Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Financing for Development, first session

Financing for development: Issues in domestic public resource mobilization and international development cooperation

The objective of this meeting is to discuss challenges faced by developing countries and the international community with regard to domestic public resource mobilization and the modernization of international public finance for sustainable development and international development cooperation.

The session will focus on:

1. Domestic public resources: What can be done to enhance the mobilization of domestic public resources for development in developing countries?

2. International development cooperation: How can international development cooperation maximize its contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals?

Effective domestic public resource mobilization in developing countries will be vital to efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and facilitate development transformation. Developing countries face major challenges in developing more effective taxation frameworks and capacities, and managing their fiscal space in a volatile global economic environment characterized by the following factors: persistent lack of effective global demand, continued lacklustre recovery from the global economic crisis in developed economies and subdued commodity prices.

There is a need to improve regulatory, legislative and administrative capacities in developing countries to broaden their tax base and increase tax revenue, and to strengthen fiscal policy design and implementation with regard to expenditure.

The role of national and subregional development banks in financing development also needs to be strengthened, and illicit financial flows curbed, not least by way of advances in international tax cooperation.

The international community has an important responsibility to garner sufficient international public financing to support domestic efforts in resource mobilization for sustainable development and to honour the commitment by members of the Development Assistance Committee to deliver 0.7 per cent of gross national income as official development assistance.

In the context of discussion and consultations on the modernization of official development assistance and a potentially enhanced role for blended finance, the international community should ensure the transparency of new frameworks, and clear and separate accounting of the longer-term costs and benefits of different types of financial flows and financing instruments for sustainable development, as well as of their true developmental impact.

From the perspective of international development cooperation, the emerging role of new multilateral development banks based in the global South deserves further discussion. Moreover, opportunities, in particular with regard to a growing network of cooperation between national, subregional and multilateral development banks, should be explored. While necessarily focusing on the most needy, efforts towards international development cooperation also need to take a more systematic account of the persistent troubles of many middle-income countries, in particular stagnation tendencies and developmental reversals.

The first session of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Financing for Development will explore these issues, in accordance with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, with a view to developing policy recommendations on how best to enhance the mobilization of domestic public resources in developing countries and to maximize the contribution of international development cooperation to sustainable developmental transformation and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Written contributions

In order to facilitate deliberations and the informal exchange of experiences and best practices on the topics to be discussed, member States and observers are requested to submit written contributions to the UNCTAD secretariat by 18 October 2017.