Worker on a farm in Felicity, Chaguanas, Trinidad, harvesting sweet potatoes. Climate change has brought drastic changes in the weather of this twin-island Caribbean nation. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Bjorn Lomborg
COPENHAGEN, Feb 13 2015 (IPS)

Right now, the United Nations is negotiating one of the world’s potentially most powerful policy documents. It can influence trillions of dollars, pull hundreds of millions out of poverty and hunger, reduce violence and improve education — essentially make the world a better place. But much depends on this being done well.

In the year 2000, the U.N. laid the foundation for the Millennium Development Goals, which comprised 21 mostly sharp and achievable targets in eight areas, including poverty and hunger, gender equality, education, and child and maternal health.Imagine sitting in a high-end restaurant with a menu lacking prices or sizes. You do not know whether the pizza costs two dollars or 2,000 dollars, or whether it will feed just you or your entire party.

These goals have been hugely successful, not only in driving more development funding but also in making the world better. For instance, the world promised to halve the proportion of people hungry counting from 1990. And the progress has been remarkable.

In 1990, almost 24 percent of all people in the developing world were starving. In 2012, ‘only’ 14.5 percent were starving, and if current trends continue, the world will reach 12.2 percent in 2015, just shy of the halving at 11.9 percent.

Likewise, we promised to cut by half the proportion of poor. In 1990, 43 percent of the developing world lived below a dollar a day. In 2010, the proportion had already been more than halved at 20.6 percent – on current trends the proportion will drop below 15 percent by 2015, showing spectacular progress.

With the MDGs ending this year, we have to ask what’s next. The U.N. has started an inclusive process from the 2012 Rio Earth summit to define so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2016-2030.

So, over the coming months, countries, missions, U.N. organisations and NGOs will perform a complex dance to determine – and hopefully whittle down – the next set of targets. But that’s easier said than done. Last summer, 70 U.N. ambassadors in the open working group proposed a vertiginous 169 targets. Clearly we need priorities.

The SDGs will determine a large part of the 2.5 trillion dollars in development aid the world will spend until 2030. In order to spend the money most effectively and help as many people as possible, negotiators now need to zero in on the targets that promise the biggest benefit for the investment.

My think-tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, has asked 60 teams of top economists, including several Nobel laureates, to identify which targets will do the most good for each dollar spent. Imagine sitting in a high-end restaurant with a menu lacking prices or sizes. You do not know whether the pizza costs two dollars or 2,000 dollars, or whether it will feed just you or your entire party.

This is where the U.N. is today – lots of well-intentioned targets with no prices or sizes. Our economists have taken the 169 targets and evaluated the social costs and benefits of each.

The best ones – the targets that have economic, social and environmental benefits 15 times or higher their costs – are painted bright green. Less good ones are light green, mediocre ones yellow and the poor targets – the ones that cost more than the good they do – red. Backed by thousands of pages of peer reviewed economic research, such a simple colour scheme will hopefully help the world’s busy decision makers focus on picking the most effective targets.

Reducing malaria and tuberculosis, for example, is a phenomenal target. Its costs are small because solutions are simple, cheap and well-documented. Its benefits are large, not only because it avoids death and prolonged, agonizing sickness, but also improves societal productivity and initiates a virtuous circle.

Similarly, we should focus on at least halving malnutrition, because there is robust evidence that proper nutrition for young children leads to a lifetime of large benefits – better brain development, improved academic performance, and ultimately higher productivity as adults. For every dollar spent, future generations will receive at least 45 dollars in benefits.

But at what point do goals simply become aspirations? While many ambitious goals are commendable, they may be unrealistic in practice – and could hinder instead of help progress.

For example, setting an absolute goal of ending global malnutrition, warn the economists, may sound alluring, but is implausibly optimistic and inefficient. We cannot achieve it, and even if we could, the resources to help the last hungry person would be better spent elsewhere.

At the other end of the scale, some proposed targets are ineffective. The doubling of the renewable energy share by 2030, for example, sounds great in theory but practically is an expensive way to cut just a little CO₂. Instead, the focus should be on providing more energy to poor people, a proven way of inclusive growth and poverty alleviation.

And in order to reduce carbon emissions, removing fossil fuel subsidies in third world countries promises much higher benefits. Reducing these subsidies in countries where gasoline is sometimes sold for a few cents per liter would stop wasting resources, send the right price signals, and reduce the strain on government budgets, while also cutting emissions.

