Replace the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals With One: Productivity

If the UN were serious about ending poverty and improving living standards worldwide, it would make productivity growth the organizing principle of its sustainable development agenda.

In 2015, the United Nations released its list of Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to “end poverty, protect the planet, and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere.” Productivity growth was not included among the 17 goals adopted. That omission is troubling because, at the end of the day, sustained development for low-income countries depends on them becoming middle- or even upper-income countries. And the only way to achieve that transition is to boost productivity growth.

Less hunger, cleaner water, better health care, more infrastructure, and other goals on the UN’s list can all be made possible by higher productivity. Clean water requires money. So do health care, education, energy, broadband, and highways. Any country can have these things if it can pay for them; countries can only get the money to pay for them through higher productivity.

But unsurprisingly, labor productivity in many poor and low-income countries remains low. Senegal’s productivity is just above $6 per hour. Honduras’s is roughly $8. Compare that with almost $82 in the United States and about $100 in Singapore. That’s why the most important development goal should be helping low-income countries increase productivity so they can generate the wealth needed to address national challenges.

Yet higher productivity is not one of the UN’s 17 goals. The closest is Goal 8, “Decent Work and Economic Growth.” Even there, productivity is treated as an afterthought rather than a core imperative. The goal focuses on full employment, reduced labor inequality, equitable pay, safe working environments, and improved financial services—not productivity.

Many of the goals are actually at odds with higher productivity. The goal of more clean energy is likely to lower, not raise, living standards if renewable energy continues to cost a nation more to produce than energy from fossil fuels.

Goal 12 presents a similar problem. It calls on countries to move toward more “sustainable consumption and production patterns,” which is a euphemism for consuming less. By this measure, poorer countries have already achieved the goal. And if they want kids to play with “ethical and sustainable” soccer balls, as the UN apparently thinks is important enough to merchandise, they will probably end up paying more.

The same is true of Goal 13: “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” Urgent climate action with long-term impacts almost always costs money.

Even the UN’s social goals would be served by higher productivity. There is a clear causal relationship between national per capita productivity and women’s rights, just as there is between higher productivity and environmental protection.

So, given that productivity is the foundation for many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, why did it not make the list? The answer is simple: Many of the policy elites who dominate the economic development conversation, especially those claiming to speak for the “Global South,” have long abandoned growth in favor of redistribution, now with a “green” cherry on top.

Case in point, in 2013, the UN secretary-general named economist Abhijit Banerjee, among others, as a key adviser to help develop the SDGs. This is the same economist who could write the following, with a straight face, about how to improve the lives of people in poor countries: “A higher GDP may be one way in which this [a better life] can be given to the poor, but it is only one of the ways, and there is no presumption that it is always the best one.” Surely, you are kidding me (and stop calling me Shirley).

No surprise, WEF founder Klaus Schwab had to be part of this anti-growth chorus. In his 2021 book, he writes, “We never should have made GDP growth the singular focus of policymaking. Alas, that is where we are today. GDP growth is our key measurement and has permanently slowed.” For him, the focus on growth was a “systemic design error in the Western economic development model,” and “we will have to deal with a whole basket of other problems we created while pursuing higher growth.” You mean problems like well-funded schools, cancer treatments, reliable energy, widespread car ownership, and more?

And this gets to the key factor: Grounded in the nonsense of Marxist dependency theory, UN leadership and staff too often seem to believe that growth is a plot to keep the Global South down, either by increasing inequality or by limiting developing countries’ growth. Indeed, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has asserted, “Every spurt of progress has been associated with sharper inequality between countries.”

This is why so many of UNCTAD’s policy proposals, such as requiring developed nations to share intellectual property and technology free of charge, are redistributionist in nature. It is also why many growth rejecters, of whom the UN has no shortage, point to Gandhi’s famous aphorism: “Live simply, so that others may simply live.” Well, at least we would have equal incomes—all of them low.

To be clear, growth in advanced economies does not come at the expense of lower-income nations; it often makes growth easier for the latter. After all, many major innovations that improve living standards globally, from modern medicines and higher-yield agricultural technologies to telecommunications networks, were developed because wealthy nations had the resources to invest in research, development, and commercialization.

Higher productivity ultimately generates the resources needed to improve health outcomes, expand educational opportunities, build resilient infrastructure, and reduce inequality. So if the UN were serious about ending poverty and improving living standards worldwide, it would make productivity growth the organizing principle of its agenda.

To actually “transform our world,” the UN should replace its 17 Sustainable Development Goals with one: boost productivity. Everything else follows from there.