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UNDP's Development Futures Series Briefs and Working Papers
UNDP’s Development Futures Series (DFS) is a series of papers penned by UNDP personnel from around the world sharing evidence and insights grounded in deep study, data and practice, while exploring new ideas, analysis and policy recommendations relevant for the future of development. The DFS aims to publish bottom-up and evidence-based knowledge aiming to reach and influence global, regional and country-level policy debates, with a focus on thought leadership, data and analytics on the top development issues of today — and tomorrow. The DFS publishes in two formats: Short Policy Briefs linking evidence to practical policy recommendations, and longer Working Papers presenting data analysis and in-depth research. UNDP’s DFS papers are especially valuable for policy makers, development practitioners, researchers, and specialized journalists.
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UNDP Debt Update: Development Gives Way to Debt
Publication Date: February 2025More LessUNDP has been tracking debt vulnerabilities across developing economies and the availability and appropriateness of international relief measures. Accompanying UNDP's latest Debt Insights update, this UNDP Development Futures Series policy brief presents a snapshot of the current situation and outlook and discusses the needed international policy priorities. Central debt vulnerability indicators remain highly elevated and have continued to worsen across many countries, thereby intensifying a trade-off between development spending and a high and rising debt service burden, with especially devastating consequences in the poorest of countries. For countries that have restructured debt, economic costs have been substantial due to protracted negotiations pending a more formalized and predictable restructuring regime, and deals have delivered inadequate and uncertain relief. If support for debt relief is not stepped up, the situation could easily morph into longer-term solvency crises in more countries. The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) this year is an opportunity to tackle debt by focusing on ensuring easier access to an effective debt restructuring process, agreeing to a large-scale debt relief initiative for the poorest countries and on ways to lower the cost of borrowing. If the conference fails to deliver, poor countries could be in for another lost decade of development.
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The Cost-of-Living Crisis in Mozambique: Poverty Impacts and Possible Policy Responses
Publication Date: September 2024More LessExtreme poverty has been rising in Mozambique for the past decade—the analysis in this Development Futures Series Working Paper suggests that this trend has been aggravated by the cost-of-living crisis induced by the onset of the war in Ukraine in early 2022. The authors of this working paper estimate that, compared to December 2021, 1 million additional Mozambicans lived in extreme poverty as of December 2022 due to the soaring food, energy and transport inflation, with 60% of these individuals being concentrated in urban areas. The analysis underscores the limited mitigation potential of tax measures, such as the reduction in Value Added Tax (VAT) implemented by the Mozambican government in December 2022. The analysis finds that alternative policies, such as cash transfers, have nearly three times greater mitigation potential. While this is a national analysis, this paper includes important policy implications for countries with significant shares of subsistence farmers, economies that have implemented or considered implementing a VAT reduction to mitigate income or consumption shocks, and countries facing compound shocks through the cost-of-living crisis, extreme weather events and armed conflict.
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Multi-speed Growth is Back, With a Fiscal Blind Spot
Publication Date: July 2024More LessMulti-speed growth is back: 68 developing economies are currently growing at more than 4%, 47 at between 2 and 4% and 37 at less than 2%. The projected effects on poverty are uneven. Despite a downward trend since the pandemic in 2020, an estimated 7.7% of the global population could still be living in extreme poverty in 2024, just below the pre-pandemic level of 8%, and could decrease slightly to 7.2% by 2026. Looking forward, high levels of debt and weak development financing are expected to make uneven patterns of growth and poverty more divergent. In 49 countries, net interest payments as a share of revenue are now higher than 10%, up from 27 countries a decade ago, and in 10 countries higher than 25%. Worst affected is the world’s poorest region, Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 45% of countries with interest payments in excess of 10% and 50% of countries with payments higher than 25%. Indicators of debt distress and default risk remain elevated. For developing economies with a sovereign credit rating, 61% percent (54 countries) have a rating below ‘non-investment grade’ and for countries with debt assessed under the LIC-DSF 51% percent (34 countries) are rated either in or at high risk of debt distress.
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Untapped Opportunities for Livelihood Recovery in Crisis and Post-crisis Settings: Applying Music as a Use Case
Publication Date: July 2024More LessThis UNDP Development Futures Series policy brief explores the potential of leveraging cultural and creative industries, especially through music, to assist in the recovery from crisis and post-crisis settings. It focuses on music, not to elevate it above other art forms, but because engaging with it provides lessons and tactics, understanding and benefits across all other performative art forms and forms of intellectual property (IP). This study emphasizes the pivotal role of music and cultural participation and its engagement as a coping strategy, adding resilience to affected communities, and the expansive impact of music if it is regarded as an economy and an ecosystem. The policy brief proposes an innovative approach: to incorporate music and cultural production into programmes and strategies to support affected communities for livelihood recovery. The objective is to explore how music, and the wider creative economy, can be a powerful tool in supporting economic diversification in a non-extractive manner, by leveraging potential passive income streams inherent in music and cultural intellectual property.
