 Welcome to the launch of the 2024 World Economic Situation Prosperous Report, which is co-hosted by UNEWIDER and UNDESA. The theme of the launch is on achieving SDGs despite slow growth. I'm Kunal Sen, the director of UNEWIDER, to the think tank in developing economics and an UN agency based in Helsinki, Finland. We are pleased to partner with UNDESA for the launch of the report. The 2024 World Economic Situation Prosperous Report is one of the UN's flagship reports in economics. The publication of the report is timely because we have significant concern that the world economy may be entering a period of slow growth with high interest rates and quite a bit of policy uncertainty at the moment. The conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine adds to this uncertainty. And after a period of very slow economic growth and at times negative growth during the pandemic, many developing countries can yield forward to see another period of slow growth which will obviously have an impact on the poorest of their citizens. It will certainly make many of the SDGs difficult to achieve. In this event, we will hear from our colleagues in UNDESA on the main findings of the report. Following this, we will debate the pathways and policies available to stimulate economic growth and accelerate progress towards the SDGs with an esteemed panel of researchers and practitioners. We'll also have around 20 minutes for questions and answers at the end and we look forward to receiving questions from the audience online. Please put your questions on the chat function of the webinar and I should also mention that we are recording the webinar for future purpose. I will now request Shantana Mukherjee, Director of Economic Analysis and Policy Division, UNDESA to introduce the report followed by a presentation of the main findings of the report by Hamid Rashid, Rashid, Chief of the Global Economic Monitoring Branch of UNDESA. So, Shantana, over to you. Thank you, Kunal and my warmest greetings to everybody gathered here, whether in New York City, Helsinki or another maybe warmer part of the world. It's a great pleasure for us at UNDESA to be partnering with you and you wider on this occasion and I'd like to thank also all the colleagues who are making it happen. The SDG Summit here at the General Assembly last September underscored the urgency of achieving the SDGs. Of course, that would be keeping a commitment the world made back in 2015, but more crucially, any progress towards that would expand the capacities of people, societies and economies to cope with periods of uncertainty, shocks and rapid change. What happens though, when the rubber hits the road? That's when, you know, resolutions meet implementation. Our report, The World Economic Situation and Prospects launched in New York just about a month ago presents a realistic assessment of what lies ahead in the short to medium term. Perhaps not everybody is familiar with this flagship report. It dates back to a UN General Assembly resolution of 31st October 1947. That's 76 years back and counting. The resolution asked for a survey of current world economic conditions and trends annually and also at such other intervals as necessary. Accordingly, we publish this report in January every year with a mid-year update around May and monthly updates as well. We believe that this makes the report the longest running, continuously published report of this type, witnessed to the economic forces that have shaped much of our current circumstances. I hope that such perspectives and experiences will guide our discussions today and we will arrive at a shared understanding of what needs to happen to accelerate progress towards the SDGs. Without further ado then, let me hand over to my colleague, Hamid who will be presenting the report. Thank you. Thank you, Shantanam. Thank you, Kunal and good morning. Good afternoon, colleagues from New York. Now I'll share my screen. That works well. Okay. And I need to go to the full from the beginning. So can you see my screen? Well, yes. Okay. So our report this year we launched on January 4th actually before the other two reports that came out of the IFIs, namely the World Bank Global Economic Prospects and the World Economic Outlook Update that came later about 10 days ago. So our numbers are the forecast numbers that we present in the report are have a current date of 1st of December 2023. So since then also we saw quite a bit of changes in the global economic outlook, but overall our forecast numbers broadly aligned or the other numbers that came out later are broadly aligned with our numbers. So there was no surprise. I think there's a broad consensus that 2023 was relatively unexpectedly a good year, but we see a downward trend in 2024. So having said that I, my presentation will loosely based on these PowerPoints I'll not strictly follow slide by slide, but I'll put my comments into three broad buckets, namely the good news and not so good news and the bad news. I think most of the time it is spent on the bad news part and what we can do about it, right? How do we overcome this bad news part of the story? So good news as I just mentioned in 2023 surprised economic analysts around the world. We expected a pretty tough year as the US Federal Reserve started raising interest rates mid 2022. There was a doom and gloom scenario towards the end of 2022, but that was not realized. Surprisingly, US economy proved to be very resilient in 2023, followed by also China, beat some expectation and some other major economies also did very well. If you look at the stock five or six largest economies, the only country that among those six was that had a lower than expected growth rate was Germany. And other than that, and if you look at India, India also performed very well. Other economies, Japan also beat