HALFTIME FOR THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
After years of steady progress, delivery of the goals has hit a roadblock. Unforeseen events and unmet promises are taking their toll. In economics and policy-making, paradigm changes take a long time. But the further the goals slip away, the more pressing they become By Kurt Bayer, Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies
PROFILE: KURT BAYER Kurt Bayer is Senior Research Associate at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies and Emeritus Consultant at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. His research interests focus on crisis prevention and resolution, industrial and innovation policies, anti-corruption and transparency and EU economic policy. In prior positions Mr. Bayer was a researcher and board member at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (1971–1995), Deputy Director General for Economic Policy and International Financial Institutions at the Austrian Ministry of Finance (1995–2008), Board Director at the World Bank (2002–2004) and Board Director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (2008–2012).
W hen the UN General Assembly in 2015 agreed on the Agenda 2030, its SDGs consisting of 17 individual goals, marked a major milestone in Global Economic Governance. In contrast to
For emerging economies and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) this was a big symbolic step forward: not to be
singled out as laggards, but instead included in a global framework where each country in the world is held responsible for the global common
their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, agreed in 2000) which contained eight specific development goals with quantitative targets to be achieved by 2015, the SDGs targeted not only less developed and emerging countries, but all members of the United Nations. In this way, they created the space for a world community, stressing that the 17 global goals needed to be pursued by all countries in the world.
good. While this was a major conceptual and
consciousness break with a general “us vs. you”, often
hierarchically applied mindset, the daily policy task to make progress frequently did not live up to this commitment. One of the most obvious deficiencies is the fact that rich countries so far have not lived up to their promise to transfer US$100 billion per year to LDCs to combat climate change. 1
1. The UN Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022 (p 20) states that in 2019 (latest available year) developed countries transferred only around US$80 billion to LDC https://unstats.un.org/ sdgs/report/2022/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2022.pdf Evidence from the COP meetings points to even less money in later years.
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