Sustainable development goal diagnostics : the case of the Arab Republic of Egypt

The United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are comprehensive and holistic in nature, encompassing 17 goals and 169 targets covering economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development. Countries face the challenge of translating the Sustainable Development Goals into feasible and realistic development plans. This paper provides a simple analytical framework to assist countries in prioritizing across competing Sustainable Development Goals and evaluating data availability to monitor them. The paper offers an analysis of potential financial resources that can be used to finance the investments needed to implement the 2030 Agenda. It uses cross-country regressions of the Sustainable Development Goals to benchmark a country's current outcomes against those of other countries, given levels of gross national income per capita, and projects its levels in 2030 if a statistically significant relationship exists with gross national income per capita. The paper applies the framework to the Arab Republic of Egypt and as such, summarizes Egypt's progress on the Sustainable Development Goals since 2000 and projects expected values for the attainment of future targets by 2030; (b) provides an assessment of Egypt's current capacity to produce the data needed to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals, and (c) assesses options for increasing financing for development. Finally, the paper compares Egypt's economic condition and trends with those of its peers, the Republic Korea and Poland.