Report: The Contribution of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda to Agenda 2030

JOSÉ ANTONIO OCAMPO

March 2016

• The 2016 Financing for Development Forum faces a tremendous challenge to forge coherence among three flagship development agreements from 2015: the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Change Agreement. To move these interdependent processes forward, international cooperation is needed in four areas.

• Tax evasion and avoidance are massive problems: 100-240 billion US dollars are lost every year to tax evasion and avoidance, while 100 billion US dollars alone go missing from developing countries due to profit shifting by multinational corporations. The international community therefore needs strong forms of cooperation to control these problems.

• The system of Multilateral Development Banks faces two major challenges: providing countercyclical financing and enabling infrastructure and climate change financing. The BRICs New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have strengthened this system.

• The proliferation of bi-lateral and mega-regional trade and investment agreements in recent years has eroded policy space for developing countries and constrained macroprudential policies to regulate cross-border capital flows. In addition, the dispute settlement processes put in place by investment agreements are eroding the democratic principles on which our judicial systems are based.

• Persistent systemic imbalances require a proper global financial safety net, including macroprudential regulations on cross-border flows, but this concern has been largely ignored by the Financial Stability Board, just as the design of a system for sovereign debt restructuring has advanced in only a limited way in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

 

 

Published by the Friedrich Erbert Stiftung, read the whole report here.