If rich countries had consistently met the 0.7 per cent target since 2002, then developing countries would have been $2 trillion better off.

Developing countries would be better able to finance the Sustainable Development Goals if rich countries were meeting their 2002 target to put 0.7 per cent of gross national income into overseas aid, the United Nations said on Monday, announcing a first major effort to measure progress in achieving the new Goals.

Launching this year’s Development and Globalization: Facts and Figures, UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi said that if rich countries had consistently met the 0.7 per cent target since 2002, then developing countries would have been $2 trillion better off.

“The Sustainable Development Goals represent the outcome of long, serious discussions on how we want our world to look in 2030, but this vision needs serious finance,” UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi said.

“The 0.7 per cent target will be a hard sell for many rich Governments, but these are a daring, ambitious set of Goals, and they require an equally ambitious response,” he said.

In 2015, the international community tasked UNCTAD and four other organizations to identify the means to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, through its Addis Ababa Action Agenda. The other organizations are the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

By focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals, this year’s report reflects the international focus on the new Goals, putting numerical values on roughly a third of the Goals’ 230 indicators. It also generated the $2 trillion figure and highlighted some of the challenges in measuring progress on achieving the Goals.

The Goals have four times the number of indicators as their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals, UNCTAD Head of Statistics Steve MacFeely said. But even for the Millennium Development Goals, the global community was able to measure only 70 per cent of the indicators.

“The global community has major gaps in its data and must find ways to use the existing data much better,” Mr. MacFeely said, adding that this year’s report would help to move measurement forward. “This report is online and interactive and has already thrown out some interesting results,” he said.

Only six countries have ever reached this target, which was first proposed by UNCTAD in 1968, then agreed to by the global community in 1970 and later reconfirmed at the International Conference on Financing for Development that was held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002.

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Introduction

The 2016 edition of the UNCTAD Development and Globalization: Facts and Figures is dedicated to the Sustainable Development Goals that were adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 (2030 Agenda Declaration). At the time of writing (June 2016), the indicators for measuring progress towards these Goals that have been proposed by the Inter-agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDG) and accepted by the United Nations Statistical Commission have not yet been endorsed by the General Assembly. Nevertheless, we think it is useful to give an early or preliminary assessment of progress for a selection of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets.

The 2030 Agenda Declaration stresses the importance of quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data to measure progress and to ensure that no one is left behind. The Declaration also states that data and information from existing reporting mechanisms should be used where possible. This report is in keeping with that philosophy; it has been compiled using a wide variety of data sources, both official and unofficial, to present a broad overview. The purpose of this report is not to present an in-depth review or analysis, but rather to provide a situation summary and highlight some key facts and messages, and give a fair synopsis of how things stand today, at the beginning of this 15-year agenda.

The selection of the targets presented in this report reflects UNCTAD’s mandate. UNCTAD is responsible for dealing with economic and sustainable development issues with a focus on trade, finance, investment and technology. Through these actions, UNCTAD contributes to progress on 52 specific Sustainable Development Goal targets, grouped under 10 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Nevertheless, the report presents some general statistical analysis for all 17 Goals, as it is considered desirable to highlight the interdependencies of all the Goals, just as it is to underline the interconnectedness of all aspects of development. Readers will note that two themes, prosperity and partnership, are given priority in this report, as these are the areas where UNCTAD’s expertise contributes most.

The report is organized in five broad themes or sections:

• People: Goals 1–5
• Planet: Goals 6 and 12–15
• Prosperity: Goals 7–11
• Peace: Goal 16
• Partnership: Goal 17

Along with the Goals, selected targets are discussed. The full list of the Goals and targets presented in this report is given below. A special note is also included in the report on global and regional population projections and demographic changes. This has been included as, over the lifetime of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in the years following, the global population will increase significantly. These changes provide an important context for the implementation of the Agenda.

There are many important messages highlighted in this report. We would like to emphasize just two: one regarding data and one regarding the not-unrelated issue of resources. The 2030 Agenda has placed much greater emphasis than the Millennium Development Goal agenda on the need for improved data and statistics. In the lead up to adopting the 2030 Agenda, the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons called for a data revolution. The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon subsequently established an Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development.

In its 2014 report A world that counts – Mobilizing the data revolution for sustainable development, the question was raised of whether unequal access to data should in fact be a recognized form of inequality. A dilemma exists concerning the fact that data availability is usually weakest for the poorest countries of the world, while these are the countries for which they are needed the most in the context of monitoring sustainable development.

This leads to the second message. The cost of implementing the 2030 Agenda will be significant. Estimates of how many additional resources will be required vary. Ambassador Macharia Kamau of Kenya, one of the co-facilitators of the intergovernmental consultative process, anticipates that the implementation of the 2030 Agenda could cost between US$3.5 trillion and US$5 trillion per year. Ibrahim Thiaw, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, estimates it will cost at least an additional US$1.5 trillion annually over the Millennium Development Goals.

One thing is clear – these sums are far in excess of existing funding. We would ask readers to think about data as infrastructure; infrastructure every bit as important as broadband or electricity networks. These issues are touched on in Goals 9 and 17. In order to provide policymakers around the world with the coherent information they need to inform their decisions, a lot of investment is required behind the scenes. This investment in data infrastructure will require additional resources but will yield a return consisting of a broader knowledge base, and ultimately more efficient policy formation and a better-informed public.