expectation in 2023. So overall, 2023 was better than expected. And for the US economy, the story goes that labor market was a performance was quite robust, but we had an additional wrinkle or argument in our report. Why that happened? Because in addition to the labor market outcomes, net worth of US households actually had a positive gain, not just in 2023, but since the pandemic, US net household net worth increased sharply over the last three year period. And that may sound counterintuitive. The reason it happened because US housing prices remained very robust in a very tight housing market where supply was very tight and demand was quite strong and the prices stood up. So housing prices remained very resilient and that really helped the US households to sustain their level of consumption. So we saw massive consumption actually binge in the US economy throughout 2023 and that explained the very robust growth rate that year. Riding on this housing prices also, the financial assets also performed very well in the US. There's no surprise there, S&P 500 and all the other indices did very well. So overall, the balance sheet of the US households remained very positive that supported consumption growth. China's story is slightly different where you see some policies support, which really helped, especially the third and fourth quarter, lower interest rates at two interested cuts and a stimulus that was not exactly called a stimulus, but some bond issuances by the federal government that helped support investments and some consumption growth. So overall, the Chinese economy also did very well. Another good news we saw in 2023, the countries that we as the UN pay special attention to the vulnerable group of countries, the LDCs, namely did well compared to 2020 too. So did the landlocked developing countries. The seeds, small island developing states didn't do as well, but we see some improvements going forward. So that ends my part of the story, the good news part. So not so good news part is that we see a weakening of global growth in 2024. Across regions, if you look at all the countries, except for Africa would see some uptake in 2024, some improvement. West Asia, again, our cattle date was December 1st, but we see persistent, the geopolitical conflict in the region. But we were, when we were writing, we were expecting West Asia would have some improvements on the back of slightly higher oil prices for the region. But that may be revised downward going forward, but other than these two regions, we see significant slowdown, especially the US economy will expect the slowdown to be quite pronounced compared to 2023. And Europe would also face significant challenges in terms of the war in Ukraine and other challenges. So we don't expect 2024 to be a great year for the European economy, European economists in general. And then if you look at Latin America, also sees quite a bit of headwinds and then commodity prices are not very, doesn't look very promising at this stage. So we have challenges there for many countries in Africa. But again, looking at our vulnerable group of countries, we see some positive outlook, especially for the seeds. We see improvement because tourism has come back significantly for many seeds, which is the main source of revenue for many of them. So one reason that we see that improvement is because globally inflation has, has basically eased significantly since 2023, beginning of 2023. And that's a tighter monetary policy stance in the US help bring down inflation. And ECB also intervening very effectively brought down inflation significantly over the period, over the, over 2023. And that has, will probably open up some space, a policy space for some countries to ease monetary tightening or diversity to some extent. Also the good news part was labor market, especially in advanced countries, labor market recovery was very strong since the pandemic. In the developing countries, of course, the labor market is still quite weak and really pre-pandemic level, still we see some challenges. And there's still also quite a bit of gender gap in the, in the labor market outcomes. So I've already argued that if you look at the region by region, this is where only improvement you'd see is Africa, some, the green bar is the growth outlook for 2024. And you see landlocked countries and LDCs and seeds all three as a group would see some improvement in 2024. On the other hand, the other developing regions would see a deterioration in growth outlook. So now let's get to the bad news part. What is driving this global trend? So we see a secular trend of slowing growth. Before the pandemic, the growth rate averaged about 3% in global economy. And we know that for the, according to the SDG commitments dating back to the beginning of the development decades, that the least developed countries need to grow by 7% a year. That's a target, but we are nowhere close to the 7% growth rate for the least developed countries. And we see the significant challenges, headwinds for the global economy as a whole going forward. And how do we explain this training, growth training downward over the years? And so we, of course, there are short-term shifts in the global economy, but also there are structural challenges that we have to pay attention to. The, of course, the biggest shock to the global economy was the monetary tightening that began in mid-2022. And after a long period of easy monetary policy near zero interest rates, we saw a massive increase in interest rates over a very short period of time. That monetary tightening, of course, would have a real effect in terms of investments and future growth prospects. And what we can reasonably expect and our report makes that argument that the central banks around the world, especially the systemically important central banks, the