Photo Credit: WHO
 
The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), to take place in Sevilla, Spain, from 30 June to 3 July 2025, will bring together world leaders to advance solutions to financing challenges threatening the achievement of sustainable development. Governments, international organizations, financial institutions, businesses and civil society will come together to commit to financing our future through a renewed global framework for financing for development.

By José Antonio Ocampo
BOGOTA, Colombia, Jun 25 2025 (IPS)

Leaders heading to the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development taking place in Sevilla, Spain, from 30th June to 3rd July, know full well that they are operating in a moment of crisis.

They can see that public financing is not merely constrained, it is choked, and that the social consequences, already severe, risk becoming catastrophic. What leaders need to understand is not that they are in a hole, but that there is a way out. They can overcome the financing crisis and replace the doom loop of austerity with an upward spiral of social and fiscal success.

The scale of change in financing that is needed to overcome the crisis requires that the very welcome agreements set to be made at the gathering in Sevilla mark not an end point, easing pressures, but a starting point, enabling profound reform. The only realistic response to this crisis is a systemic one.

Leaders need not only to put in place debt relief for overindebted developing countries, including reductions in principals and in interest payments. They need to work to create a permanent institutional mechanism for sovereign-debt restructuring. They need to enable a major expansion of long-term, low-cost financing through regional and global development finance institutions.

José Antonio Ocampo

Leaders need not only to halt the freefall of development financing. They need to work to redesign financing for the twenty-first century. Embodying hope that a transformation can be realised is the growing momentum for global public investment. Colombia, Chile, Norway, South Africa and Uruguay are amongst the countries leading the call.

South Africa’s leadership of the G20’s Development Working Group has even named “global public goods and global public investment” as its “number one priority”, “aimed at the construction of a new architecture of international cooperation”.

Over fifty civil society organisations are also backing the call for global public investment, including the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, Southern Voice, CIVICUS, and Global Citizen. A new multistakeholder commitment to advance the implementation of global public investment will be a key initiative in the financing conference’s flagship Sevilla Platform for Action.

Global public investment provides a new approach for how countries can think about, organise, and oversee the financing of global challenges. It is rooted in three principles: all benefit from the outcomes; all contribute according to their means; all decide together.

The first principle of global public investment, that all benefit from the outcomes, demonstrates that international cooperation in financing is not charity, it is collective self-interest. We need each other; we can’t afford not to cooperate with each other to achieve shared goals.

The second principle, that all contribute according to their means, helps to show everyone playing their part, which is essential both for ensuring backing and for reshaping countries’ relationships, status and power.

The third principle, that all decide together, enables equality and quality in the direction and oversight of resourcing.

The global public investment approach recognises that the crisis we are in is not only fiscal but ultimately political – a crisis of multilateralism, of collective action. It meets the world’s need for a more effective way for countries to collaborate, and for a more effective way to justify why they do. It shows that looking out for each other is how we protect ourselves; it demonstrates that through pooling of resources everyone wins out.

Though the current crisis in financing was exacerbated suddenly this year, it has been building for much longer. For years, leaders have been struggling to mobilise and structure the resourcing of public goods. But they need to resist the temptation to lower ambition. They cannot afford to settle for approaches that have been shown to not deliver. Retreating from public financing, or retreating from international cooperation, will only worsen the impacts of the global crisis.

The evidence is clear that private financing, though vital, cannot replace public financing. So too, the record shows that national action, though central, is insufficient for protecting global public goods. For the challenges we face, building a new international architecture based around global public investment is both necessary and feasible.

Global public investment harnesses both the power of mutual interest – that we are interdependent – and the power of mutuality – that we achieve more by working together. It is an approach whose time has come.

Sevilla is just the start.

IPS UN Bureau

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International solidarity is necessary for reinvigorating and rebuilding the global economy as well as inclusive and equitable development. Credit: Jenny Lopez-Zapata/IPS

By José Antonio Ocampo and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 3 2017 (IPS)

The United Nations recently released the 70th anniversary issue of its flagship publication, the World Economic and Social Survey (WESS). First published in January 1948 as the World Economic Report, it is the oldest continuous publication analyzing international economic and social challenges. The 2017 issue reviews 70 years of WESS policy recommendations, many of which remain relevant today to address global challenges and to achieve the 2030 Agenda or Sustainable Development Goals.

Created in 1945 to ensure world peace, the United Nations charter recognized that economic and social progress for all is fundamental for ensuring sustainable peace. The UN has thus been monitoring socio-economic developments globally since the 1940s. Its analyses have long highlighted the interdependence of the global economy, and advocated international policy coherence and coordination for sustainable, inclusive and balanced socio-economic progress.

The picture which emerges is that the UN has been ahead of the curve on many issues, especially on closing gaps in human well-being between and within countries. From early on, it has urged developed countries to support socio-economic progress in developing countries, not only in their own interest as trading partners, but also to maintain conditions for greater economic stability and more equitable global development. It has also long called for predictable transfers of finance and technology to developing countries, and for opening up developed country markets to developing countries’ exports.

The UN has also pioneered innovative multilateral institution building to fill lacunae. In the 1960s, WESS provided the analytical rationale for establishing the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to support developing countries seeking to equitably benefit from international trade and investment, and to industrialize.

The 2017 review of issues WESS has underscored the importance of its analyses. The 1951-52 issue identified three major challenges: “maintenance of economic stability, those concerned with persistent disequilibrium in international payments, and those arising from the relatively slow advance of the under-developed countries”. Needless to say, these challenges remain relevant today.

The 1956 issue warned against monetarism and monetary policy solutions, arguing that “a single economic policy seems no more likely to overcome all sources of imbalance … than is a single medicine likely to cure all diseases”. Along these lines, the 1959 issue acknowledged the “evils of large-scale inflation”, but argued that “economic stagnation or large-scale unemployment is not an acceptable cost to pay for price stability or equilibrium in the balance of payments”.

The 1965 issue warned that tying aid would reduce aid effectiveness, external debt burdens were rising rapidly, and capital would flow from developing to developed countries.

The 1971 issue warned of the “unsettling effects of massive movements of short-term capital” and argued for an “international code of conduct and mechanism for surveillance” to curb their disruptive effects. It also warned that IMF governance arrangements dangerously limited developing country voice, and called for Special Drawing Rights to be used to provide development finance.

In the 1970s and 1980s, WESS repeatedly warned that putting the burden of adjustment on deficit countries alone would not only stifle their growth, but also exert deflationary pressure on the world economy. The UN urged provision of additional finance by surplus countries and international financial institutions on less stringent terms and conditions to support robust recoveries and prevent widespread welfare losses.

The 1982 issue warned against the reluctance to undertake expansionary policies at a time of a global crisis for fear of undermining investor confidence: “without more vigorous expansionary policies, recovery will lack strength, levels of demand will not be sufficient to bring present productive capacity into full use, and the incentive to undertake new investment will remain weak”.

WESS’s rich legacy reminds us of the continuing relevance of multilateral institutions, especially in facing major challenges. The global economy needs strong institutions and coordinated international actions, with adequate voice and participation by developing countries. This is particularly true for ensuring international monetary stability and trade dynamism, which remain crucial for global development.

It also underscores that international solidarity is necessary for reinvigorating and rebuilding the global economy as well as inclusive and equitable development. Sustainable development is necessarily multidimensional and often context-specific; requiring strengthened state capacities and capabilities, strategic development planning and appropriate adaptation to local conditions.

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