Of course, the ultimate decision for the Sustainable Development Goals is a political one. No doubt, economics is not the only measure of what the global society should ultimately choose as its development priorities, but costs and benefits do play an important role.

But if well-documented economic arguments can help even just to swap a few poor targets for a few phenomenal ones, leveraging trillions of dollars in development aid and government budgets in the right direction, even small adjustments can make a world of difference.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Residents of Clara Town, a low-income neighbourhood of Monrovia, Liberia. Clean water and adequate sanitation remain major problems for billions in the developing world. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS

By Jonathan Rozen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 2014 (IPS)

How will the U.N. prioritise the goals of its Post-2015 Development Agenda? Which goals deserve more funding? And which goals will help the most people? These are the questions that the Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) seeks to answer.

“Right now the U.N. [Post-2015] process is a little bit like going into a very expensive restaurant, and you get this menu, but there are no prices. So you have no idea what you’re signing up for. You have no idea what’s really good and what’s not,” Bjorn Lomborg, president of the CCC, told IPS.“It means you have a sense of what it is you end up buying. What’s the bang for the buck?” -- Bjorn Lomborg

As the world moves beyond the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and into the Post-2015 Development Agenda, member states will need to decide which goals to focus on and the best way to approach these challenges. The current list contains about 1,400 goals, ranging from poverty eradication to disease mitigation.

“What we would like to do is take a look at all of these goals and say, well how much do they cost, how much are they going to do?” said Lomborg. “If money was of no concern we should be focusing on all of these goals, but we clearly don’t have enough money to deal with everything.”

In July 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed 27 leaders from civil society, governments and the private sector to the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Based on the panel’s analysis, the CCC has identified around 60 goals to be economically assessed.

The CCC is asking some of the world’s top economists to assess these goals based on how much money they will cost and the impact they will have.

“Were providing the price-tags for all these things,” Lomborg told IPS. “It means you have a sense of what it is you end up buying. What’s the bang for the buck?”

After the economists’ assessment, the results will be given to U.N. agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to provide further feedback, he explained. This information will then be presented to a panel of four Nobel laureates to be categorised into “bang-for-buck” value groups.

“I think this will help the conversation immensely, not just for member states, but for billions of people,” Lomborg stated.

Political challenges

The CCC recognises that choosing and prioritising goals for the Post-2015 Agenda is deeply influenced by political dynamics and national interests.

“At the end of the day, this is ultimately going to be a political decision made among a lot of different people, with a lot of different interests. But we see ourselves as giving tail wind to good ideas, and head wind to bad ideas,” Lomborg told IPS.

During a visit to New York, the CCC met with numerous U.N. member state missions and U.N. agencies. All of them expressed support for the CCC initiative.

“The economic angle is one important perspective, but there could be other criteria as well to determine what should or should not be the goals and target framework,” Peter van der Vliet, deputy permanent representative of the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the U.N., told IPS.

For initiatives aiming to make an impact on U.N. decisions, it is important to recognise that other factors will inevitably influence the formal results, noted Lomborg.

“We welcome this contribution from the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and remain confident that it, along with all ideas and similar initiatives from civil society stakeholders, will enrich the deliberations,” Amina Mohammed, the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning, told IPS.

While the CCC recognises that the numbers from their assessment will likely be “inconvenient” for some actors, and likely not the sole factor in determining actors’ priorities, they also believe that the financial costs of individual goals are important to think about.

“Economic evidence will help push off the good ideas and drag down the bad ideas, and the politics will inevitably also do some of this. But if we can push it in the right direction, that’s all you need,” said Lomborg.

The possible impact

While the magnitude of the Post-2015 Development Agenda brings many levels of complexity to the goal assessment process, it also means that the agenda has the ability to make a serious impact.

“The Post-2015 agenda, you could say, is this generation’s biggest opportunity,” said Lomborg. “This process could end up influencing 700 billion dollars of development aid and trillions of dollars in local resources spent by developing countries.”

For the CCC, because the Post-2015 Agenda is so large, that the impact of even slightly greater efficiency in the way funds are spent would make a serious difference.

“We’re trying to help people move a little bit towards a more rational, effective way of thinking about these issues,” Lomborg told IPS. “I think everybody would agree that there is a consensus on getting a little more information.”