Estimating the SDGs' Demand for Innovation

Charles Kenny and Dev Patel

No 469, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: How much innovation will be needed to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals? We model shifts in the cross-country relationship between GDP per capita and achievement in key development indicators as “technological gains” and convergence to the best performers at a given income as “policy gains.” Assuming that the United Nations’ income growth projections for low- and middle-income countries are met, we estimate the residual demand for technology and policy innovation needed to meet several critical targets of the SDGs. Our results suggest that (i) best performers are considerably outperforming the average performance at a given income level, suggesting considerable progress could be achieved through policy change but that (ii) the targets set in the SDGs are unlikely to be met by 2030 without very rapid, ubiquitous technological progress alongside economic growth.

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals; Preston curves; innovation; technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O15 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2017-10-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ino
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/estimating-sdgs-demand-innovation

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:469

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().