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Thematic Bonds and How to Deliver More Sustainable Finance in Developing Economies
Authors: United Nations Development Programme and Lars JensenPublication Date: June 2024More LessSustainability-themed bonds are growing in popularity, including among development practitioners who view them as promising instruments in the delivery of more, especially climate, finance in developing economies. This UNDP Development Futures Working Paper provides an overview of the thematic bonds market and a discussion of issuer incentives as well as some of the main challenges related to additionality and credibility. To improve the potential of thematic bonds as a tool for sustainable and equitable development, the paper proposes five features that any official sector-supported model should prioritize. These features aim to deliver substantially lower funding costs for ‘green activities’ and improve market access as well as the credibility of bonds, which include strengthening issuer commitments to ambitious targets and incentives to implement climate-friendly policies. Finally, it is important to recognize the limitations of donor-supported models. High debt burdens in many countries limit the use of debt instruments, and these will compete for limited official sector funds with other, potentially fairer, means of delivering climate finance.
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Putting a Stop to Gender Violence through Community Action: The Experience of a Network of Women Leaders in Peru
Publication Date: June 2024More LessThis policy brief describes the creation of the Women Leaders Network in Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru, and how it serves as a successful model for transformation and structural change for gender equality. This network has been able to unify existing and rising women leaders around a common cause, addressing gender based violence (GBV), while maintaining an intersectional approach. Once unified, the women pushed the local government to create a permanent taskforce for preventing and responding to GBV in which the women leaders and representatives of the local government, judiciary, police, healthcare and others participate.
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Breaking the Disaster-response Cycle in SIDS: Aligning Financing to Urgent Climate Action
Publication Date: May 2024More LessThis policy brief focuses on the specific issue of disaster-response for three reasons. First, the disaster-response cycle describes a well-documented pattern of fiscal surge and a crowding out effect over much needed adaptation investments; second, climate vulnerability will only increase the volatility of this cycle in the future, threatening both the prospects for sustainable and inclusive growth as well as an increasingly untenable trajectory for fiscal sustainability; and third, because fiscal and financial capital flows to SIDS pose a challenge to the international financial architecture at large. The characteristics of the problem are known, as well as the size of the fiscal and financial burdens; this is a problem that would not be a problem if the incentives for public and private capital flows were aligned in the right direction. This presents a challenge for the multilateral system at large.
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Accelerating the Green Transition: Socioecological Systems and the Future of Development
Authors: United Nations Development Programme and Kishan KhodayPublication Date: April 2024More LessThe planetary crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, an existential threat calling into question the future of civilization. Unless collective action is taken to halt and reverse the decline of the planet’s ecosystems, the road to 2030 will be defined by accelerating levels of social vulnerability, poverty and crisis. The polycrisis experienced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the past decade is a case in point, providing critical insights on the role of ecological change in the emergence of complex multidimensional crises. This paper explores lessons and insights from a new generation of integrated local solutions that have emerged across the region to manage risks and build resilience and makes the case for a new systems orientation to development paradigms and practice to achieve goals of transformational change. In moving towards 2030, a new paradigm is needed in which development is seen no longer as a linear set of goals and targets but as the emergent property of a complex socioecological system.
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Bridging Gender Gaps with a Sustainable Care Economy: Investment Opportunities and Challenges
Authors: United Nations Development Programme, Yali Wang and Seyfettin BaranPublication Date: April 2024More LessThe COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an acute deficiency in care services, highlighting the unfair and unsustainable model on which the care system traditionally relies. Recent surveys indicate that more than three quarters (76.4%) of unpaid domestic care work worldwide is done by women, hindering their access to other opportunities. Simultaneously, increasing care needs due to rising dependency ratios are challenging the viability and sustainability of the traditional care provision system. To meet the growing care demand among the young, old, ill and disabled, societies must move away from such a system and invest in a sustainable care economy to provide affordable, high-quality care services while recognizing, reducing and redistributing (“3Rs”) the unpaid care burden borne by women. Besides emphasis on SDG 5, this policy brief focuses on opportunities and challenges in scaling a sustainable care economy to create new sources of fair jobs and reshape current economic and financial systems to make it more equitable, contributing to a broader range of SDGs, including SDG 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11 and more. While the research is built on data mostly from China, the findings may benefit a wide range of emerging economies with similar development contexts.
