Revista Retratos
SDG 17: Partnerships and means to reduce social and economic inequalities
July 29, 2019 10h00 AM | Last Updated: August 21, 2019 04h20 PM
Mobilizing financial resources, sharing technology, and enhancing capacity-building in developing countries. These are some of the initiatives that you can find in the 17th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), which, by strengthening partnerships between institutions, aims to contribute to the decrease of social and economic inequalities. The manager of the National Accounts government sector, Andre Cavalcanti, and the International Relations assistant, Roberto Sant’Anna, are responsible for this subject at IBGE.
Retratos Magazine: What are the peculiarities of SDG 17 in relation to the others?
Andre Cavalcanti: It is an aim/mean that seeks to concatenate the various aspects that cover the mobilization of financial and non-financial resources to assist the implementation of SDGs. These are cross-cutting themes that function as a support for the others.
Roberto Sant’Anna: SDG 17 enables this broad agreement, rather than having a specific goal for a particular theme. Its purpose is to mobilize and enable the introduction of the other ones. If you observe the other SDGs, they always have implementation goals that fall back on SDG 17, so if we consider that, it is a very encompassing goal.
Retratos Magazine: How will it benefit the developing countries?
Andre Cavalcanti: In a way, SDG 17 represents the commitment of developed countries to provide resources to countries with lower relative development. In trade, it seeks to foster the participation of less developed countries in the total of global exports, to evaluate the tax barriers imposed on these countries in relation to developed ones. It is mainly focused on this purpose, trying to balance the relations between the countries. When it mentions systematic aspects, it is considering aspects of global macroeconomic stability, so that the least developed countries are not affected by global crisis events.
Roberto Sant’Anna: There are also goals about resources mobilized by developed countries for developing ones, for the introduction of the SDG program. The 17th goal is fundamental because it will mobilize resources, capacity-building and technology towards the introduction of the goals in other countries. It approaches implementation itself, which is: mobilizing to introduce the goal. I believe that this is a role the IBGE has been performing for a long time. A clear example is the creation of two Reference Centers in Africa, one in Cape Verde and the other in Senegal, for cooperation on the use of electronic data collection.
Retratos Magazine: What are the measurement challenges of this Goal?
Andre Cavalcanti: There is a goal, for example, that says what percentage of gross national income (GNI) the developed countries should implement in terms of official assistance to developing countries. That goal only makes sense when it is considered in a global level, since it strengthens the commitment that developed countries have towards others in the introduction of the sustainable development goals.
Roberto Sant’Anna: Looking at the international scenario, many of these indicators, by their own nature, are called dichotomous, whose answers are “yes” or “no”. It is an indicator that just makes sense at a global level, in comparison with other countries. Another example is when we go into the cooperation area, many indicators are not achieved either from a statistical survey, or from management records. We already had problems in an aspect relating to the cooperation concept for developing countries, because the institution responsible for that policy did not produce the indicator.
Retratos Magazine: What are the partner institutions in the indicators production?
Andre Cavalcanti: Nobody does anything alone, partnership is the key word. The image of SDG 17also follows this line of thought. In public finances indicators, we have partnerships with the National Treasury Secretariat, the Central Bank, which deals with external resources indicators and with the balance of payments, as well as partnerships with the Ministry of Industry, Foreign Trade and Services, which deals with international trade. We also have institutions engaged in technology, such as the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel), the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication, and the IBGE itself, a producer of data on Internet access.
Roberto Sant’Anna: Many indicators will be facilitated if we reach an agreement to access administrative records. It is a meaningful discussion that will facilitate, a lot, the follow-up and elaboration of indicators, especially of those related with the financial and tax field.
Interview published in Retratos Magazine no 17.
