In 2015, the Member States of the United Nations (UN) adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Devised as an agenda for global sustainable development, the SDGs reflect the commitment of stakeholders to eradicate poverty, respect human rights, empower women and girls, and bring prosperity and peace, while tackling climate change and working to preserve oceans and forests.

The private sector has a significant role to play in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), along with other stakeholders. Firms are well placed to contribute to social goods by inventing new products, reducing negative externalities and by being channels for positive cross-border impacts.

This chapter is an introduction to this book and sets out the motivation. It briefly introduces the role of firms in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly through their core business and the expected role of industrial policies to foster the contribution of business activities to the attainment of SDGs.

This chapter explores the contribution of the business sector to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through three different angles. First, it reviews the academic literature on the role of firms in the provision of social goods, and their incentives to engage in such investments. Second, it gathers and describes examples of firms’ actions related to the SDGs. Finally, it presents evidence on firms’ prioritisation, actions and planning related to SDGs using the United Nations Global Compact survey data.

This chapter presents a novel methodology to measure the share of the private sector engaged in the production of goods or services that are related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It relies on a mapping between sectoral and product classifications at a granular level and the 17 SDGs, based on a natural language processing/machine learning algorithm. This chapter also provides a complete view of the SDGs which can be linked to firms’ activities, either to their core business or non-core business activities.

This chapter showcases how combining indicators from the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output tables and Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG can be used to draw insights on cross-border impacts of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-related business activities. The chapter focuses on four SDG indicators: manufacturing value added; medium- and high-tech industry value added; research and development expenditures; and agriculture and food processing industry value added.

This chapter uses a policy benchmarking exercise in a sample of seven countries and the European Union to better understand the current policies that governments are implementing to target the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It focuses on three main types of instruments, namely rewards and incentives; government assistance; and mandatory compliance. These instruments are then classified by target SDGs to shed light on the policy mix by SDGs.

Building on the results of previous chapters, this chapter provides policy recommendations on the design of industrial policies for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aimed to increase the private sector’s contribution to the SDGs through firms’ core business activities. It studies the right policy mix between rewards and incentives, government assistance and mandatory compliance instruments, the importance of targeting small firms, new entrants and innovative firms and the design of industrial strategies for the SDGs.