It is with great pleasure that I welcome back into the Virtual Studio, Homi Kharas. I wanted to explore with him the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the halfway point for their completion. I was looking for his assessment of current progress especially after he, John W McArthur, and Odera Onyechi published a new Report at Brookings: “How is the world doing on the SDGs? Four tests and eight findings”.
Also, I wanted to get his views of what we can expect at the upcoming UN Summit of the Future, scheduled for September 22nd and 23rd in New York during the High Level Panel Week. This Summit is the second of two Summits called for by the current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Homi is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, housed in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. In that capacity, he studies policies and trends influencing developing countries, including aid to poor countries, the emergence of the middle class, and global governance and the G20.
His most recent co-authored/edited books are: The Rise of the Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World (2023), Breakthrough: The Promise of Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development edited with John McArthur and Izumi Ohno (2022) and Leave No One Behind: From Summits to Solutions: Time for Specifics on the Sustainable Development Goals edited with John McArthur and Izumi Ohno (2019).
Hosted by Alan Alexandroff