More expansionary fiscal and monetary policies听are needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals
This month, the international community will gather at the United Nations in New York to review progress on the implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to reduce poverty, hunger and economic inequality and promote development, particularly in developing countries. But only one of the SDGs, #17, says anything about how to finance all the efforts. While SDG 17 calls for more international cooperation and foreign aid, it only suggests that developing countries strengthen domestic resource mobilization (DRM) by improving their tax collection and curtailing illicit financial flows, etc.
While important, this approach neglects much bigger problems with the prevailing set of macroeconomic policies that hamper the ability of developing countries to increase public investment, employment and scale-up the long-term investments in the underlying health and education infrastructure needed to achieve the SDGs. The policy framework used in many developing countries is characterized by an overly restrictive low-inflation target achieved by using high interest rates and backed up by strict inflation targeting regimes at independent central banks.Read More »
In recent decades, market-based solutions such as financial inclusion have become more popular in developed countries to reduce inequalities and boost wealth and incomes of the poor. There is no better example of this than the recent thrust of low-income families, women, ethnic minorities, and the young into the subprime mortgage lending expansion in the USA since the early 2000s. Higher access to formal loans for these households was argued to enable them to climb the magical ladder of homeownership and achieve their American Dream. But as we know, the picture didn鈥檛 turn out to be quite so rosy. 
Microfinance has been widely hailed as one of the most innovative tools for fighting against poverty. It has generated global attention over the last two decades, especially since the UN declared 2005 the ‘Year of Microcredit’ and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank. This led to a significant expansion of the sector in the last decade. According to the World Bank (2015), the microfinance industry is estimated to have $60-100 billion in loans outstanding, and several thousand microfinance organizations reach an estimated 200 million clients. 32.5 million of these clients are in India and 90 percent of them are women.
On 8th November, 2016, the Indian government announced that it was banning the use of 500 and 1000-rupees currency notes from midnight, effectively scrapping 86% of India鈥檚 currency notes by value. The Indian public would have to change the outlawed currency notes for new ones at bank counters by the end of the year.
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