Event

Tackling Vulnerabilities and Leveraging Scarce Resources, 21 & 23 October 2020

Naveeda Nazir
Naveeda Nazir
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Tackling Vulnerabilities and Leveraging Scarce Resources: On the road to the Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (UN LDC5)

OECD Development & partners are organizing a virtual conference that will focus on how to ensure that the international support system helps LDCs to address their vulnerabilities as they recover from COVID19.

  • First session: 21 October 2020, 15:00 – 16:30 (CET)

What does COVID-19 mean for LDC’s vulnerabilities and support measures?

 The COVID-19 crisis is rolling back years of development progress. It urges us to rethink the economic vulnerability of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and of developing countries more generally. Vulnerability, one of the main criteria for including countries into the LDC list, has been measured by the economic and environmental vulnerability index (EVI), which captures the country’s structural vulnerability to economic and environmental shocks. However, growing concerns on exposure to international shocks, and the compounding of several risks, make it necessary to rethink how we measure vulnerabilities and how we help the LDCs address them. The first panel will take stock of this debate to inform the preparations of the Fifth UN Conference on the LDCs (LDC5), to be held in Doha, Qatar in January 2022.

  • Second session: 23 October, 2020, 15:00 – 16:30 (CET)
  • Financing the recovery in LDCs: what role for international co-operation?

In his latest report on the implementation of the Istanbul Programme of Action (IPoA), which came out at the very outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN Secretary-General had already stressed the uneven progress of LDCs, and the need to better support them beyond the graduation point. Declining foreign direct investment, persistently low shares in world exports, slow gains in structural transformation and productive capacity, continued dependence on commodities and a worsening of undernourishment in the LDCs were all matters of concern on the eve of the major 2020 global economic crisis. This second panel will discuss options for improving the mobilization of global finance, its alignment with, and its impact on the recovery and sustainable development of LDCs.

Click here for more information.

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