Making It: Issue 20 - Shared prosperity

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With 2015 marking the transition from the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community can celebrate many development successes since 2000. However, steady prosperity has not been achieved throughout the world and there remain remarkable differences between and within regions, countries and societies.

Growth in the past has occurred too often without providing the opportunity of participation and reward to significant segments of the population, and women and youth in particular. To really improve the living standards of all women and men, the benefits of growth have to be shared more equitably. This can be achieved when decent employment opportunities are available for all segments of the labour force. Manufacturing industries and their related services sectors can absorb large numbers of workers, provide them with stable jobs and good benefits, and increase the prosperity of their families and communities. An efficient agro-industry, combined with increased investment in agriculture, enhances economic stability for rural households, increases food security and promotes innovation throughout industrial value chains.

Experiences from the past decade show that shared prosperity has, in most cases, been based on progress made in absorbing the labour force more effectively into higher-income industrial jobs. Based on this experience, it is essential to better integrate women and youth in the process of creating an industrial workforce. This not only yields positive multiplier effects for households and communities but also contributes to greater social cohesion. Increased participation in international trade also helps to improve local working conditions through the need to comply with international standards and greater access to modern technologies and best practices.

Industry is an important source of decent employment, accounting for almost 500 million jobs worldwide – or about a fifth of the world’s workforce. Only those economies that have the ability to constantly generate new activities based on upgrading to higher levels of value-addition, higher productivity, or higher returns to scale – economies characterized by structural change – can sustain stable jobs and increase the prosperity for a growing share of the population.

Main highlight of this issue include:

• "Innovation for inclusive and sustainable industrial development" in which LI Yong, Director General of UNIDO, argues that reinforcing technology and manufacturing will deliver growth and jobs without polluting the environment, p.22
• "Sustainable development in the climate change era. From New York to Paris": interviews with IIASA’s Pavel Kabat and the UNFCC’s Christiana Figueres, p.10
• "Monitoring industrialization: a statistical perspective" by Shyam Upadhyaya, p.38
• "Learning from misfit subcultures" Alexa Clay on innovators in the black, grey and informal economies, p.8
• ‘We need to embrace science, technology and innovation’ - interview with the President of Mauritius, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, p.34