On October 21, the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN gave an intervention before the Second Committee of the Seventy-First Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Agenda Item 17, dedicated to “Macroeconomic Policy Questions.”

In its statement, the Holy See applauded the increasing number of developing countries participating in the global economy, but noted the enormous challenges the Least Developed Countries face in order to participate meaningfully, especially because they are particularly vulnerable to downturns in commodity prices. The Holy See said that debt restructuring is an important part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and called for an in-depth ethical and juridical analysis of international credit systems. Discussions of the foreign debt of poor countries should be coupled to the ecological debt that wealthy economies have amassed toward underdeveloped economies and to the financial resources that developing countries need to mitigate and adapt to the Paris Agreement

The statement can be found here.