Finance — Following the Money behind Global Development

Global development runs on money. RYB follows it from the UN down to a single city budget.
Follow the Money

Finance — Following the Money

Every Sustainable Development Goal eventually becomes a budget line. A target to end extreme poverty, protect a coastline, or fund girls’ education only moves from agreement to reality once someone decides where the money comes from, and where it goes. This section exists to follow that money, at three different altitudes: the global agreements that are supposed to fund the SDGs collectively, the country-level decisions that decide whether a nation gives more than it takes, and the city-level choices about a single budget, a single arts grant, a single Voluntary Local Review.

RYB calls this section “Follow the Money” for a reason. The Sustainable Development Goals are sometimes presented as a matter of political will alone. They are equally, and perhaps more often, a matter of financial architecture: who collects tax, who avoids it, who lends, who is owed, and who decides.

Finance, Money

The Global Layer — How the System Is Supposed to Be Funded

At the top sits the question of how 193 countries are meant to finance seventeen shared goals at once, and soon, if MONDIACULT 2025 and the Culture2030Goal campaign succeed, an eighteenth. Two ongoing global processes shape that answer directly.

The UN Tax Convention, formally the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, is the first attempt to negotiate global tax rules with every UN member state at the table, rather than the smaller, OECD-led group that has set the rules until now. Developing countries see it as a chance to recover revenue currently lost to profit shifting; several wealthy countries, including the US and UK, have voted against the process itself. Whichever way it resolves between now and 2027, the outcome will shape how much money is even available to fund the SDGs going forward.

Underneath that sits Tax Havens and the Offshore World, the practical machinery the Convention is trying to address. Independent researchers estimate that hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue disappear into offshore structures every year, money that would otherwise be available for exactly the public services the SDGs are meant to expand. RYB’s Financial Secrecy page tracks which jurisdictions enable this most, using the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index, ranked by real-world impact rather than by reputation.

Poverty and Corruption sit at the receiving end of this same global picture. Both pages carry a deliberate second perspective: the standard story of why poverty and corruption persist is not the only one, and economists like Jason Hickel have argued that the financial architecture built by wealthy nations bears at least as much responsibility as anything happening inside the countries usually blamed.

The Country Layer — Scoring a Nation’s Own Behaviour

One level down, RYB’s country pages put a number on how an individual nation is doing, and increasingly, on how that nation’s wealth affects everyone else’s chances too.

The SDG Index Score, published annually in the Sustainable Development Report, ranks how close a country is to its own 2030 targets. RYB’s SDGs Finland and SDGs Netherlands pages track this score directly, alongside the separate Europe Sustainable Development Report’s regional comparison, and explain why the same country can show two different scores on two different reports built with two different methodologies.

A second, less publicised number tells a sharper story: the Spillover Score, which measures whether a country’s own economic behaviour helps or harms other countries’ ability to reach the SDGs. A country can rank near the top of the world on its own SDG Index and simultaneously rank red on Corporate Tax Haven status and on profits shifted in by multinationals, as the Netherlands does. RYB’s Dutch Finance page is the clearest example on this site of what that combination looks like once it is laid out plainly: a country that can be a genuine SDG leader at home and a genuine obstacle to the SDGs abroad, in the same year, in the same report.

National aid policy lives at this same altitude. Governments decide every budget cycle how much development assistance to give, to whom, and under what political conditions, and those decisions move fast enough that a country page can look outdated within a single change of government. The Netherlands cut civil society development funding by more than 70% under one cabinet and is now attempting, under a different coalition, to reinvest in some of what was cut. Tracking that kind of reversal, honestly and as it happens, is exactly the work RYB’s country finance pages are built to do.

The City Layer — Where the Money Actually Lands

The third altitude is the one most global development writing skips entirely, and the one RYB cares about most directly: a single city’s budget, and what it chooses to fund.

This is where Voluntary Local Reviews belong. A VLR is a city’s own attempt to measure its SDG progress, often researched by a local university, often covering only a handful of the seventeen goals rather than all of them. RYB’s SDGs Netherlands page goes into Amsterdam’s 2022 VLR in detail, the first produced by any Dutch municipality, and into The Hague’s separate, earlier inclusion in international research connecting culture specifically to local SDG reporting.

City-level finance also means something more immediate: which budget line survives a round of cuts. Arts and culture funding, and funding for women’s organisations, are reliably among the first casualties when any government, national or municipal, decides to spend less. RYB’s own work sits close to both categories, which is part of why this section exists. Tracking a city’s arts budget, its support for a Culture Women’s Day initiative, or its appetite for a concept like Amsterdam Creative City for a Culture of Peace, is a finance question as much as a cultural one. A city cannot fund a Culture of Peace pilot with a budget it does not have, and it will not have one without first deciding that culture deserves a line item at all.

Beyond Tax and Aid — Money’s Other Frontiers

Not every page in this section is about the SDGs directly, and that is intentional. CBDCs, Crypto, NFTs, Inflation, and Universal Basic Income track where money itself is changing shape, questions that will eventually intersect with development finance even where they do not yet. A central bank digital currency or a universal basic income pilot is, at root, still a question of who controls money and who benefits from how it moves, the same question running through every other page in this section.

Looking Forward

A goal without a funding mechanism is a wish. RYB’s Finance section exists to keep that distinction visible across every level where it matters: the global tax rules still being negotiated, the country scores that hide as much as they reveal, and the city budgets where a Culture of Peace either gets a line item or it does not. As the Culture Goal moves from MONDIACULT proposal toward whatever the post-2030 agenda actually becomes, its success will be decided here, in exactly these pages, before it is decided anywhere else.

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