Comments to the 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report (FSDR)

Comments to the 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report (pdf)

Overarching Comments

• The multiple crises should be taken as an opportunity to take decisive steps in transforming the global economic and financial system. The global financial system is riddled with its own internal, inhuman, irrational and unjust logic, policies and practices. The 2022 FSDR falls short of taking the multiple crises as an opportunity to take decisive steps to transform the global financial system and begin constructing a new one that serves the needs and interests of people and the safety of the planet.
  
  
• Finance capital and the financial system should be based in and serve the real economy – production and social reproduction. But the financial system cannot be made just and fair unless the economic order it emanates from and should support is also changed. The construction of a new financial system must be part of a larger agenda and process of changing the global economic order.
  
  
• We find that the FSDR does not depart from the logic of the current system. The framework, analyses, options and recommendations it provides largely ignore 1) the huge inequalities across economies 2) the unjust economic, financial and power relations across countries, 3) the flaws in the orientation and structures of domestic economies, 4) the net outflow of resources from the South to the North including those in the form of illicit financial flows, interest rates on unsustainable and illegitimate debt and supply driven and predatory lending, imbalances in trade due to unfair trade relations and the cultivation of import dependence of Southern countries – 5) and the constraints all of these impose on the abilities of countries of the global South to generate and mobilize financial resources for the fulfillment of the needs and basic rights of their people.
  
  
• We find a disjunct between the Report and sustainable development goals and strategies. In particular, we are gravely concerned that the Thematic Chapter and the whole Report focuses too much on improved access to and modalities of credit and access to capital markets as means for “long-term, affordable and stable financing.”
  
  Download full report: Comments to the 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report (pdf)