In India the official VNR's main point is that rapid economic growth has sharply reduced poverty. A 2018 study backs this claim saying extreme poverty is declining in India at rate of 44 people per minute as a result of which, since May 2018, India claims to no longer have the largest number of poor people. Despite this dramatic poverty reduction, over 73 million Indians still live below the international poverty line. Most of these people subsisting on less than US$1.90 a day are in rural areas. Even as the absolute numbers of poor fall there is rapid rise in inequality. A 2018 Oxfam report says India’s richest one percent garnered 73 percent of national wealth generated in 2017.

“The Data Revolution” has been promoted as a vital tool to help to achieve the SDGs or, at least, to better measure progress. Having access to massive amounts of data is seen as helpful for countries to plan, design and implement development and public policies in general. This chapter highlights concerns about this revolution and suggests how to rethink global governance for the digital era.

The redefinition of the principles, norms and policies (software) and the structures and institutions (hardware) of sustainable development governance is closely related to our capacity to adopt new rules and adapt international structures to govern data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their impact on our lives and rights.

The WORLD Policy Analysis Center and University of California Press are thrilled to announce a new, freely downloadable book, Advancing Equality: How Constitutional Rights Can Make a Difference Worldwide. This resource pairs a quantitative analysis of the constitutions of all 193 U.N. member states with case law from more than forty countries. By systematically examining protections against discrimination on the basis of sex/gender, race/ethnicity, religion, migration status, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity, alongside guarantees of the rights to health and education, Advancing Equality offers insights into the range and implications of different constitutional and judicial approaches to ensuring equal opportunities.

The numbers provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about the assistance contributed by its members to developing countries are “inflated”, include “fictional figures”, suffer from “fundamental flaws of overcounting, incoherence and premature implementation of an unfinished system” and have therefore “become incoherent as a statistical quantity”, argues David Scott, former head of the statistical division of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in an article recently published by the Brookings Institution.

The Second Committee of the UN General Assembly, in charge of Economic and Financial Affairs, concluded its 2019 deliberations last November 27. Fifty resolutions were passed and discussion was closed on all but one agenda item: the Revitalization of the UN General Assembly. The range of the resolutions, dealing with sustainable development, macroeconomics, operational activities for development and countries in special situations show that the UN is relevant in macroeconomic and financing matters. More attention will be demanded in the coming year to the issue of Revitalization of the work of the General Assembly through the lens of coordination for sustainable development, while the old debate about the role of consensus in the Committee’s deliberations was reopened.