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UNU-WIDER renews focus on inequality, conflict, and creating the fiscal space for development

With less than five years remaining to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), UNU-WIDER continues to increase available knowledge on how to combine national policy initiatives, global cooperation, and research results to achieve progress. In 2024, UNU-WIDER began a new work programme to address critical challenges in global development with focused research on inequalities, conflicts, and fiscal space for development. How does research on these three topics change the world? 

As a donor-funded research institute within the United Nations system, UNU-WIDER is well-positioned to influence global conversations in multilateral forums and support policy reform and formulation at national levels. Its work supports UN Member States with development goals through two primary avenues: provision of state-of-the-art research evidence, particularly on the policy experiences of Global South countries, and advocating for member states’ concerns in the international arena, for example, in multilateral cooperation, development financing, or peacekeeping efforts.   

Research evidence

The first area—research evidence—includes development of high-quality data, which means putting the knowledge infrastructure in place to enable ongoing research and policy analysis even after a programmatic period closes or a funding cycle ends. This infrastructure is important because almost no policy is perfect out-of-the-box. Usually, considerable fine-tuning by policymakers is needed to get implementation right. So, capacity must be developed inside national government offices and local academic institutions to enable the ongoing production of research evidence that can support this process of fine-tuning. 

One of UNU-WIDER’s main advantages—the result of 40 years of conducting research worldwide—is its ability to connect domestic public servants with international experts. This connection facilitates the easy sharing of best practices and experience across countries, something that is particularly prevalent in UNU-WIDER’s country programmes like Mozambique and South Africa. South–South cooperation is therefore enhanced in both the comparative evidence and the process of creating it. 

For example, across sub-Saharan Africa, UNU-WIDER continues to support the capacity to use administrative tax data for economic analysis and to provide national tax-benefit microsimulation models. These tools offer quick feasibility tests for everything from small-scale social transfers and tax expenditures to universal pension schemes. Policymakers can look to our research evidence to see what has been done in another country, how well it worked, and if similar work might not provide insights for policy formulation at home. 

What’s on the global agenda in 2025?

In 2025, the United Nations will host the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, expecting the summit to result in decisive agreements to mitigate today’s global debt crisis. In 2024, global public debt reached record highs, approaching 100% of global economic output and the number of countries at risk of debt distress rose to above 60. With debt-servicing costs hamstringing more than half of low-income countries, creating the fiscal space for development is a critical priority. 

Similarly, discussions about the needs of Global South countries will be more present at the G20 Summit negotiations, with the 2024 Summit hosted by Brazil and 2025 by South Africa. And, with China’s emergence as an important bilateral creditor for lower-income countries over the past decade, multilateral discussions in the BRICS group will matter, too. As the US now turns away from multilateralism and reduces its foreign aid priorities, there are important opportunities for European countries to increase their leadership on international solutions. 

The OECD will continue to be an important forum. Not only does it host the Development Assistance Committee of the world’s top official development assistance (ODA) donors, it is also a place where the US, China, European states, and Global South countries are represented and work together. The OECD will also continue to work on international tax fairness, an important part of the solution to fiscal constraints in low-income countries. The IMF and World Bank—important creditors which shape the course of national recoveries for member states hoping to emerge from debt-distress—are also implementing reforms.

COP30 will set new national emission reduction targets as a part of the Paris Agreement and hammer out details on the 2024 agreement to triple ODA financing for climate projects (from USD 100 to 300 billion by 2030). And, as the market pressure to cut social spending mounts over the year, Qatar will host the United Nations Second World Summit for Social Development, expected to set the agenda for the next global development goals after 2030.   

UNU-WIDER will be there

Our research evidence, including in-depth explorations of policy experiences in Global South countries, speaks to government efforts to reduce inequality, overcome violent conflicts, provide effective social protection, support the structural transformation and diversification of the economy, advance climate-friendly economic and energy production, ensure food security, strengthen public budgets, shore up macroeconomic resilience to shocks, and other topics of critical importance to successful and sustainable national development. 

Our work programme, naturally, includes discussing our research findings where they can be most impactful. UNU-WIDER’s work supports the conversations taking place in the multilateral forums highlighted above, offering rigorous evidence to support many of the arguments Global South countries are expected to make. In 2025, UNU-WIDER will have a presence in the global conversation, convening international experts and national policymakers for pivotal discussions alongside the critical events shaping international cooperation, including the G20 Summit in South Africa, the OECD in Paris, COP30 in Belem, and major United Nations conferences in Seville and Doha.

About the work programme   

UNU-WIDER’s new work programme focuses on three research areas—reducing inequalities, resolving conflicts, and creating the fiscal space for development—and cutting across three themes of gender, data for development, and climate change. Our projects address a range of critical issues, including domestic revenue mobilization, social protection systems, reform of the international financial architecture, safety nets in post-conflict and humanitarian contexts, and green industrial policy for the transition to a net-zero, climate-friendly future.

Timothy Shipp is Editor and Communications Associate at UNU-WIDER with a focus on inequality research. He is the managing editor of the WIDERAngle and holds a master’s degree in Global Development Policy from Boston University.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or the United Nations University, nor the programme/project donors.