The 2018 UNCTAD World Investment Forum is taking place in Switzerland on October 22-26. This year the event is entirely dedicated to financing sustainable development.
Implementing the transformative 2030 Agenda and achieving the SDGs require significant capital — public, private, blended finance, particularly in key sectors such as infrastructure, food security and rural development, sustainable energy, public health and education. The estimates suggest that developing countries alone face an annual financing gap of $ 2.5 trillion for achieving the SDGs (UNCTAD, 2014).
There is an urgent need of the global solution-oriented dialogue for closing this significant financial gap and engaging the private capital into financing the SDGs.
“Some $300 trln dollars in financial assets are managed by the global financial system on our collective behalf. The issue is to direct these funds, where they are needed first and where they have the greatest
impact”, – said Michael Moller, Director-General of the UN office at Geneva, during the grand opening ceremony.
Global financial assets are sufficient to meet the financing needs of the 2030 Development Agenda, but the challenge is how to channel them into SDG sectors (Lajčák,2018)
Addressing this challenge requires developing the incentives for private capital to participate in financing and investing in global 2030 Agenda, building innovative collaborations between different investment stakeholders, shaping the investment environment and investment- related policy making.
The concerted global action is needed to change the well-established investment patterns and reorient the financial markets into sustainable long-term and resilient investment. Unlike global trade governance, realized by the WTO, investment governance is fragmentary. The UNCTAD World Investment Forum, held biennially since 2008, to a certain extent, aims to bridge this gap by providing pre-eminent global platform for key investment stakeholders to gather and discuss emerging trends and challenges in investments, shape and inform investment policy-making and investment-related research agenda.
The 2018 Forum hosts about fifty events, including the Global Leaders Investment Summit, the Global Investment Game Changers Summit, ministerial round tables, conferences, private sector-led sessions, etc. The participants consider the backlash against globalization stemming from its unequal developmental impact, the risks in protectionism in both trade and investment; new context of the investments informed by the crisis of the multilateral system, emerging digital economy, sustainable development imperative; the role of promoting the ESG reporting and innovative sustainability-themed products such as ESG indices, green bonds, etc.
