Economic and Social Development

This brief examines the social policy responses aimed at protecting income and job losses implemented amidst the pandemic. A rich dataset has been exploited to characterize the breadth of countries’ policy responses by building an index that reflects the diversity of policies implemented, amongst all those available, in terms of social assistance, social insurance, and the labour market. This analysis offers a qualitative approach on whether governments’ actions were comprehensive or narrow, conditional on the fiscal efforts and the stringency of the containment measures. There are three key insights from this analysis. First, even when social protection systems are highly conditioned by the income level of each country, all countries resorted to the social assistance dimension of social protection. Second, even in the presence of new social assistance measures, most developed countries also relied on social insurance and labour market policies. Finally, social protection systems should be continuously strengthened, especially in case more stringent measures are required due to the current and future threats to public health.

As 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.

The 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.

Even though microenterprises in Colombia represent approximately 80 percent of the national productive sector, accounting for 33 percent of the labor force and approximately 5 percent of the aggregated value, the microenterprise segment has many problems in productivity, formality and innovation compared to its bigger brothers. This is a paradox of utmost relevance as these structural problems have greatly influenced the COVID-19 impact on microenterprise, one of the most affected sectors during the crisis. Taking advantage of a new, detailed national microenterprise survey (EMICRON), this document sheds a light on the structural and institutional problems that affect the wellbeing of microenterprises in Colombia and characterizes the junctural impact of the COVID crisis in the sector. This document indicates that the direction of the economic recovery should not only focus on overcoming the crisis but should incorporate long-term and structural policies.

According 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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the livelihoods of the most vulnerable households in developing countries. In response, several countries have launched income support programs (ISPs). We evaluated the likely impact of these programs on the weekly growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths across 62 developing countries between January and December of 2020. Event study results suggest that implementation of ISPs reduced the weekly growth rate of cases and deaths. A heterogeneity analysis found that ISPs seemed effective in reducing the growth of cases and deaths related to COVID-19 in middle-income countries and the growth rate of cases in low-income countries as well as those countries with high informality in the labor market. Difference-in-difference estimates using the Callaway and Sant’Anna (2020) estimation strategy indicated that ISPs decreased the COVID-19 case growth rate by 12.1 percentage points and the death growth rate by 22.9 percentage points.

In a post-COVID-19 Iraq, it will be impossible to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or an inclusive development trajectory without tackling the multiple dimensions of fragility in the country. The fragility landscape in Iraq is challenging at best with all dimensions scoring on the high end of the scale. There is a strong imperative to work across the humanitarian, development and peace (HDP) nexus with UNDP as Fragility Integrator, together with all stakeholders, to sustainably address priority drivers and their effects on the social contract and ensure no one is left behind. This policy brief provides recommendation of how to create the enabling environment towards a fragility-based post-COVID-19 recovery.

This paper aims to draw attention to the need to create an innovative measure that allows us to devel into women's poverty and its specificities. Only by performing an accurate analysis of women’s multidimensional poverty will it be possible to respond to their specific needs, identify the bottlenecks that prevent them from escaping poverty and make policy recommendations that are gender-sensitive in that regard. This paper presents a proposal for a Multidimensional Poverty Index with a focus on women in Latin America and the Caribbean, including results for 10 countries: Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. Estimates show that 28 percent of women in the analysed countries are multidimensionally poor. Uruguay and Chile exhibit the lowest incidence, below 10 percent, while in Honduras and El Salvador, more than 62 percent of adult women are multidimensionally poor.

Amidst increasingly protracted and complex crises and ‘development emergencies’, the operational environment for development agencies like UNDP requires programming approaches that can be applied across the humanitarian development-peace nexus. These approaches must integrate interventions from multiple sectors and be truly locally owned. After decades of use in development practice, area-based programming (ABP) still has the potential to meet these simultaneous needs. This paper explores the unique characteristics of ABP and its applicability to complex development and crisis settings. It further proposes new frontiers of practice moving forward.

The present policy brief charts the journey ahead. It describes the cultural levers that form the foundation of our organizational transformation, along with the “quintet of change” that builds on it. While introduced separately, all UN 2.0 areas are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. In each chapter, we illustrate the potential for impact, explain why we shift approaches, highlight where we are now, outline our goals and describe how we are changing. With this policy brief, we provide a broad framework for change and offer direction for more detailed strategies, plans and initiatives. Each United Nations entity will pursue its own journey towards the UN 2.0 vision, progressing along its own path. Every element of the “quintet of change” will have a unique footprint in every entity – tailored to mandate and context.