ECB and the Federal Reserve, they have indicated higher for longer kind of a stance where we'd expect interest rates to remain relatively high, relative to pre-pandemic levels. So we'll not go back to near zero interest rates unless there's a major economic shock requiring settlement to move very quickly. But this higher interest rate environment, there were a lot of adjustments needed in the real economy in terms of most of the market participants were very used to having this ultra-low interest rates for a long period of time. But another structural challenge that we have to keep in mind is that what we're seeing on the trade side. Trade used to be the engine of global growth for a long period of time, especially for the developing countries. There was a main driver of economic growth and poverty reduction. If you look at China's economic trajectory over a 40-year period, trade drove China's economic growth and brought down poverty rates from about 80%, less than 10% over a four-decade period. That engine of growth is actually disappearing for many developing countries. We saw a remarkable decline in global trade flows in 2023, which is almost unprecedented in a year that was not a recession year. So if you look at any year since the 2000 or even going back, of course, when there's a global recession, trade takes a hit. But this was not a recession year and we saw a significant decline in global trade. So part of it is geopolitical factors driving global trade diversion or trade flow going in the opposite direction. We see the decoupling of the two largest economies. That is a major challenge. Developing countries also, partly because of the effect on investments, trade exports are taking a hit in many countries. So we see overall trade trending downward. And if you look at net export as a contributor to GDP growth, for many of the countries developing countries, the net export would become even bigger negative. That means it would have a more negative effect on global growth, of the developing countries going forward. So that's structurally, that's the biggest challenge for many of the countries, I would say. And the third issue, although we don't go into a strong sort of, in great length discussing it, but we are probably not fully capturing the effect of technological change that is unfolding globally right now. And namely the unfolding of AI and the pace of change. So in the past, we had significant technological shocks, but it was usually there was a long adjustment period. But this time probably it is going to be very fast. And that would have huge impact in the labor market, both in developed countries, also in developing countries. We had a box on the topic, but I think this is where again, the SDG implementation would face some challenges. So, and I already mentioned global trade. So the main challenge for the developing countries as we see it and as we underscore in our report is that very limited fiscal space and on the monetary policy side, they can do even less because most of the developing countries are the receiving and in terms of the policy rates set by the major central banks, namely the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank. So they can't independently have counter cyclical policies when interest rates are rising in the US or in Europe, they can't cut interest rates. So there's a harding behavior, there's a pressure for subtle banks to follow the lead of the major central banks. So on the monetary side, we don't expect a lot of sort of support coming in developing countries to support investments and support economic growth, which are critical for, which are necessary conditions for achieving the SDGs. Not the sufficient condition, of course. We need more than economic growth to reduce poverty and to reduce inequality and achieve all the other SDGs. But on the fiscal side, we see significant challenges as well for the developing countries. Many of the developing countries are, even before the pandemic, they had high levels of debt, but pandemic pushed up their debt levels significantly, especially external debt because unlike in developed economies where domestic capital market was big enough, governments could borrow to finance their pandemic response. In case of developing countries, they had to borrow from external sources and that really increased their debt servicing burden for the developing countries, as you can see. Now, almost 50 countries have debt service payment, which is 10% of their government revenue or higher. So median is about 9%, so this is a significant strain and that would affect spending on SDGs because in one side, many of the countries are facing debt distress and debt overhang. That means they don't have enough free cash flow to invest in new projects, new infrastructure projects and other projects. But on the other side, also the overall government revenue would take a squeeze because debt always takes priority over other spending commitments. So SDG spending would hit a setback and we also, this would affect climate action, spending on climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. So overall, this limited fiscal space poses a significant challenge for many, many developing countries across the board, across a broad spectrum of developing countries, whether it's Latin America or Africa or South Asia. So this is where we believe that managing the debt level and reducing, restructuring the debt burden would be very important going forward if they have to have a fair chance in achieving the SDGs. So in the final slide, let me just, I already talked about monetary and fiscal policy. In the report, we make a strong case for industrial policy interventions. This is again, a topic that was not very popular until recently. Now the industrial policies back in fashion, many developed