This Issue Brief tests the transformative capacity of the domestic inequality reduction target, and highlights implications for the definition of INDC-eqs applied to a dashboard of country-relevant SDGs and targets.
Highlights:
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The Sustainable Development Goals’ Target 10.1 reads: “By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40% of the population at a rate higher than the national average.” Using historical inequality data, we assess countries performance on domestic inequality target over the 1988-2008 period.
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This enables us to qualify the SDG inequality reduction target as conservative for countries for which income growth of the bottom 40% actually overcame mean income growth. And as transformative for countries which so far have failed to meet the target.
- Assuming that SDG-led social and economic transformation will come from a combination of goals and targets cutting across the different dimensions of sustainable development, but also from the target/value assigned to each, we argue that countries should not choose those on which they are already good performers. Only under this condition would the SDG implementation phase not be a show-casing exercise, but a genuine experimentation process.
