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Preliminary Benefit-Cost Assessment for 11th Session OWG Goals

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Preliminary Benefit-Cost Assessment for 11th Session OWG Goals

In a world of limited resources, we can’t do everything, so which goals should we prioritize? The Copenhagen Consensus Center provides information on which targets will do the most social good (measured in dollars, but also incorporating e.g. welfare, health and environmental protection), relative to their costs. Some of the world’s top economists have assessed the targets from the 11th session Open Working Group document into one of five categories, based on economic evidence:

• PHENOMENAL – Robust evidence for benefits more than 15 times higher than costs

• GOOD – Robust evidence of benefits between 5 to 15 times higher than costs

• FAIR – Robust evidence of benefits between 1 to 5 times higher than costs

• POOR – The benefits are smaller than costs or target poorly specified (e.g. internally inconsistent, incentivizes wrong activity)

• UNCERTAIN – There is not enough knowledge of the policy options that could reach the target OR the costs and benefits of the actions to reach the target are not well known

Just think: if we could prioritize a goal that saves 10 lives for every $250,000 spent, over another goal that saves 1 life for the same amount, we could do billions of dollars more good over the next 15 years!

The assessments were put together by interviewing 16 of the world’s top economists in their respective fields. They were asked to consider the economic costs and benefits associated with the strategies that would be available to implement the targets. As much as possible non-economic considerations such as rights based arguments and political considerations were ignored. This is not to imply that these other considerations are not important – only that the intention of this document is to focus purely on the costs and benefits. In many cases, the targets were not specific enough to assess a benefit and a cost, however we urged the economists to err on the side of providing a recommendation, even if it would not normally reach the very high confidence required of academic articles.

It should be noted that the benefits and costs do NOT solely reflect money. In line with standard welfare economics principles, all benefits and costs have been considered (such as improved health, environmental impacts) – which have subsequently been converted into a dollar value.

Open PDF ... Copenhagen Concensus Center ... CCC_UN-MDG-new-proposals-analysis-preliminary.pdf'