In this video,Alicia Barcena, executive secretary, ECLAC,analyzes the road map in the form of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which has been put forward by the international community as it approved in 2015 by the UN General Assembly.
To implement the 2030 Agenda, new partnerships based on solidarity and equity must be forged at the international level and within each country. Such is the interdependence of the new goals and the universality and indivisibility of the new agenda that this will be a more complex and challenging process in terms of institution-building and policymaking than was the case for the MDGs.Achieving its 17 Goals requires that stakeholders commit to developing and consolidating instruments for their implementation.
Countries should ensure that the environmental big push in each of them will contribute to achieving the objectives defined at the twenty-first session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21). Otherwise, faster growth will be environmentally unsustainable. A Schumpeterian horizon of long-term investments surrounding this push would act at the same time as an investment stabilizer (a countercyclical policy) and would make it possible to pursue a path of technological change and highquality
job creation (a policy of inclusion).
A path of this type will be both investment- and technology-intensive, resulting in high import levels that could hold back growth and compromise employment. For this reason, it will be essential that countries internalize part of the production processes and the skills and capacities they require, and to open markets for the region’s exports, in order to avoid current account pressures that could derail the economy from the growth track. Managing the real exchange rate can help achieve this balance, but it has adverse effects on distribution, while its impact on competitiveness is not significant for sectors impacted by the technological revolution —thus it is no substitute for industrial policy. A more proactive stance by countries in regional trade and payments agreements could also help reduce external vulnerability. Macroeconomic, industrial, trade and technology policies must work together if the environmental big push is to be viable and not frustrated by trade imbalances.
Equality is another objective that could face tensions in a crisis setting, as there will be strong pressure to reduce social spending. Consequently, policies to consolidate social advances are important for progressive structural change and for economic stability. On the one hand, universal social protection would set a floor for aggregate demand, which could also act as a countercyclical mechanism; on the other hand, universal access to education and health would have a positive impact on productivity. Without social protection it would be difficult for people to sustain or improve their position in a labour market that is subject to constant shocks from technical progress. Social protection is not an obstacle to development, and to treat it as such is to forget the observation of Schumpeter (1942), to the effect that “motorcars are travelling faster than they otherwise would because they are provided with brakes”. The combination of progress towards a new governance for the creation of global public goods, the consolidation of the region’s contribution to this effort and the implementation of national strategies and policies for progressive structural change will thus form the basis for a new development style centred on equality and the environmental big push.
ECLAC is presenting an analytical framework that complements the 2030 Agenda based on a structuralist approach to development and from the point of view of the Latin American and Caribbean countries.At its thirty-sixth session in Mexico, from 23 to 27 May, 2016, the organization presents this proposal in a new document, Horizons 2030: Equality at the Centre of Sustainable Development.
Further information may be found by reading the report below
Source:Cepal
