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UN DESA Policy Brief No. 171: Leveraging Critical Energy Transition Minerals: policy pathways for sustainable development
Developing countries with extensive critical energy transition mineral reserves have the potential to harness these resources for economic growth and sustainable development. However, doing so involves significant economic, environmental and social risks. Strong governance, strategic national policies and effective international cooperation are essential to maximize sustainable development benefits and avoid the so-called resource curse.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 169: How Shocks Turn into Crises: national policies for advancing social development in turbulent times
Shocks and crises have become more frequent, intense and widespread in an interconnected world. Looking toward the Second World Summit for Social Development in 2025, this policy brief focuses on explaining how shocks turn into crises and how national policies, supported by the international community, can help counter shocks, build resilience, and advance social development objectives, namely eradicating poverty, promoting full and productive employment, and fostering social inclusion in times of converging crises.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 168: Net Wealth Taxes: How they can help fight inequality and fund sustainable development
Ensuring effective taxation of wealth is a tool to address inequality, increase progressivity in the tax system, and raise domestic revenues to finance sustainable development. This policy brief outlines the advantages and disadvantages of net wealth taxes, lays out some policy instruments that help in their administration, and explains why and how international tax cooperation can aid countries in successfully levying net wealth taxes.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 166: Global action is needed to advance social development amidst converging crises
In an interconnected world, more frequent, severe and far-reaching shocks and crises are derailing key social development objectives such as poverty eradication, full employment and inequality reduction through a range of channels. Global action is needed to advance social development and build resilient and inclusive societies for all.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 163: Policy Choices for Leaving No One Behind (LNOB): Overview From 2023 SDG Summit Commitments
Prioritizing leaving no one behind (LNoB), 31 countries have introduced new policies and commitments aimed at eradicating poverty, enhancing human capital, addressing uneven access to basic necessities, improving decision-making processes on sustainable development and ensuring no country or locality is left behind.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 155: Accelerating middle-income countries’ progress towards sustainable development
Many MICs require international support to address current and long-term challenges. Eligibility criteria that rely only on income per capita limit available support – including access to concessional finance – without accounting for MICs’ multidimensional development needs.
UN DESA Policy Brief Special Issue: Financing the Sustainable Development Goals through mission-oriented development banks
There is an urgent need for channeling long-term risk-tolerant finance towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper argues that National Development Banks (NDBs) and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can play a crucial role in mobilizing the needed capital.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 150: Economic well-being at older ages: prospects for the future
More must be done to tackle decent work challenges, promote transitions from informal to formal employment, combat long-term unemployment and strengthen mechanisms to set and adjust wages.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 146: Why safe, orderly and regular migration matters for sustainable development
Respecting, protecting and fulfilling the human rights of all migrants, regardless of their migration status, benefit migrants and countries alike. Addressing the adverse drivers and structural factors that hinder people from building and maintaining sustainable livelihoods in their own countries and communities can reduce the pressure to migrate.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 144: Moving Beyond GDP and Achieving Our Common Agenda with Natural Capital Accounting
With the climate and biodiversity crises raging, Our Common Agenda stresses the urgent need to go beyond GDP, including through country implementation of the SEEA.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 142: Old-age poverty has a woman’s face
An agenda on gender equality aimed at reducing women’s poverty, including in old age, should promote women’s labour market participation and decent work, ease their care burden and improve women’s pension coverage as well as pension adequacy.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 141: A just green transition: concepts and practice so far
A globally just transition requires international support for developing countries that takes into account their’ realities, capacities, and priorities. Greening measures and strategies shouldn’t push people in other countries behind.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 137: Ensuring SDG progress amid recurrent crises
SDG progress has been set back, and the outlook faces uncertainty given the cumulative and amplified impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and climate change. The crises impact all countries, albeit unequally.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 135: Cryptoassets and so-called “stablecoins”: Where do we go from here?
While they have been touted for their potential to increase the efficiency of financial transactions and to support financial inclusion, their high volatility and largely unregulated and quasi-anonymous nature has raised concerns over investor protection and financial integrity, and increasingly also financial stability and international spillovers.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 134: The Great Finance Divide
Developing countries will need reliable access to affordable financing, and also need to manage and use these resources well to translate financing into SDG progress, enhanced productivity and fiscal capacity to service debt.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 131: Credit rating agencies and sovereign debt: Four proposals to support achievement of the SDGs
Credit ratings play an important role providing information on sovereign borrowers. But financial markets, including credit ratings, often over-emphasize short-term economic concerns, and underweight longer-term issues, including environmental and social risks as well as investment in resilience and sustainability.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 129: The monetary policy response to COVID-19: the role of asset purchase programmes
Central banks have relied heavily on unconventional monetary policy tools, especially large-scale asset purchases, to respond to the pandemic. These programmes have helped to stabilize financial markets and kickstart economic recovery. But the central bank asset purchases have also contributed to an underpricing of risk and sharp increases in asset prices.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 125: Improving compatibility of approaches to identify, verify and align investments to sustainability goals
Regulators and other market participants have introduced a variety of mandatory and voluntary approaches to help investors align investments with sustainability goals.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 122: Adapting international development cooperation to reduce risk, enable recovery and build resilience
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed new demands on development cooperation in its various forms: finance, capacity support, policy change and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The ongoing challenge of the pandemic and its consequences has also shown the durability and adaptability of development cooperation.
UN/DESA Policy Brief #120: Investing in the future of rural non-farm economies
Development strategies that focus solely on urban development and leave rural communities behind are not adequate to overcome the development challenges we face.