Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

A guest blog by Homi Kharas who is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder of World Data Lab. An economist by training, Kharas is a pioneer in the study of the global middle class.  He has over four decades of experience working in or writing about international financial institutions and contributed to the shaping of the U.N.-brokered global agreement in 2015 to pursue Sustainable Development Goals in every country and region of the world. Key points From a growing global middle class to expanding trade and faster, market-driven clean energy adoption, 2025 delivered tangible progress for developing economies despite a difficult global backdrop. Inflation and food price increases are being held in check, and advances in digital public infrastructure, nutrition, and weather forecasting improved everyday resilience for hundreds of millions of people. These gains show that, even amid crisis, targeted investments and multil...

Guest blog by Homi  Kharas:  Interim Vice President and Director - Global Economy and Development and John McArthur:  Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development. Originally published on Brookings Institute website here in their Future Development section.   John McArthur Homi Kharas Pouring several colors of paint into a single bucket produces a gray pool of muck, not a shiny rainbow. So too with discussions of financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Jumbling too many issues into the same debate leads to policy muddiness rather than practical breakthroughs. Financing the SDGs requires a much more disaggregated mindset: unpacking the specific issues, requiring specific resources, in specific places. In a forthcoming paper, we zoom out on the global SDG financing landscape in order to zoom back in on country-specific contexts and gaps. In particular, we consider how much the world’s governments are already spending on SDG-related ...