The Present Value of Future Generations: Prioritizing Public Spending for Sustainable Development

Purpose: The purpose of this work is to explore how global public finance prioritization, looking especially at global military spending and defense budgets, in search for a more efficient approach to better deal with the opportunity costs between defense and development. Changing the status quo and business-as-usual approaches to public spending can guarantee resources are re-directed to successfully achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. The underlying question on how we are going to finance sustainable development still remains. ‘Status quo’ and ‘business-as-usual’ approaches have called the SDGs as an ambitious to-do-list that will be practically unachievable. The main argument behind this approach: the SDGs are too many, too ambitious, and more importantly too expensive to be achieved by the year 2030. This works aims to show evidence that financing the SDGs boils down to proper spending prioritization. There is a funneling of the required 90 billion USD per year from the public sector in order to achieve the UN Agenda 2030. While we as humanity seem to agree on ‘the what’ needs to be done, by agreeing on SDGs agreed by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, there is still a big question mark on ‘the how’ are we to implement the sustainable development agenda. This work shows an original answer to this question.