Inclusive economic growth is the catalyst that will build a future where everyone can thrive. Ensuring that the benefits of prosperity reach everyone – including women, rural communities, and underserved populations – is the cornerstone of that future. The Sustainable Development Goals provide a unified commitment to this outcome, yet we have much more to do to achieve it.
In this context, the United States remains committed to supporting low- and middle-income countries, many of which face heightened debt sustainability risks and liquidity shortfalls.
We believe private sector investment is critical to achieving a sustainable economic recovery. Through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the United States mobilizes private sector finance in developing economies by increasing confidence in markets, providing political risk insurance, and providing loan portfolio guarantees.
ECOSOC and the UN system can play a role helping developing countries understand how to build sustainable and responsible partnerships with the private sector to catalyze investments in transformative sectors such as energy, health, infrastructure, and technology, while promoting environmental sustainability, transparency, and human rights.
ECOSOC must continue to deploy the tools it has to recover vigorously from the pandemic. This includes promoting effective measures to ensure the efforts we undertake are free from corruption, waste, and abuse by implementing our existing international anticorruption obligations and commitments. Advancing best practices in business ethics, combating kleptocracy and foreign bribery, and increasing transparency in beneficial ownership information is also key.
In this, we must support the role non-government stakeholders play in promoting transparency and anticorruption efforts, including by providing them with a safe and open operating environment. We welcome further participation of non-governmental organizations, civil society, and the private sector in the activities of ECOSOC and its functional commissions to help them more effectively and efficiently achieve their mandates.
As we face the pandemic and move forward together as a global community, the United States remains committed to partnership with all countries in special situations to ensure those most vulnerable among us are not left behind.
