This is a good news piece. Cambridge University Press has recently published the Copenhagen Consensus complete report as Global Crises, Global Solutions to make it easy to access all the data and analysis.
It will be obvious from the following that I think this is a serious and important effort to put the competing claims for our attention - on issues ranging from AIDS to Climate Change - into a useful framework for decision making. Naturally, every interest group trumpets the view that “my cause is the one cause”. But the first world does not have infinite resources. How can we rationally prioritize funding? What should we fight for when choosing leaders?
The project was jointly sponsored by Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The organizing concept was to winnow down a list of ten “global crisis” issues, then force-rank the allocation of a hypothetical US$50 billion to the most cost-effective policy options. The resulting options list came down to the following:
- Civil conflicts
- Climate change
- Communicable diseases
- Education
- Financial stability
- Governance
- Hunger and malnutrition
- Migration
- Trade reform
- Water and sanitation
Obviously a controversial list. E.g., why aren’t issues like fisheries management, women’s rights, etc in that list? Well, we’ve got to start somewhere with a small enough issue list to make some progress - perhaps Consensus 2005 will get into more of your favorite issues.
Briefly, the methodology is as follows:
Leading advocates for each issue are invited to submit Challenge Papers making their case.
For each issue, two critics are invited to submit their contras.
A panel of eight world-ranked economists then undertakes to evaluate each issue, on the basis of the submissions plus interviews, to arrive at an allocation of the $50B hypothetical budget. The economist panel was comprised of eight serious people, half being Nobel prize folk such as Jagdish Bhagwati (I’ve read enough of his work to reach the level of real respect).
OK, here’s the beef:
The Economist 3 Jun, 2004, Putting the World To Rights link will take you to eight more very useful Economist summary articles (all now require subscription):
Understanding the global “water crisis”
Migration and development
Feeding the hungry
Fighting corruption
The economics of climate change
The learning deficit
The price of peace
A remedy for financial turbulence?
The Copenhagen Consensus summary results are available as a PDF.
The parallel conference of Youth Forum results were very close to the economists panel conclusions, and are also available as a PDF.
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