Economic Notebook about Development

The Third International Conference on Financing for Development was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 13 to16 July 2015. The Conference was attended by 24 Heads of State and Government and Deputies, more than 100 Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation and Deputies and other high-ranking Government officials from 174 countries. The heads of major financial, trade and development institutions and senior representatives of United Nations agencies and other international organizations, as well as more than 600 civil society organizations and networks and more than 400 business sector representatives participated in the Conference. The preparations for the Conference included a series of substantive sessions and informal interactive hearings with representatives of civil society3 and the business sector4 during the period from October 2014 to April 2015, as well as drafting sessions and informal consultations from January to June 2015. In addition, the United Nations regional commissions held regional consultations on financing for development in March and April 2015. The outcomes of all those meetings served as inputs to the preparation of the draft outcome document of the Conference. If you are an unfamiliar visitor to an organization engaged in international development assistance and unsure of the reception you will receive, there is a surefire way to win over your hosts: tell them you believe that four key principles are crucial for development-accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion. Your hosts will almost certainly nod enthusiastically and declare that their organization in fact prioritizes these very concepts as key tools in the larger battle to eradicate extreme poverty and achieve sustained development. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Development Assistance Committee affirms that "there is growing consensus on the value of human rights principles- such as participation, non-discrimination and accountability-for good and sustainable development practice," and defines effective states as "those that . . . have open, transparent, accountable and inclusive political institutions. The simplest and most general definition of efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is that the stock prices always fully reflect all available information. Prices are in equilibrium, and only new information can disrupt this; price reactions on new information are instantaneous and correct. In other words, EMH states that prices are not predictable, since rational well-informed investors who properly anticipate the prices based on their knowledge generate randomly fluctuating prices.