countries have actually actively sort of designed industrial policies to basically to address climate change issues but also to re-show their supply chains and build resilient supply chains. So industrial policy has become a major tool and this is where the developing countries will have to catch up with industrial policies. The idea of industrial policies is more targeted intervention where you get more bang for the buck. We have limited resources available because of the fiscal constraints that I just mentioned. So every dollar that has to be spent should have very high multiplier. And this is where innovation policies would be very important in providing technology and making sure that we have the developed countries are able to selectively spend on R&D so that they have a better productivity outcome and they can have more growth. They can squeeze out more growth and we believe this is where the efforts need to be there because without industrial policy, a traditional fiscal policy intervention, large scale stimulus will not be feasible for many countries. So they have to be more targeted, more efficient fiscal spending and we talk about fiscal efficiency as well in the report in terms of reducing tax loopholes and other kinds of fiscal leakages but the bottom line is that there will be a clear need for more targeted industrial policy interventions if we have to re-stimulate growth in the developing countries. Final point that I would say is that given that there's very limited room to maneuver within the countries, international cooperation will become increasingly important for the many developing countries including the LDCs and the CIDs and there one point we highlight very strongly is the need for timely debt restructuring and debt relief and we have been talking about it under G20 and other initiatives but we haven't seen enough sort of breakthrough in terms of a meaningful debt relief for the large number of developing countries who are either on the verge of debt distress or in debt distress right now and you see few countries in 2023 defaulted even some start performing economies like Ghana in Africa defaulted, Ethiopia defaulted recently. So we have to stem that tight in terms of if there's a cascading effect of more defaults that would really further derail our efforts to achieve the SDGs. So I think this is where the international community needs to come together and provide more direct and more concerted efforts to provide the needed debt restructuring at this stage before it's too late. So this is where international cooperation is critical. So and of course, I know we need to have more climate finance obviously many of the countries when they are have to make difficult choices often climate action takes a back seat because they have to meet their food security needs other needs before they can think about climate action but this is where also international cooperation will be very important going forward. So with that, I'll stop here and thank you so much. Happy to answer questions as needed. Thank you. Thank you, Hamid. That's very clear and succinct presentation. Your presentation already raised several questions actually which we can see but you come back to those questions from the online audience a bit later because now I wanted to introduce the panel and Hamid you will stay on for the panel too. So look forward to of course your insights in the panel discussion. So let's now introduce the panel that we have a very esteemed set of panelists here and Hamid do you want to just stop sharing the screen? So I think I'll let me stop share. Okay, all right. Right, great. So now we can see all see each other. So I'm going to introduce the members of the panel and I will. So first off, you see Oda Awala. UC is the executive representative of the private sector development at Finchurch Aid which is a very large and exterior very respectable organization working extensively in Sub-Saharan Africa and also other low income countries. So UC is going to bring us a practitioner perspective in the panel. So get a sense of how we can see from a practitioner point of view. So UC look forward to your thoughts on that. Then moving on to Richard Kima who is actually a colleague of ours in UNU wider research fellow in UNU wider currently working on Southern Africa towards inclusive economic development program SA tight in short, a very program we have in South Africa. He's based in Pretoria and Richard is a specialist in global macroeconomics. Richard will bring us more of the macroeconomics insights in the discussion. And then last but not least, we also have Sanna Kuranin. Sanna is a senior economist at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies Boffit in short based also in Helsinki like UNU wider. Sanna has expertise in resource rich economies as well as an emerging economy such as Russia. So we're going to try and get some sense of what this might mean for resource rich economies also economy that depend on resources who import resources. So both sides of the story. So I'm going to know, I'm really just going to start with the macroeconomics perspective. So I'm going to start with Richard. And Richard, I mean, so we have heard about from Hamid and the report itself also talks about slow growth happening along with inflation challenges. Of course inflation seems to be trending downwards but still pretty high both in developing countries and developing countries. So how can developing countries accelerate growth without increasing inflationary pressures or transmitting making the financial stability situation worse? So hopefully not having bank runs and other sorts of problems in the financial sector. So what do you think would be the way forward for developing countries in this very tricky situation where they want to get great economic