Migration and the growth of global diasporas are key contemporary trends which impact on the pledge to ?leave no one behind? in the 2030 Agenda. The developmental potential of migration is captured in four Goals and five Targets in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper offers critical perspectives on the SDGs targets with a discussion on the economic challenges as well as the opportunities for trade and entrepreneurship.
The focus is particularly on remittances (including South-South remittances) and other financial investments such as diaspora savings and bonds. The second area of analysis is financial innovation through the growth of money transfer organizations in LDCs (i.…
Download
One of the most important elements of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs is the strong commitment to inclusive development, and leaving no one behind has emerged as a central theme of the agenda. How did this consensus come about? And what does this term mean and how is it being interpreted? This matters because the influence of SDGs on policy and action of governments and stakeholders in development operates through discourse. So the language used in formulating the UN Agenda is a terrain of active contestation.
This paper aims to explain the politics that led to this term as a core theme. It argues that LNOB was promoted to frame the SDG inequality agenda as inclusive development, focusing on…
Download
Voluntary national reviews (VNRs), are an important innovation as a United Nations process for follow up to the adoption of development agendas. The paper analyses how countries addressed three key cross-cutting issues of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the VNRs submitted in 2017: leaving no one behind; addressing trade-offs through policy integration; and pursuing global partnership as means of implementation. While the VNRs contain already many interesting examples as basis for mutual learning and sharing of, the paper also identifies a need for more attention to these issues and more explicit discussions on strategies for their implementation.
Infographics:
Leaving No One…
Download
We examine globalization's effects on those left behind in both industrial and emerging markets. While access to global markets has lifted billions out of poverty in emerging markets, the benefits have not been equally shared. Increased competition through globalization as well as skill-biased technical change has hurt less educated workers in rich and poor countries. While much of the rising inequality is often attributed to globalization alone, a brief review of the literature suggests that labor-saving technology has likely played an even more important role. The backlash has focused on the negative consequences of globalization in developed countries, and now threatens the global…
Download
This paper provides an overview of the conceptual and empirical issues involved in the overarching goal of "leaving no one behind" (LNOB). After reviewing some existing documents on the topic, it proposes ways to operationalize LNOB, discusses whether to take a country-focused or person-focused approach, examines various (multidimensional) ways to measure those who are left behind, argues for grounding LNOB on intrinsic and instrumental reasons, suggests ways to identify those at risk of being left behind, and discusses difficult trade-offs with other SDGs for an agenda focused on LNOB.
For more information on the CDP's work on "Leaving no one behind" go to: Leaving no one behind, poverty…
Download
One of the pillars of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the pledge to ?leave no one behind?. This paper argues that we must recognise that many people throughout the world are not just being left behind. They are being pushed even further behind, and their levels of well-being are falling, often in ways from which it is impossible to fully recover. Indeed, many are confronted with forces that lead to their avoidable premature deaths. Thus, development policies should have as their first priority to ensure that no one is pushed behind.
The paper argues that this could be secured through a different way of framing economic policy, that focuses on the obligations of states to…
Download
The UN Resolution heralding the Sustainable Development Goals pledges to leave no one behind, and moreover "to reach the furthest behind first". This priority echoes the priority to the worst-off that is being discussed in philosophy, economics and related disciplines, but also the pleas of many actors who represent or fight for the most disadvantaged populations. This paper argues that serious theories do support such a priority and that the best policies implementing this priority do not necessarily involve the most intuitive anti-poverty targeted measures.
For more information on the CDP's work on "Leaving no one behind" go to: Leaving no one behind, poverty, human and social…
Download
The paper focuses on two crucial issues that hinder the fiscal sovereignty of developing countries: the reduced level of international tax cooperation, and the lack of appropriate procedures for sovereign debt crisis resolution. The low level of international tax cooperation enables a race to the bottom in tax rates among countries, tax avoidance through profit-shifting activities by companies and tax evasion by individuals and companies, based on the existence of non-cooperative jurisdictions.
In the last five years, the international community has made some improvements in this field, but the situation remains far from satisfactory. On the other hand, the current procedure for sovereign…
Download
The paper examines whether the planned eradication of poverty to the year 2030 part of the SDG strategy is compatible with the expected trends in key economic variables such as GDP growth, population growth, income inequality and food prices. To do so, the paper develops a comparative static, poverty-accounting model that allows to simulate to 2030 the impact on SDG1 of the fastest improvements recorded for the above four variables during the last 30 years.
Numerous model simulations show that, even under the most favorable assumptions, between 16 and 28 countries (mainly from Africa) out of the 78 analyzed will not reach the SDG1 target. Policy suggestions on how to improve on such…
Download
The development cooperation system is undergoing a dramatic process of change. New actors are on stage, new instruments (beyond ODA) are being used, and the fields of work have been clearly widened. The enlargement of the development cooperation system is in line with the ambitious and comprehensive 2030 Agenda. However, those changes also imply massive tensions and challenges to the current development cooperation system in terms of its objectives, procedures and narrative.
This paper presents some of these challenges in light of the "leaving no-one behind" mandate. The paper discusses, firstly, how the development cooperation system can be brought up to date, taking into account massive…
Download
Welcome to the United Nations
