SPECIAL FEATURE
2030
What are the main novelties – and weaknesses – of the SDGs?
Innovations Following in the footsteps of the MDGs in a more differentiated way, the SDGs widen the narrowly economic definition of what “development” means for countries, both rich and poor. They took their cue from the UN Human Development Indicators which emphasize that “people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone” 2 . Thus, goals like reducing poverty, access to education and drinking water, preserving oceans, combating climate change, ensuring gender equality, healthcare, sustainable consumption and production patterns as well as infrastructure, clean energy security, equitable income distribution, strong accountable institutions and global partnerships, and a number more
specific goals which define people’s lives enter into the portfolio of the countries’ policy-makers and international financial institutions. This is a “beyond growth” agenda, whose proponents have been opposing the traditional neoclassical economic model focusing on GDP growth as the main development indicator. The economists’ discussion of how to measure human well-being, i.e. the state of a society’s development, and which type of policies to pursue in order to increase well-being, goes back a long way. Already in 1930, John Maynard Keynes published an article on “The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren” 3 where he referred to the beyond-income aspects of a “good life”, in his view achievable because of massive productivity increases which required only about 15 hours of
weekly work to earn adequate income. Many economists have followed this “beyond growth” perspective and attempted to create other than GDP metrics to measure human well-being. The intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for instance, created the Centre on Well-being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE) 4 , with a view to capture the wider economic aspects. Many other institutions have followed, however, GDP per capita still remains the most widely used measure for economic success. Still, in economics and policy-making, paradigm changes take a long time. If governments and policy-makers keep referring to and addressing the wider dimensions of the SDGs consistently, given time we can expect their wider acceptance.
2. https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI 3. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 4. https://www.oecd.org/wise/
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