growth but also there is a concern about inflation and financial instability. Can you serve seven minutes of you at the most if you don't mind? Thank you. Okay, thank you very much Kunal and thank you for having me in the panel. So to answer this question, I would like to kind of like set up a context and a background. So and this year, so we know that the central banks in developing countries and around the world they've been facing, you know, this delicate balance and trade-offs to either curve down inflation, revive growth and indeed ensure financial stability. And those, and the policy uncertainties are there, namely, you know, those who are connect which are connected with the direction of monetary tightening and by the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank among others. And those policy uncertainties are looming large for the real economy and financial markets. So, but the full impact of this monetary tightening including indeed the contractive tightening ongoing now. So still not materialized because of large lags in monetary transmissions. So on top of these central banks in developing economies they will be faced in actually additional challenges. So, among others, so those are like shrinking policy space for discretionary policy adjustments, tightening global financial conditions, growing balance of payment concerns, but also sudden stops and debt sustainability risks. And to address these challenges, those central banks can use a broad range of tools including capital flow management, macro prudential policies and exchange rate management and all this in a first instance to minimize the adverse spillover effects of monetary tightening by the developed economies. Some countries already have successfully used these tools and for instance, Brazil has successfully reduced it. I mean, they kind of like reduce the tax on fixed income investments to zero. So during the great financial crisis and this has successfully slowed down capital outflows from the country. And another example is China's central bank. So the paper is Bank of China which has utilized a range of exchange rate management tools to ensure the stability of the remnant bid including direct interventions in the spot and forward markets. So in addition, developing countries will need to kind of like maintain a strong economic fundamentals in order to minimize the vulnerability to external shocks but also strengthen the technical and institutional capacities. But that would include like family economic and financial data collections and strengthening of the supervisory capabilities. And all this will prepare them to properly implement policies. And a range of yearly warning indicators and countries models that can be then, you know, help be used kind of like to help monetary authorities spot domestic and external risks and vulnerabilities. And these countries can also develop various crisis related models. And so and use those, you know, models to kind of like help spot vulnerabilities and quantify, you know, the overall vulnerabilities to crisis like sudden stops, as I mentioned earlier. And they can also use those model to forecast the possible size of economic outcomes such as GDP loss and assess the duration and the probability of exit from a crisis. So furthermore, the implementation of fiscal policies as, you know, the colleagues I liked earlier so could kind of like help these developing countries as well. And those fiscal policies so include that option of prudent fiscal measures and counter-cycle fiscal intervention but also the establishment of sovereign stabilization funds. And all of this can act as a shield, you know, against external economic shocks and help boost aggregate demand and also manage, you know, capital flows and in a truck-stale investments. In particular, developing countries we need to kind of like, you know, bolster the financial, the fiscal revenues through like in the short-term increasing the use of digital technologies that can help them reduce tax avoidance or evasion. And in the medium-term, governments in those countries can, you know, expand the revenue through more kind of like progressive income wealth and in green taxations. So many of these economies will also need to kind of like improve the efficiency of fiscal spending and the effectiveness of subsidies and better target social protection programs. And in addition to that, you know, by curb and fiscal deficit and adopting prudent fiscal measures so these countries can alleviate undue pressures on their currencies. And as we all know, you know, a stable currency will not only install confidence in foreign investors but also serve as a bulwark against volatile capital flows that can indeed, you know, be triggered by monetary policy changes in larger economies. Furthermore, so it remains critical for this developing economies to kind of like implement well-targeted industrial innovation policies as the colleague highlighted earlier as well. And strengthening innovation systems and absorptive capacities will kind of like be crucial for generating new and sustainable sources of growth and employment, diversifying export structures and accelerating the energy transition. And to kind of like as a final point, so those central banks can also like central banks in general, basically will need to kind of like, you know, strengthen international cooperation and as the colleague highlighted earlier as well. So mostly, you know, international multi-policy cooperation and coordination through communication and interactions between, you know, monetary policy authorities worldwide. And this will help minimize the adverse spillover effects of the major developed countries central banks policies on developing economies. And central banks can also strengthen collaboration in monitoring and maintaining fiscal stability, including identifying and addressing financial risks stemming from climate change. So I think I'll stop here as, you know, as a kind of like a set of tools, you know, those developing economies could use to kind of like accelerate growth. