Rethinking Sustainable Development

• Author: Nemat Shafik
• Position: Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

Straight Talk

As the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals approaches, much thought is being devoted to what should succeed that framework for measuring global progress against hunger, disease, and poverty. Any successor framework must reflect global aspirations and arise from a rich consultative process. I believe that the new framework must embrace a broader understanding of development—one that is relevant for all countries, rich as well as poor.

The world today looks very different from a few years ago. Many countries have high levels of debt that could make it difficult to undertake spending initiatives for many years. Financial sector incentives and regulation may have to be rethought, existing growth models refined to deliver sufficient new employment opportunities, and the functioning of the international monetary system revisited.

The most immediate challenge is restoration of confidence in the global recovery. After showing some resilience in 2011, global growth has slowed again, mainly because of continuing uncertainty about developments in the euro area and a potential fiscal crisis in the United States. Any efforts at restoring confidence in advanced economies must be accompanied by efforts to tackle the high and pervasive unemployment and the shortage of decent job opportunities in many countries around the world, especially in Europe and the Middle East. The jobs crisis is particularly acute for young people. A rebound in growth will help, but even then the pace of job creation will have to accelerate very rapidly to absorb both the existing unemployed and the new entrants coming into the labor market.

Other issues include globalization and the difficult job of managing that process; policy and market failures exposed by the crisis that still have not been addressed, especially in the financial sector; and longer-term trends such as widening disparities in income distribution, aging and imbalanced population growth, global food insecurity, and climate change.

Finding a cooperative solution to these challenges is even more urgent than at the turn of the century, when the world community joined forces through the United Nations’ Millennium Development campaign to defeat the scourge of poverty and the hunger, disease, and lack of opportunities that accompany it.

New imperatives

The Millennium Development Goals focused attention on the need to reduce absolute poverty. And while significant gaps remain...