Budgeting for SDGs: A Data-driven Approach
Governments play a pivotal role when it comes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations. To succeed, they must effectively integrate these global goals into their budgeting process. This involves strategically allocating financial resources that are directly linked to the SDGs. This linkage between public spending and development goals is key for informing development plans, but is hardly observable inreal-world data due to the complexity introduced through SDG interdependencies and potential spillovers across development programmes.Despite the relevance of incorporating the SDGs into their budget process, governments lack of guidance in mapping public spending to these global challenges.This research aims to provide a flexible data-driven framework to analyse the relationship between the allocation of public investments and improvement in the development indicators.First, we use data on the trends of the indicators and public expenditure to obtain an effective predictive model of an improvement in the SDGs indicators. Then, we analyse the relative importance of the expenditure categories for building our model, to identify those that are the most relevant.Such a framework could complement contextual expertise and assist treasuries around the world in making the best use of their resources to achieve the SDGs.
Economic world Policy and governance