A World Awash with Money: There Are Many Options to Finance Development

It is often argued that there are no resources for human rights and sustainable development. This is wrong. There are alternatives, even in the poorest countries.

At national level, there are at least eight options that should be explored to expand fiscal space and generate resources to realize human rights and achieve the SDGs. These eight options are fully supported by policy statements of the UN and the international financial institutions. Governments around the world have been applying them for decades. They include:

1. Increasing progressive tax revenues
2. Restructuring/eliminating debt
3. Fighting illicit financial flows
4. Increasing social security financing by adequate employers’ contributions and formalizing workers in the informal economy with good contracts
5. Re-allocating public expenditures
6. Tapping into fiscal and foreign exchange reserves
7. Adopting a more accommodative macroeconomic framework
8. Lobbying for more aid and transfers

A fundamental human rights principle is that States must utilize the maximum amount of resources to realize human rights. These different alternatives must be agreed transparently in national dialogue with government, free trade unions, federated employers, representative CSOs.

At the international level, there are also multiple options, but they require multilateral consensus. This could be achieved at international conferences, such as at the forthcoming 4^th Conference on Financing for Development in 2025. Examples include:

• The new UN Tax Convention, moving towards a Global Tax System, with a Global Asset Registry to fight illicit financial flows 
• An international debt work-out mechanism, hosted at the UN, as well as prevention and management of debt crises
• New Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) allocations, with a better mechanism that does not increase debt and conditionalities, with a fairer and periodic distribution of SDRs
• Reforms of the international financial institutions to ensure long-term financing of human rights and sustainable development
• Regulation of the global financial markets