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How Do Investments in Human Capital Development Affect SDG Outcomes in Malawi? A Human Capital Push Scenario
Publication Date: April 2024More LessAs the world races towards 2025, the midpoint of the last decade of SDG action, the need for swift identification of actionable strategies becomes an imperative for policymakers. With a focus on Malawi, a country grappling with uneven SDG progress, this policy brief highlights the pivotal role of human capital development (HCD) in areas such as health, education, skill building and infrastructure development in the attainment of the SDGs. Based on a set of simulations, the brief underscores the transformative impact of an integrated HCD approach, whereby policy design, planning and programme implementation converge to unlock the potential of human capital as a driver of sustainable development. This analysis builds on the ‘Human Capital Push Scenario’ employed by using the International Futures (IFs) model.
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How Likely Are We to Achieve the SDGs at the Current Pace? Public Budgets and Policy Priorities in Colombia
Publication Date: April 2024More LessThis policy brief analyses the possible convergence of SDG indicators for Colombia. The methodology uses an agent-based model to depict the distribution of public resources for the SDGs within governments, modelling budgeting inertia, interdependency, and spillovers across the 17 SDGs, with the purpose of informing policymakers of the prospective implications of current budgetary policy. Using historical budget and development indicators, we find that (i) at the current pace, only 18 percent of SDG indicators will reach their targets by 2030; (ii) there are structural bottlenecks in close to 65 percent of SDG indicators that do not respond to boosts in resources; and (iii) budget reallocations could have a greater impact on SDG achievement than simply increasing resources. To accelerate SDG achievement, governments need to redesign some of the current programs and implement results-based budgeting anchored by SDG indicators.
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Identifying Key Priorities and Regional Development Gaps in the Local Level: The Case of the State of Mexico
Publication Date: April 2024More LessThe 2030 Agenda calls for the collection of data at the local level to contextualize sustainable development challenges and monitor the progress of the SDGs. While local governments in fact use data, the level of analytics that are used to construct regional agendas is not homogenous. We propose a systematic approach for the creation of local agendas that identify development gaps, while fostering the multidimensionality and interconnectivity of public problems that become systemic development bottlenecks at the local level. We systematically identify local priorities in terms of how much the existence of such problems aggravate other issues. Our approach builds on the acceleration and MAPS framework and includes community participation to appropriate priorities. While further analysis is required to assist policy analysis and recommendations, this first step for identifying local priorities is easily replicable and promising for harnessing data and fostering deeper analytical projects for the creation of local agendas.
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Localizing Multidimensional Poverty Assessments for Inclusive Public Policies: The Case for a Communal Poverty Profile in Mali
Publication Date: April 2024More LessAs in many developing countries, in Mali, generating reliable and up-to date data beyond national averages to uncover geographic and other inequalities is one of the major challenges for rigorous monitoring of progress towards achieving the SDGs. Mali’s National Observatory for Human Development has set up a mechanism to generate socio-economic and poverty metrics for 703 municipalities based on the small area estimation procedure. The generated metrics shed light on poverty inequalities among municipalities while providing information on SDG acceleration integrated policies. This experience of data processing shows that existing data at the supra-communal level can be used to infer useful indicators that uncover the most deprived people, inform local development policies and offer reliable inputs for predictive modelling for anticipatory governance.
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Mapping Essential Life Support Areas to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals
Publication Date: April 2024More LessThe United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030) is a guiding star for countries, establishing a common vision for human and planetary well-being. However, approximately half of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are severely or moderately off track for achievement by 2030, in part because decision-making around the SDGs is often undertaken by just a few governmental ministries. While the Agenda 2030 declares that the SDGs are “integrated and indivisible”, goals related to the environment often take a back seat to economic goals during national implementation. The UNDP led project ‘Mapping Nature for People and Planet’ demonstrates how countries can apply integrated spatial planning to facilitate inclusive decision-making for policy targets around the SDGs, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global conventions and frameworks. The project supports countries in developing a singular map of Essential Life Support Areas (ELSAs) that shows pathways for action to achieve multiple targets at once, including those at the nexus of nature, climate and sustainable development. At the base of the map are the country’s most pressing policy targets and current spatial data layers, hand-selected by national experts. This policy brief captures insights from this project to help policymakers use integrated spatial planning to support the achievement of SDGs, with a focus on those that are the most dependent on nature.
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New Effective Paths for Approaching the 2030 Agenda with Public and Private Actors amid Political Instability
Publication Date: April 2024More LessThe political instability in the Latin American region makes it challenging for countries to incorporate and maintain long-term policies. Peru, a country with solid macroeconomic policies, has recently experienced one of its most critical stages in political terms in the last 30 years. In this scenario of uncertainty, how is it possible to prioritize policies that help achieve sustainable development goals? This policy brief describes the process of challenges and knowledge gained from implementing and adjusting the SDG PUSH methodology to prioritize public policy interventions that could become SDG accelerators in a complex political context. In addition, the policy brief will discuss the critical involvement of the government and how it contributed to the ownership of the process and the positioning of the SDGs in informed decision-making.
