MDGs: Both necessary and sufficient
Following on my previous columns that have been assessing the Post-2015 Development Agenda and its accompanying sustainable development goals (SDGs) 2015-2030, which is scheduled to be approved at the upcoming United Nations (UN) Summit (September 24-27) later this year, quite a few readers have asked me a rather pertinent question: whether I believe the SDGs, as they presently stand, constitute a proper basis for planning the long-term development of Caricom (including Guyana). My answer has always been a resounding yes! Indeed, I would go further and assert empathetically that, the SDGs constitute both a necessary and sufficient framework for charting the region’s, as well as Guyana’s future, in the coming decades. This strong affirmative response on my part is based on two fundamental considerations, which I shall address in the two sections below.
MDGs and Caricom (Guyana)
The first of these considerations is that, at the minimum, the MDGs have played, by any reasonable measure, an impressive forward looking role in 1) producing gains in poverty reduction across the region; 2) attaining significant improvements in the provision of such basic services as health, education, and sanitation; 3) aided in putting in place basic safety nets, adequate enough to protect the most vulnerable sections of the region’s population; 4) directing attention to the region’s environmental vulnerabilities and related concerns. This last item has clearly encouraged the region to focus on two crucially important matters: 1) disaster preparedness, and 2) readiness to cope with natural disasters (hurricanes, volcanoes, droughts, floods); medical disasters (dengue, malaria and HIV-AIDS); and, also social disasters (crime, teenage pregnancies and drugs).
Readers should, however, bear in mind constantly that the SDGs are far more than an MDGs plus notion, as some writers have labelled it. Indeed, in addition to the SDGs being a considerable scale-up of the MDGs, they are fundamentally broader in scope (that is, more universal in conception) and qualitatively deeper in their considerations of 1) structural change; 2) social development; 3) economic advancement; 4) environmental and ecosystems concerns; 5) human development in all its myriad dimensions; 5) justice and, last but not least, 6) equity and fairness. In the SDGs all these considerations are integrated into a complex holistic framework, which I certainly believe, should guide the long-term strategic evolution of the region and its constituent member states.
From an analytic standpoint, the first consideration on which my positive response is based is that, if the MDGs have produced the gains identified above, then the SDGs are well placed to produce even substantially more gains. As such, readers should recall that the SDGs will apply to all member states of the UN, working in close partnership with each other. Furthermore, developing countries performance under the MDGs process (as well as their targets) had been monitored, even if not adequately. The MDGs’ monitoring mechanisms had evolved in a more or less ad hoc manner, since these were put in place after the MDGs had been agreed. The SDGs, however, are being structured from the outset, with far more foresight in terms of their operational monitoring and related reviews of indicators of compliance.
Long-term performance
The second consideration on which my affirmative response rests is that the long term performances of most of the region’s member states, indicate weaknesses which will remain in place well after the MDGs implementation is scheduled to come to an end later this year. As will be shown in this and the next column, several of the region’s performance indicators support this assertion.
First, as shown in Table 1, the long-term economic growth of the region has been poor. As can be seen there, for nearly half a century (1970s to mid-2010s) the growth rate of the region’s real GDP has averaged less than 2 per cent.
This weak performance was only about one-quarter of what has been achieved in East Asia, and less than one-third of what has been achieved in Developing Asia. Further, this was just over one-half of the rate of growth that was achieved in both Developing Africa and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Table 1 also clearly shows that, in every separate decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s), the growth rate achieved in Caricom has been the lowest. This long-term trajectory of poor economic growth has clearly heightened the vulnerability of the region to external economic shocks emanating from global events.
This observation is reinforced by the further consideration that several countries, like Guyana, depend on external savings to finance domestic spending. Thus the data in Table 2 reveal that remittances have accounted for, on average over the past four years (2011-2014), about 15 per cent of Guyana’s GDP. Meanwhile the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has also averaged about 10 per cent of GDP over the same years. In total therefore, the inflow of foreign savings accounted for approximately one-quarter of Guyana’s GDP.
The corollary of this situation is that the domestic savings rate in Guyana has been quite low. Further, for the region as a whole, the estimated average savings rate over the past decade has been about 15 per cent of its GDP, which is about one-half the average and which had obtained for emerging and developing economies as a whole.
Next week I shall continue the presentation from this observation.
