This chapter studies the feasibility of the SDGs to improve our understanding of the empirical link between government expenditure and development outcomes. First, we explain the strategy to produce prospective (counterfactual or otherwise) analyses with the computational model and two metrics to evaluate advances in development gaps. Second, we present simulation results showing the development gaps by 2030 when the historical budget, in real terms, is preserved during the remaining years of the current decade. Third, we conduct sensitivity analyses that involve changes in the overall budget size that modify the value observed at the historical period used for calibration. Fourth, we present some reflections on the results.

This chapter analyses the connections between public funding, the rule of law, and multidimensional development. First, via simulation, we document a negative relationship between the budget size and the proportion of embezzled resources (or wasted resources due to inefficiencies). Second, our result suggests that reallocating public funds from other issues to programmes associated with the rule of law can mitigate corruption up to a certain point. Third, we find that the worse the country’s performance, the easier to remain in a development trap, as it becomes more cumbersome to realise a successful allocation profile (i.e., to decipher the proper mix of rule-of-law funding and overall budget size).

This chapter provides the reader with three reflections about the Policy Priority Inference research programme and its potential to make a difference in the real world. First, we synthesise the results found throughout the book and their implications for sustainable development. Second, we elaborate on systematic guidelines for deriving policies from the various analyses presented throughout the book. Third, we discuss the technical capabilities needed to adopt this toolkit and advocate for the training of computational social scientists.

This chapter presents a cutting-edge study of multidimensional poverty since it fully exploits highly granular data on expenditure (government programmes) matched with social development indicators. First, we explore how economic well-being and various socioeconomic rights, in Mexico, have benefited from domestic income and remittances of households located in the deciles 1 to 5 of the income distribution. Second, we analyse the degree of substitutability of remittances (or personal income in general) vis-à-vis spending on social programmes.

This chapter identifies accelerators and bottlenecks by estimating indirect budgetary effects at a systemic level (i.e., with the help of a network of interdependencies). First, we provide algorithms for the detection of bottlenecks and accelerators. We identify an accelerator by performing counterfactual expenditure increments on a particular policy issue while leaving the remaining ones with their original budgets. Then, a policy can be conceived as a systemic bottleneck when the removal of funding indirectly hinders the performance of other policy issues. Second, with Mexican data on 76 SDG targets, we identify 20 systemic bottlenecks and 33 accelerators. Third, we find that there does not exist a significant correlation between clogging/acceleration potential and naïve conjectures to promote development systemically (budget sizes and network centrality).

This chapter investigates how federal transfers can boost subnational development. We analyse the case of Mexico and its 32 federal states. For this, we assemble a balanced dataset with 103 social, economic, and environmental indicators for each state. First, we study how federal transfers impacted state-level development during the sample period. Second, we analyse how changes in the distribution of transfers across states affect the indicators’ average evolution when attempting to foster all SDGs or each of them. We find that ‘fiscal contributions’ – a particular form of government transfers aimed at equalising regional disparities – exert an average impact on SDGs of around 25%–45%. Likewise, our simulations indicate that it is possible to achieve substantial impact gains when using an ‘optimal fiscal transfer’ to allocate the total federal transfers across SCGs.

This chapter introduces the reader to the public datasets that we employ in most of the applications developed in the book. This information is our main input to provide a worldwide view of the state of sustainable development and how it responds to government expenditure. In light of this global database on development indicators, we also describe the most popular analytic tools and their limitations. Finally, we reflect on the main empirical challenges that researchers face when studying sustainable development with these data and motivate the methodological proposal of the book.

Devices, gadgets and everyday things might be the most obvious tangible entities of Mundania. Present technology. Perceivable and touchable. But what does it mean that something is tangible, and for whom and when is it tangible or graspable? How can different aspects of technologies be controlled in Mundania, and by whom? What do different people have to know about the technologies they live with? What can they know? The aim of this chapter is to approach these questions by closely engaging with some of the devices, materials and details of Mundania, and to start thinking about how they often seem to vanish.

Hands-on

To grasp something is to gain control, to have it at hand. To notice, comprehend and get in touch with it. To engage with processes, relations and devices (Dahlgren and Hill 2022). There are power dynamics at play here. Who can grasp what, who or what is under influence, and what do different people come to grips with? What does it mean that something is hands-on in a society permeated by complex technologies?

Many societies of the early 2020s are built on vast interconnected technological and organizational systems. Large-scale systems are furthermore built of miniscule components that are impossible to notice or adjust without advanced instruments. Top-secret facilities like data centres and connection points, housing a plethora of interconnected infinitesimal components.

The technologies of Mundania are ungraspable due to scale. Too large or too small. They are also ungraspable due to spatial or conceptual perimeter control. Many sites and whereabouts are secret, shielded and fenced off. The assemblages of technologies are huge and microscopic, distant but also close. When close and at hand, often also boxed in, sheltered and shielded. ‘Warranty void if seal is broken.’

Even though much of the world of advanced digital technologies is out of grasp, the word ‘digital’ pertains to something utterly concrete and human, namely fingers. Digital comes from digitus, the Latin word for finger. Throughout history, the fingers of a human have often been used for counting, and early calculating devices like abacuses are used with fingers. Devices for calculation operated by fingers are early and graspable forebears of today's systems of computation.

vbLarge-scale distributed technological systems extend beyond, and they are in the atmosphere, like a fog or like mist. This is all built on multiple layers and arrangements of infrastructure. Technologies of various age, installed for various reasons and with various purposes, are combined. Older constructions and systems influence the way newer systems are built and organized. Infrastructures are hidden beneath streets and floors, inside walls and away from sight. The word ‘infra’ in ‘infrastructures’ is Latin and means below, under or beneath. Spatially, infrastructures are, of course, not always below, but they are often persistently staying under the threshold of attention. Under, infra, sub. Subliminal.

Infrastructures

Sometimes infrastructures are visible. Intentionally showcased. Large factories, constructions and facilities built to function, but also built to impress (Nye 1996; Willim 2005b). Think again about the TV towers in the middle of cities, broadcasting buildings, huge power plants or enormous data centres (Ericson and Riegert 2010). Some of these are prominently visible. Anchor points. Parts of corporations and organizations, as well as parts of infrastructures. Even if these structures may be colossal, they are merely small parts of the systems. Like beacons along wide-ranging routes and networks. Water towers looking like mushrooms, visible fruiting bodies revealing that beneath there are enormously vast mycelium-like, rhizomatic systems of pipes, tubes and ducts. Our societies are full of similar fruiting bodies. Beneath, larger structures are hidden.

Despite these exposed buildings, infrastructures are often not considered. Mostly they are below the threshold of attention for most people. Sometimes they appear as cables and connectors that surface from below (Starosielski 2015). Sometimes they appear as enigmatic constructions, sometimes as points to engage with. Microphones, screens, buttons or maybe small, symmetrically organized holes in walls and sockets, tempting people to insert equipment, to connect and to charge. These are minute yet important points of engagement. Noticeable. Something people might look for. Once again like fruiting bodies, only smaller ones, that capture the attention of mushroom pickers. But the workings, the rhizomatic arrangements past these points are often overlooked and out of reach.