Financing for Development: Time for the UN to Take Centre Stage Again

Jesse Griffiths, Guest Blogger

Jesse Griffiths is Director of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad).

Little progress has been made since the last conference of the United Nations Financing for Development (FfD) process, held in Addis Ababa in July 2015, which agreed the Addis Ababa Agenda for Action (AAAA) – the framework for how the world would finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since Addis, however, there has been little headway and last year’s UN FfD Forum was disappointing, with few concrete outcomes achieved. As the FfD Forum outcome document highlighted, that current policies are not delivering the economic step-change needed to achieve the SDGs.

Given the slow rate of reform since Addis, it is clear that global leaders need to work towards a major new set of concrete actions on financing for development. The European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) recently launched a short paper setting out three key tests that this year’s UN FfD Forum should pass if it is to be regarded a success:

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Worst Case Economics

Frank Ackerman is principal economist at Synapse Energy Economics in Cambridge, Mass., and the author of Worst Case Economics: Extreme Events in Climate and Finance (Anthem Press, 2017). He spoke to Triple Crisis co-editor Alejandro Reuss in late December 2017 about the main themes in the book. To learn more, you can also visit the book page on Dr. Ackerman’s website here.

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Selling Out Argentina’s Future—Again

Alan Cibils and Mariano Arana[1]

In Argentina’s 2015 presidential run-off election, the neoliberal right-wing coalition “Cambiemos” (literally, “lets change”), headed by Mauricio Macri, defeated the populist Kirchnerista candidate by just two percentage points. Macri’s triumph heralded a return to the neoliberal policies of the 1990s and ended twelve years of heterodox economic policies that prioritized income redistribution and the internal market. The ruling coalition also performed well in the October 2017 mid-term elections and has since begun implementing a draconian set of fiscal, labor, and social security reforms.

One of the hallmarks of the Cambiemos government so far has been a fast and furious return to international credit markets and a very substantial increase in new public debt. Indeed, since Macri came to power in 2015, Argentina has issued debt worth more than $100 billion. This marks a clear contrast to the Kirchner administrations, during which the emphasis was debt reduction.

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