Giving Compass' Take:

 · The Brookings Institution takes a look at spending on the Sustainable Development Goals around the wold and relays five key findings from its research.

· How does spending differ among countries? What can be done to increase SDGs spending and catalyze efforts to achieve these goals? 

· Check out this article about funding the SDGS.


Pouring several colors of paint into a single bucket produces a gray pool of muck, not a shiny rainbow. So too with discussions of financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Jumbling too many issues into the same debate leads to policy muddiness rather than practical breakthroughs. Financing the SDGs requires a much more disaggregated mindset: unpacking the specific issues, requiring specific resources, in specific places.

In a forthcoming paper, we zoom out on the global SDG financing landscape in order to zoom back in on country-specific contexts and gaps. In particular, we consider how much the world’s governments are already spending on SDG-related issues every year, how spending varies across income levels, and how the spending patterns link to country-by-country estimates of needs. We focus on the public sector due to its lead responsibility for tackling both the public goods and the “no one left behind” issues embedded in the SDGs and the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development, the latter including a “social compact” commitment to provide universal access to basic services. This research can be considered as complementary to assessments of where the private sector can best contribute to SDG financing. Below we summarize some preliminary findings, noting that all results are subject to refinement as we complete the analysis.

  1. Global public sector SDG spending is already more than $20 trillion per year
  2. SDG spending rises proportionately with GDP per capita
  3. Minimum SDG spending needs are approximately $300 per capita
  4. Financing gaps vary by income level and by country
  5. Three substantial opportunities to fill the financing gaps

Read the full article about world spending on the Sustainable Development Goals by Homi Kharas and John McArthur at The Brookings Institution.