Dynkin made the comment in an exclusive interview with IRNA, which was published on Saturday. He is a professor of economics and also the president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, an independent research institute based in Moscow.
He said that the UN Sustainable Development Goals for the period 2015-2030 will not be achieved, citing its already-proved failure in poverty, hunger, climate and inequality in the global South. He also referred to the latest UN Human Development Report, which notes “a new uncertainty complex has reached a scale unprecedented in human history".
The Russian expert believes that “the notion of sustainability, which implies equilibrium, does not sit well with the notion of development, which implies moving out of equilibrium".
Therefore, he argued, sustainable development has already turned out to be a failed concept which can be substituted with the concept of responsible development that “is based on the maximum possible use of renewable resources including intangible ones".
Dynkin said in his interview that the countries of BRICS – a bloc of emerging economies that include Russia, China and Iran, among others – “may well shape innovative approaches in the global agenda, including in the UN platform” and possesses both political and economic capacities to achieve the goal.
“In the economy, the BRICS countries are already playing a significant role in developing their own transport, logistics and financial infrastructures, food security and access to energy resources," he said, also referring to a recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that compared the gross domestic product (GDP) of BRICS with that of the group of seven major economies consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US, known as G7.
“The combined GDP of the BRICS-10 countries, according to April IMF PPP estimates, is already 7% higher than the combined GDP of the G7 countries.”
Based on the obvious trend of its increasing economic power, BRICS “is quite capable of promoting its own value-based political agenda”, the Russian academic said, adding that the bloc has already played a key role in forming what he called “political East” as an alternative to “political West” amid global efforts to create a multipolar world.
IRNA