The Present Value of Future Generations: Prioritizing Public Spending for Sustainable Development

Juan E. Chebly
Additional contact information
Juan E. Chebly: Universidad Simon Bolivar

International Journal of Innovation and Economic Development, 2015, vol. 1, issue 5, 15–25

Abstract: Purpose: The purpose of this work is to explore how global public finance prioritization, looking especially at global military spending and defense budgets, in search for a more efficient approach to better deal with the opportunity costs between defense and development. Changing the status quo and business-as-usual approaches to public spending can guarantee resources are re-directed to successfully achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. The underlying question on how we are going to finance sustainable development still remains. ‘Status quo’ and ‘business-as-usual’ approaches have called the SDGs as an ambitious to-do-list that will be practically unachievable. The main argument behind this approach: the SDGs are too many, too ambitious, and more importantly too expensive to be achieved by the year 2030. This works aims to show evidence that financing the SDGs boils down to proper spending prioritization. There is a funneling of the required 90 billion USD per year from the public sector in order to achieve the UN Agenda 2030. While we as humanity seem to agree on ‘the what’ needs to be done, by agreeing on SDGs agreed by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, there is still a big question mark on ‘the how’ are we to implement the sustainable development agenda. This work shows an original answer to this question.

Keywords: Sustainable Development; Financing for Development; Official Development Assistance; Human Development; Public Spending; Production Possibilities Frontier; Comparative Advantage; Tradeoff; Defense; Peace; Security; Agenda 2030; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://researchleap.com/the-present-value-of-futur ... ainable-development/ (text/html)

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:mgs:ijoied:v:1:y:2015:i:5:p:15-25

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Innovation and Economic Development from Inovatus Services Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bojan Obrenovic ().