Articles
Better data for better lives : Statistics at the center of the SDGs
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As the global statistical community embarks on the final phase of defining a new indicator framework to review progress of the newly adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world community prepares to celebrate World Statistics Day on 20 October.
This day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010 to recognize the central role of statistics for development and their importance in shaping our societies. A statistical day was already a tradition in over 100 countries around the world, but the adoption by the General Assembly of a resolution marking 20 October as World Statistics Day brought a strong recognition of the important role of statistics in people’s lives.
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Uncovering the Truth about Global Poverty
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The Sustainable Development Goals – despite their positive and progressive rhetoric – by no means constitute a transformative agenda for restructuring the global economy and meeting the basic needs of all people within the means of our shared planet. As we explain in STWR’s latest report, the basic assumptions that define the SDGs discourse – that life is improving for the majority of humanity, that unfettered economic growth and development-as-usual can continue indefinitely into the future, and that the world is on course to completely eradicate poverty by 2030 – are fatally flawed and misleading.
Open Letter to the UN, signed by Chomsky, Pogge, Klein ...
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As the UN and the world's governments ratify the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) today (September 25), we must be clear that they do not represent the best interests of the world's majority -- those that are currently exploited and oppressed within the current economic and political order.
The SDGs claim they can eradicate poverty in all its forms by 2030. But they rely primarily on global economic growth to achieve this tremendous task. If such growth resembles that seen in recent decades, it will take 100 years for poverty to disappear, not the15 years the SDGs promise. And even if this were possible in a shorter timescale, we would need to increase the size of the global economy by a factor of 12, which, in addition to making our planet uninhabitable, will obliterate any gains against poverty.
Read more: Open Letter to the UN, signed by Chomsky, Pogge, Klein...
Corporate Bias at World Bank / ICSID
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This briefing focuses on the main venue for settlement of legal cases brought by corporations against governments: the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It finds significant ICSID bias in favour of corporations and commercial interests by analysing ICSID overall and by looking at a specific case brought by a global mining corporation against El Salvador.
In late 2014, the Economist magazine wrote:
“If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking, protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties over the past half century have done, through a process known as ‘investor-state dispute settlement’, or ISDS.”
Why the SDGs won't make the world a fairer place
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The much-hyped Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted by the UN summit starting this week in New York will not deliver the new economy that the world so desperately needs. Their creators want to reduce poverty and inequality without touching the wealth and power of the global 1%. They fail to understand a basic fact: Mass poverty is the product of extreme wealth accumulation and over-consumption by a few.
