Economic and Social Goals

5 Key excerpts on "Economic and Social Goals"

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  Improving the Sustainable Development Goals

  Strategies and the Governance Challenge

  • Lars Niklasson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These goals are more focussed on ends than on means, especially in comparison to the goals on the economic dimension. This means that they state a number of concerns but add only a little in terms of how to achieve them. Some examples of means are food production and government planning. This, in turn, makes it reasonable to think of the economic goals as means to achieve the social goals. A main problem is to find the financial means to pay for social services and basic investments. At the same time, the social goals include means to achieve some of the economic goals – for example, in the form of education and skills development (“human capital”) needed for advanced production.

  Economic growth is a way to create resources which can be used to pay for education and health care, etc. Several goals talk about resource mobilization, but the more specific issue of domestic taxes is almost not addressed at all. It is most explicitly stated in goal 17 (below).

  The environmental dimension

  There are four goals which relate to traditional environmental concerns: goals 12–15. There are links from some of the other goals to environmental issues, as indicated earlier. I will come back to how these goals relate to the Economic and Social Goals, if the environmental goals are limits on the others and if the others contribute to or hinder the fulfilment of the environmental goals.

  Goal 12: responsible production and consumption

  The aim of goal 12 is to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. It is a bridge between the economic and environmental issues. It formulates key aspects of sustainable development by placing limitations on consumption and production, which are the two fundamental dimensions of the economy.

  Target 12.1 states the general goal of working with these issues and asks the developed countries to take the lead, “taking into account the development and capabilities of developing countries”. Target 12.2 specifies what this should lead to – i.e. to “achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources”.

  The following targets add goals on waste management (target 12.3), waste generation (target 12.5) and a concern with “environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes” (target 12.4). Target 12.6 relates to businesses and target 12.7 to public procurement.

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  Economic Models for Policy Making

  Principles and Designs Revisited

  • Solomon Cohen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

    4Social Economic Development Goals in Economy-Wide Policy Models An Application to Korea 1 Background

  In the early decades of development economics, mainly in the fifties and sixties, economic development was analysed and planned in terms of economic growth. The central development objective was the growth of GDP, and sometimes GDP per capita. Empirical data on the actual performances in most developing countries gave a different picture, showing increasing income inequalities, more population groups falling behind poverty lines, increasing underemployment and unemployment, and deteriorating food and other living conditions. The new picture brought a revision in interests and insights by economists and planners dealing with development problems. One of the reactions that emerged was the social economic development perspective, which saw the misplaced focus on GDP as the fault in the planning framework, and they went for reformulating development models and plans in terms of broader social economic development goals.

  In spite of the accelerated interest in a social economic development perspective there were no attempts made to put up an operational framework that would unify new goals in the development planning models that were commonly used at the time. There was a flood of definitions and concepts on basic needs, social indicators, social aims, and so on, but most of them were dispersed and not accessible in economic models. Our contribution in this area was to broaden the scope of policy modelling and planning practices towards the social economic development perspective. This chapter formulates and applies a social economic development model that supplements GDP growth with income and employment variables belonging to social groups, and indictors on attainment of wellbeing, and it extends the scope of policy instruments and other relationships accordingly. Primarily for reasons of data availability, the Republic of Korea was selected as a test case. The model was estimated on the basis of data for the sixties and was employed to simulate development up to the early eighties. Interestingly, the empirical applications around 1970 showed positive and coherent future performances for Korea on its GDP, distribution, employment, and basic needs attainment for the seventies and early eighties; these outcomes were also confirmed by the realised development performance of Korea years later.

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  Microeconomics in Context

  • Neva Goodwin, Jonathan M. Harris, Julie A. Nelson, Pratistha Joshi Rajkarnikar, Brian Roach, Mariano Torras(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Here we cannot avoid some normative judgments, as people may disagree about what constitutes well-being. But we can identify some general goals that are widely accepted as desirable. In Table 1.1, we present one possible list of the final goals of economic activity, summarizing the reflection of a number of thinkers but not attempting to represent a final consensus. The first five goals on the list are primarily individual concerns while the last five are more related to social concerns. Some of the goals involve making life possible, some involve making life worthwhile, and yet others involve both types of goals

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  Corporate Governance and Directors' Liabilities

  Legal, Economic and Sociological Analyses on Corporate Social Responsibility

  • Klaus J. Hopt, Gunther Teubner, Klaus J. Hopt, Gunther Teubner(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Is one justified in generalizing the statement that formal goals, whether those of utility (on the side of consumer) or profits (on the side of the producer, however the rights may be specified) serve as means for an un-limited plurality of concrete material and immaterial goals [or wealth (on the side of society)]. The formal character of a homogeneous goal is a necessary condition for a possible plurality of concrete material and immaterial heterogeneous goals. It follows that challenging the profit-goal itself would be the wrong strategy for increasing social responsibility. Such a strategy would decrease the degree of a societal system's social responsiveness. In conclusion, a formal goal as a goal neutral to persons, things and exchangeable is a functional necessity for formal and neutral mechanisms of exchange and formal and neutral procedures which fix the relative value of exchangeable goods (Luhmann, 1974) and the aggregation of these within a common framework. b) Social Goals Called Economic Goals In general, economic goals are social goals, they are deeply rooted in human nature and in the social existence of human beings. So-called economic goals are means for social ends. Economic material and immaterial goods and services contribute to the satisfaction of human needs and, what is more, these needs emanate from societal states of relative scarcity, from societal norms and values which include the norms of a capitalist economic culture. One reason for calling a certain class of social goods economic goods might be found in their relative scarcity. Unfortunately, until now it has been accepted that all things which belong to our social existence can be characterized as being relatively scarce. The only remaining reason for label-ing a certain class of social goods economic goods can be related to the fact that their production and distribution consumes natural and human resources in abundance and takes relatively much time. The exclusive nature

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  Reclaiming Social Policy

  Globalization, Social Exclusion and New Poverty Reduction Strategies

  • Kenneth A. Loparo, Arjan de Haan(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Integrating Social and Economic Policies 58 While economic growth is essential for sustainable poverty reduction, economic growth in itself is not enough. The reasons for this are manifold, even if we restrict ourselves to a narrow income-based definition of poverty: the figures on the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction are averages, the deviations from these averages are large, and inequalities are important and in many cases rising. Moreover, and a core concern in this chapter, economic growth is the result of a range of public policies and private actions. Many economic policies have been shown to impact distribution – or are perceived to do so, which may be equally important for public policy-making. On the other hand, social policies impact both growth and distribution. This chapter describes the relationship between social and economic policies, and social or human development outcomes and economic growth. The chapter first provides conceptual grounding for this debate, particularly the different ways in which the distinction and integration of the social and economic have been conceptualized, including the debate on whether social policy is merely a correction of malfunctions in the economy or proactive intervention shaping those institutions. This is followed by a discussion of the role of the state and a description of public funding trends, which underlies many of the questions around links between public policies, particularly regarding the potential negative impact of a large state sector and the ‘crowding-out’ of private transfers. The following sections describe some of the interactions between ‘the social’ and ‘the economic’: the importance of health, nutrition and edu- cation for economic growth, the importance of vulnerability and the role of social security spending, while the last section describes the recently re-emerged question of redistribution, and the importance of social inclu- sion for economic growth.

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