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The UN has outlined the four transformational themes for development in 2025: Women, Money, Artificial Intelligence, and Peace.

Our reporter Juliet Mann is in Davos and talks to Achim Steiner, the administrator of the UN Development Programme and asks how those were chosen.

#davos #un #china

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00:00Because they're emblematic for some of the greatest challenges we face at the moment.
00:03We still live in a world of great inequality, and particularly also between men and women,
00:09not being paid the same for the jobs they do, access to the kind of infrastructure that allows
00:14you to be a successful entrepreneur. Peace, on the other hand, because we live in a moment in
00:18time where we have more conflicts and more displaced people, whether refugees or internally
00:23displaced people, than at any point since 1945. Artificial intelligence because we are yet again
00:29at a point where technology can be a very transformative driver.
00:33What would you say are the key hurdles that might prevent you from reaching all of those goals?
00:40Maybe the simplest way to describe it is that we see a tendency at the moment where
00:44partly out of the uncertainty about the future, there is an increasing tendency to turn inwards.
00:50What used to be our neighbors are more often now our enemies. What used to be our partners
00:56are now our competitors. Yet we live in a 21st century global economy and also geopolitical
01:02reality where we depend on one another more than ever before, not just in philosophical terms,
01:07but actually very practical terms. COVID was a brutal reminder with the pandemic.
01:12Technology, we can have the most extraordinary digital economy and artificial intelligence,
01:17but if countries are not legislating and putting the right institutional
01:21capacities in place to deal with cybercrime, cyberterrorism, it could become
01:25an extraordinary threat to our safety. You recently made your first trip to China
01:30since the pandemic. China has led the world in poverty reduction over the past decade.
01:37So what did you take from your visit? I think, first of all, China has had to also
01:42make many short-term policy decisions to deal with the pandemic, the consequence of the pandemic,
01:47the shocks to international markets. And I think what was very interesting was to see how
01:53by the end of 2024, a series of these public policy measures had worked relatively well.
02:00And China's economy, again, achieved a 5% plus growth rate last year. So it is, in a sense,
02:07back on track from the point of view of having been severely disrupted.
02:11Perhaps beyond the extraordinary journey in terms of poverty eradication that China has
02:16accomplished over the last three to four decades, perhaps the most interesting thing
02:20to watch over the coming years is, is China perhaps one of the first economies in the world
02:25that has taken the green economy paradigm, these transitions and transformations,
02:30genuinely as the driver of the future economy of China?

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