Trade and Development Report 2019

Who’s behind it? – UNCTAD

 

How can it help? – UNCTAD’s flagship Trade and Development Report 2019 calls for bold action to finance a global green new deal and meet the SDGs. 

UNCTAD stresses that the world can still meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, but only if there is the necessary political will to change the rules of the international economic game and adopt policies that scale up the resources needed for a big investment push led by the public sector and set the global economy on an expansionary course.

The report recasts the Depression era’s signature policy on a global scale – a Global Green New Deal – as the right policy framework to make a clean break with years of austerity and insecurity following the global financial crisis, help bring about a more equal distribution of income and reverse decades of environmental degradation. It proposes a series of reform measures to make debt, capital and banks work for development and finance a deal, including: 

  • An expanded role for special drawing rights as a flexible and scalable financing mechanism that goes beyond liquidity provisioning to support long-standing calls for a global environmental protection fund providing predictable and stable emergency funding without strict policy conditionalities or limiting eligibility criteria.
  • A global SDG-related concessional lending programme for low- and lower-middle-income developing countries combining a refinancing facility designed to allow participant countries to borrow on concessional terms and an additional lending facility designed to cover the external share of gross financing needs of the public sector until 2030.
  • A global sustainable development fund capitalized and replenished by donor countries paying in their unfulfilled commitments to the official development assistance target of 0.7% of gross national income and providing dedicated resources to compensate for what was only partially delivered over past decades (estimated at over $3.5 trillion since 1990).

 

Share This