreme poverty rate (SDG target 1.1) is projected in a baseline scenario to decline to only 9.2 per cent by 2030. This would mean that as many as 785 million people could find themselves in extreme poverty by 2030, far from reaching SDG 1. Given this context, achieving SDG 1 by 2030, will require extraordinary efforts by countries, both individually and collectively. The scenario analysis presented in this policy brief shows that a decline in income inequality can be a potent driver of poverty reduction and if combined with robust economic growth, can produce highly positive, if not miraculous, results for the eradication of extreme poverty, by 2030.

Activities geared to strengthening the capacity of public servants to implement the 2030 Agenda have multiplied rapidly since 2015, with a multiplicity of national and international actors involved. Yet, available information does not easily allow for a consolidated picture of how ongoing efforts address gaps at the level of individual countries. Areas identified in the Agenda itself as needing capacity building, such as data, statistical systems, follow up and review, have received high attention, as have planning and SDG localization. The landscape of capacity building for SDG implementation appears fragmented. There likely is untapped potential for cross-fertilization of capacity building initiatives. Reporting on capacity-building activities for public servants has not been a consistently high priority of governments. Because of this, the degree of responsiveness of capacity-building activities to recipients’ and countries’ needs is hard to assess. Government-wide capacity-building gap assessments and strategies are rare. Little is known about the changes in learning outcomes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which can have longer-term impacts on capacity in the public service.

By putting stress on national socio-economic systems, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new tensions and trade-offs among policy areas, and exacerbated already existing tensions. In many countries heavily affected by the pandemic, this has revealed problems of lack of policy integration and policy coherence, both within and across sectors as well as across levels of government. Integrated policy-making has been critical in responding effectively to the pandemic, and will be paramount in post-COVID recovery to realize the Sustainable Development Goals.

Digital transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is enabling new forms of work and new ways of organizing work. Yet, due to regulatory gaps, social protection gaps, and weak enforcement mechanisms, many workers in these new forms of work - especially in the platform economy - may be pushed into precarious employment. Labour regulations should be updated to balance flexibility with the safeguarding of labour standards, workers’ protection, and income security in the digital age. This requires a shift away from one-size fits-all solutions to tailor-made employment and social protection policies that consider the unique opportunities and challenges of different types of new forms of work, based on better data and careful examination of the impacts of digitally enabled forms of work on society and the economy. Social protection systems need to adapt to ensure no worker is left unprotected in a future world of work transformed by digital technology.

The legitimacy of public institutions is crucial for building peaceful and inclusive societies. While levels of trust in institutions vary significantly across countries, opinion surveys suggest that there has been a decline in trust in public institutions in recent decades. Economic insecurity—which the COVID-19 crisis threatens to exacerbate—and perceptions of poor or corrupt government performance undermine the social contract and are closely linked to declines in institutional trust. Rebuilding public trust in the light of the current crisis demands services that work for everyone and jobs that provide income security, as well as more inclusive institutions.