Speech at the High-Level Event on Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond
Pandemic has challenged us all and revealed our strength and weaknesses.
For Georgia, a small country, and emerging economy, at the door of Europe, it has given us a number of important lessons:
- It has pinpointed the importance of professionalism and strong management both for dealing with the crisis and for our future economic development.
- It has shown the importance to preserve the core elements of democracy: transparency, proportionality and accountability have been maintained. Proving that democracies can effectively manage global challenges without renouncing their essence.
- It has also revealed and deepened the existing flaws in our economies, – increased inequalites and poverty, environmental and social costs not properly accounted - that need to be effectively answered.
- It has finally confirmed what we already knew about the risks of excessive dependency in the suply chains and the additional humanitarian costs that conflicts and occupation cause in a time of pandemic.
Looking at the future we know that we have to adapt and change
- In our approach to economy and growth by finding a new balance between growth and sustainability, between supporting individual skills and entrepreneurship and public support, between free trade and diversified partners. We are setting out on a strategy to develop safe tourism, new industries together with a green economy, based on the biodiversity we have to preserve.
Being a small and flexible, and historically resilient country, we have both the size and the resources to become a laboratory for testing new models. Global disruptions are opening new alleys for small countries to engage into production and enter supply chains
- At the same time we know that as a a small country will face more difficulties in accessing capital markets and attracting foreign investment necessary to support new investments and promote sustainable industries. We hoever innovative we cannot walk that road alone.
But this adaptation and rebalancing of our economies cannot be ours only, it has to be our common international endeavour. Those that predicted that the pandemic would lock us in a more egoist world have to be proven wrong. We need more solidarities at all levels:
We need more multilateralism not less, for cataclysms without borders can only bet met by solidarity without borders. The United Nations have to be in the driving seat for revamping multilateralism.
At the same time, we need more regional solidarities and as Georgia has been and will be looking towards a stronger Europe, encompassing its neighbours.
Multilateral assistance will have to find new instruments to support global economy as well as emerging economies, a new and comprehensive approach to the debt issues is needed , innovative financing that we have been supporting all along has to be defined now . Ideas of a global relief initiative, a new Marshall plan should be explored and supported for extraordinary times deserve extraordinary reactions.
Sustainable growth is no longer a choice for tomorrow. SDG’s are a necessity now. A necessity that our citizens, having lived through Covid, fully adhere to. We as governments have to lead in that direction.