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks Richard. Actually, there are quite a few questions you'll get to again later on on inflation control and inflation targeting. So it'd be good to discuss what is possible with inflation control and inflation targeting into the very now mature well understood policy, at least in advanced economies in the developing country space. So we'll get back to that later on. But thank you so much for your comments. I want to now move on to Sana. So Sana, again, with your interest in resource rich economies. So what do you think the implications of the current global economic conditions are for resource rich economies? And kind of a follow up question on the other side of the story. So how will the commodity price shocks the volatility of commodity prices that we've seen in the pandemic and even now, what does it mean for countries to depend on resources? So both on both sides, what do you expect to see as we look at this year? Yes, thank you, a big question. I wanted to talk about the resource rich countries because there's obviously, they are facing many difficulties that we're trying to address in the SDGs. So it's very common for these resource rich countries to be in kind of a development trap sometimes described as a resource curse. There's rent taking behavior, which leads to inequality in these countries. Often they undereducate their people, so we need to address these issues. Of course, sustainable industrial regulation, labor protection, very important issues addressed here. But because I'm a central banker, even though there's some overlap with Richard's comments there, I'd like to talk about the macroeconomic issues and financial sector issues that could help these countries to develop their economies. So enabling financial sector requires macro stability. And that means, of course, sustainable budgets, debt levels, functioning central banks, and strong financial regulations, macro prudential policies that already Richard mentioned there. And of course, these macroeconomic buffers should be well achievable for the future. And these buffers should be well achievable for many resource rich countries with the events of commodity price booms. And we have seen a lot of volatility in commodity prices during the pandemic, due to the Russia's invasion in Ukraine, we're going energy prices up, due to Queen transition with some lithium or some particular minerals. And this volatility is definitely an issue that should be addressed in more, with bigger focus in these economies. Of course, central bank inflation targeting, very important flexible exchange rate. These are these classic issues that we always like to see in all countries, not just developing countries, not just rich countries, but all the countries. But then addressing this volatility that's particular for these resource rich economies. We do observe this kind of boom bust events according to the commodity prices. And the problem is that these booms and busts are often amplified by the financial sector. So during the boom, financial sector is giving loans to not only to the commodity firms, but also to the other firms in the economy. But then when we get the commodity price bust, then also banks face some kind of liquidity squeeze and are unable to provide financial services to other sectors of the economy, even though they might have still growth opportunities. So we need to try to strengthen the financial sectors in the way that they could avoid this kind of boom bust and amplifying the booms and busts in the economy. Because this also leads to the fact that financial sector might be hampering the economic diversification, which also would help these economies to demitigate the volatility of the economy. So if the financial sector is too much centered in serving the commodity sector of the economy, then possibly it's not serving very well small and medium science enterprises or households. And of course financial inclusion is something that definitely needs attention in many, I'd say most developing countries, but also some developed countries. So we still don't have necessarily as strong financial inclusion globally that we'd like in even in developed countries. So this, for resource dependent countries, resource rich countries, this volatility is an issue. And I currently I'm afraid that we might still continue to see very strong movements in commodity prices. And this country should be better prepared to face them with strong macro economic policies and also by strengthening the financial sector. I'll stop here, thank you. Thank you, Stan. Actually there's a question also from the audience and I want to come back to that later because it's a really important question because we already have the Ukraine crisis. We'd like to increase in food prices and energy price and energy prices. But now we have ongoing situation in the Suez Canal which is going to lead to also increasing prices because lots of transportation is going to happen where shipping would have to go through entirely across the continent of Africa which would increase transportation times and of course increase prices. So there's a new situation happening right now along with what else is happening in the Middle East. So I want to come back to that because that's a new development which we haven't really thought about in the discussions that we have had earlier on the Ukraine crisis itself. So we'll come back to that, Stan. But thank you so much. I want to move on to UC. And UC, so now let's bring out the development cooperation.