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Preparing Cities for Climate Displacement: Insights from Anticipating Futures in Viet Nam and Pakistan
Publication Date: April 2024More LessExtreme weather events and rising sea levels are having an increasing impact on human mobility, especially within specific countries. In 2022, for example, there were 32.6 million disaster-induced displacements around the world, the highest figure seen in a decade, and 70 percent of these took place in Asia Pacific regions. Policy actors need to anticipate and prepare for future human mobility patterns exacerbated by the effects of climate change to ensure that those who move have their human rights protected and can contribute meaningfully to the communities in which they arrive. Knowing how to anticipate, invest and act on these futures now and needing to react to immediate priorities is, however, challenging. This paper outlines the promise of an anticipatory policy design approach that blends predictive analytics with qualitative foresight to provide the data and space that stakeholders need to effectively adapt and anticipate such events. The approach is introduced here as part of an initiative to analyse the scale and effects of migration to Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam and Karachi, Pakistan by 2050 as a result of the effects of climate change.
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Return-on-Investment in National Digital Transformation: Exploring the Development Impact of Digital
Publication Date: April 2024More LessDigital transformation is often measured in the context of systems and subscribers—for example, increases in 4G mobile coverage, numbers of active users and the value of financial investment in hardware and software. This results in digital being seen solely through the lens of solutions and not outcomes. This brief highlights the importance of broadening our measurement of digital transformation: ‘return-on investment in digital transformation’ (RoI-DT) aims to position digital approaches as key to achieving development outcomes. This includes the role of digital in reducing poverty, improving equality and protecting the planet. By broadening the definition of impact and return-on investment, the development community can better integrate digital as a key human development enabler—and one that should no longer be solely the responsibility of digital, technical or IT teams and experts.
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SDG Budget Tagging: A proposal to measure SDG Financing
Publication Date: April 2024More LessSustainable Development Goal (SDG) financing is gaining global interest in the Decade of Action (2020–2030). Without an adequate assessment of the SDG financing flows, government actions can fail to accelerate SDG achievement. This document presents an SDG budget-tagging methodology to measure and strengthen countries’ SDG financing diagnostics. The methodology can be applied to (i) national and subnational budgets; (ii) international development cooperation to strengthen its monitoring; and (iii) identifying potentially eligible projects in private financing strategies. In addition to strengthening SDG financing diagnostics, when accompanied by data visualization tools, SDG budget tagging can strengthen fiscal transparency by communicating government action to the public using the 17 SDGs and inform SDG-oriented budgetary policymaking.
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SDG Push through Social Protection Programmes: Reflecting on UNDP’s Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities Project in Bangladesh
Publication Date: April 2024More LessHow long do impacts of the graduation-based social protection approach last after support ends? What factors affect the impacts’ longevity? What do these factors mean for those seeking to exit poverty sustainably? This brief explores such questions by revisiting women who participated in a UNDP social protection initiative in one of Bangladesh’s most climate-vulnerable districts between 2017 and 2019. Four years on, the brief unpacks how the women are faring in a context where they are exposed to climate-induced shocks. The insights contribute towards sparking discussion on the sustainability of impacts and on influencing factors while carrying key lessons for social protection to achieve sustainable outcomes.
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Targeted and Inclusive Approaches to Tackling Energy Poverty in a Crisis Context: Case Study from Moldova
Publication Date: April 2024More LessAccording to UNDP estimates from the early days of the energy crisis in Moldova, 71 percent of households were in the most vulnerable energy category, spending 90 percent or more of their available income—after the minimum expenditure—on energy and heating during the cold period. Highly dependent on energy imports, the country risked tripling its population living in poverty from 11 to 35 percent. In the context of a compounded crisis and the war in Ukraine, the Moldovan Government, in close collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), developed an innovative and targeted on-bill energy compensation mechanism, the first of its kind in Moldova, the Energy Vulnerability Reduction Fund (EVRF). The aim of EVRF is to create an inclusive solution that minimizes the negative impacts of the sharp increase in energy prices on energy-vulnerable and income-poor households, therefore safeguarding social cohesion. At the same time, in the longer term, the EVRF aims to incentivize the transition towards sustainable energy sources and to achieve higher levels of energy efficiency in the residential sector. This paper presents the main outcomes of the UNDP support for the establishment and implementation of a robust EVRF, along with an impact assessment and lessons learned that are applicable to other country contexts.
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