Publications

As Agenda 2030 passes its mid-way point, ambitious reforms will be required during its second phase if the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are still to be achieved. A lack of financial resources is one of the main reasons why their implementation has fallen so far behind. The UN’s latest Financing for Sustainable Development Report has identified the “financial divide”, i.e. the lack of access to funds at favourable interest rates for countries of the Global South, as a key problem [...]

Since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, development finance has operated under conditions of low interest rates and high liquidity in global financial markets. This has changed with the recent turnaround in interest rates. This briefing paper describes the current trends, analyzes the implications for financing sustainable development in the Global South, and formulates policy recommendations on how countries in the Global South and their financing partners in the North can respond to the interest rate increases.

Once in a decade, the UN convenes a conference on the least developed countries (LDCs) to negotiate a programme of action, consisting of political agreements and international support measures. Financing for development in all its dimensions is an essential component of these programmes. The process that led to the Fifth UN Conference on Least Developed Countries and the Doha Programme of Action took place under the difficult conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the limited financial space that LDCs had [...]

This briefing paper gives an overview of the current challenges in different development finance action areas. In the second part, we give an overview of the UN’s FfD process and of the international agreements on Financing for Development. Based on our analysis, we identify 10 key levers for financing sustainable development. With these, Eu­rope can make a substantial contribution to financ­ing for development and thereby to the successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development worldwide.

On August 23 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) performed the long desired payout of special drawing rights (SDRs) to the tune of 650 billion US dollars. Especially for countries of the Global South, the SDRs are a welcome cash injection. Unlike the EU and the USA with their economic recovery programs worth trillions, developing countries have so far only been able to mobilize few financial resources to cope with the impacts of the crisis, and for this reason too [...]

Time to overcome contradictions and hypocrisy in the COVID-19 crisis

Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis have greatly exacerbated national and global inequalities. Blatant examples are the unfair distribution of care work, relying mainly on women and poorly remunerated if at all, and the global disparity in the distribution of vaccines.

So far more than 60 percent of people in high-income countries have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, but less than 2 percent [...]

Global debt levels have been surging constantly over the past decade, and the need to fight the COVID-19 crisis with running fiscal deficits and borrowing money has been a further shock to global economies. While central bank interventions have been keeping interest rates low in the global north, countries in the global south are particularly vulnerable to crisis because they owe large amounts of external debts. The risk of debt crisis is high and debt service costs are rising rapidly [...]

The UN Forum on Financing for Development (FfD) 2021 was the first FfD forum held as planned since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. Accordingly, the expectations were high. Development finance is currently facing a triple challenge: to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, funds for an acute crisis response are needed – for example, to finance universal access to vaccines through the COVAX-facility, or for social protection measures. To mitigate the further divergence between countries, resources must be made available for [...]

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations (UN) estimated that developing countries needed an extra US$ 2.5 trillion in external finance to cope with the consequences of the crisis. This vast sum is needed because additional spending needs – for example on health services and social protection – coincide with a simultaneous collapse of all traditional sources of development finance: tax revenue, export earnings, migrant remittances, foreign direct investment and, to a lesser extent, also official [...]

Lessons from the global COVID-19 crisis

This is the fifth edition of the report Spotlight on Sustainable Development. Since 2016, we have published this report annually to assess not only the implementation of the 2030 Agenda but also the structural obstacles in its realization.

When we started to plan for this year’s report in Autumn 2019, mass protests were shaking a growing number of countries in various regions of the world. In Ecuador, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, in Egypt, Lebanon [...]