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Copenhagen Consensus is a Danish project which seeks to establish
priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived [1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg and the rest of the Institute for Environmental
Assessment, funded largely by the Danish
government, and co-sponsored by The Economist.
The participants are all economists, with the focus of the project being a rational prioritization based on economic analysis.
In spite of the billions of dollars spent on global challenges, by the United Nations, the governments of wealthy
nations, foundations, charities, and non-governmental
organizations, the money spent on problems such as malnutrition and
climate change is not enough. The World Bank estimates that the UN's Millennium Development Goals would cost per year an additional $40-$70
billion on top of the $57 billion already spent annually as of 2004 [2] ; this increased expenditure
would have to continue each year until 2015 in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
The emphasis on "rational priorization" is both a recognition that the funds provided for global challenges will remain
insufficient, and a belief by the organizers that media attention and the
"court of public opinion" results in priorities that are sometimes arbitrary and/or sentimental.
Process
The process used by the project depends heavily on the expertise of reputable economists to evaluate the costs and benefits of
targeting the ten major global challenges initially chosen by the project. Nine economists, including four Nobel Prize winners, met May 24 - May 28, 2004 at a roundtable in Copenhagen. Ten
scientific articles were prepared by other economic experts, one on each of the ten challenges. Each article summarizes current
knowledge about one of the challenges, identifies from three to five opportunities to solve or ameliorate the problem, and
contains cost and benefits information related to the challenge. For each article, two critiques are written by other reputable
economists, in an attempt to achieve a balanced perspective. At closed-door sessions the experts reviewed the articles and the
critiques, and produced a ranking based on applied welfare economics of the 30-50 opportunities listed in the articles.
Experts
Nobel Prize winners marked with (€)
- Jagdish Bhagwati
- Robert Fogel (€)
- Bruno Frey
- James Heckman (€)
- Justin Yifu Lin
- Douglass North (€)
- Thomas Schelling
- Vernon L. Smith (€)
- Nancy Stokey
Challenges
The author of the primary article about each challenge is also listed
The experts started with ten challenges and several "opportunities" within each:
Preventing spread of HIV
The experts ended up rating seventeen of the opportunities within seven of the ten challenges. Projects were rated in 4
groups: Very Good, Good, Fair and Bad
Very Good They assigned the highest priority to implementing certain new measures to prevent the spread of
HIV and AIDS. They estimated that an investment of $27
billion could avert nearly 30 million new incidents of infection by 2010.
Policies to reduce malnutrition and hunger were chosen as the second priority. Increasing the availability of micronutrients, particularly reducing
iron deficiency anemia through dietary supplements, has an exceptionally high ratio of benefits to
costs, which were estimated to be $12 billion.
Control malaria
Third on the list was trade liberalization; unlike the top two priorities,
lives are not at risk, but the experts agreed that this challenge's modest costs yielded large benefits both for the world as a
whole and for developing nations.
The fourth priority is to control and treat malaria; $13 billion produces very
good benefits for the cost, particularly if applied toward chemically-treated mosquito netting for beds. [3]
Good The fifth priority is increased spending on research into new agricultural technologies appropriate for developing nations. Three
proposals for improving sanitation and water quality for a billion of the world’s poorest followed in priority (ranked 6 to
8: small-scale water technology for livelihoods, community-managed water supply and sanitation, and research on water
productivity in food production). Closing this group was the project concerned with goverment - lowering the cost of starting new
business.
Fair Number 10 was migration project on lowering barriers to migration for skilled workers. Eleven and twelefe
were malnutrition projects - improving infant and child nutrition and reducing the prevalence of low birth weight. Number 12 was
the scaled-up basic health services project for fighting the diseases.
Poor Numbers 14-17 contained migrations project (guest-worker
programmes for the unskilled), which was deemed to discourage integration, and climate change projects (optimal carbon tax, the
Kyoto protocol and value-at-risk carbon
tax), which the panel judget to be least cost-efficient of the judged proposals.
See also
External links
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