Financing the SDGs

Finance Ministries, the G-7 and the G20 need to see that SDG achievement is their core business, as it about maximizing global growth

The world of development finance has not, until recently, intersected significantly with the world of private finance. This is because the working assumption has been that countries develop by mobilising public resources to deliver development objectives, while the private sector invests in growth. Other than delivering public goods (like law and order) and merit goods and services (like education and sanitation), the job of the government was seen as fostering an enabling economic environment in which the private sector could do its job.

This assumption, always dubious, obviously does not hold at the present juncture. The efficient markets hypothesis, the bedrock