Inputs to the Outcome Document

Remittances and diaspora investments are a major source of external private finance crucial for achieving SDGs, but their full potential remains largely untapped. Member States should acknowledge their potential and renew and expand their commitments to maximize their impact to development, ensuring access to formal, affordable, and secure remittance services through supportive regulations, improved payment systems, digital solutions, and promoting financial inclusion for both migrants and their families back home. At the same time, Member States should facilitate and support diaspora investments to homeland SMEs by creating diaspora engagement strategies and supportive environments, capacity-building for diaspora members, involve them in policy development, remove investment barriers, and provide adequate mechanisms to crowd in their investment.

This brief focuses on the importance of strengthening financial regulations that can accelerate private financing towards the Sustainable Development Goals in the Asia-Pacific region. The brief puts forward actions to deepen banking and capital markets in Asia and the Pacific, as well as outlines a new approach that combines concessional and private finance in the least developed countries in Asia and the Pacific.

This policy brief highlights the challenges faced by Asia-Pacific developing economies, in particular LDCs, in tapping the potential of digital trade opportunities to finance sustainable development and discusses some potential policy solutions. It focuses on promoting domestic resource mobilization, fostering international cooperation, and supporting LDCs to participate in digital trade. The key recommendations include closing the digital divide, establishing coordinated digital tax frameworks, strengthening regulatory cooperation, and building digital-trade capacity for MSMEs and marginalized groups.

This brief focuses on the importance of strengthening the coherence and consistency of the international development system with respect to financing sustainable development and climate ambitions. It highlights the fragmented approaches to financing currently prevalent and underscores the need to integrate international commitments regarding sustainable development and climate ambitions with national investment planning and financing processes. A similar integrated approach is called for at the global level as well.