What do you get when you ask 8 economists, including 5 Nobel Prize winners, to rank solutions to 10 global problems, if they had $75 billion at their disposal? Eight different lists?
Not according to Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish business professor and author of the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The end product, he says, is a perfect cost–benefit analysis for improving the state of the planet.
Lomborg organizes the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded in 2002 to find cost-effective ways of advancing global welfare. The 2008 edition drew a panel of 8 renowned economists to Denmark, where they spent a week analyzing proposals for addressing 10 global challenges (Box 1). After considering the costs and benefits of the solutions, the panel ranked them according to desirability, awarding top spot to a proposal to combat malnutrition by supplying micronutrients to undernourished children.
Box 1.
It would cost $60 million a year to provide vitamin A capsules and zinc supplements to 140 million children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, according to Sue Horton, vice-president (academics) at Wilfred Laurier University, who presented the top proposal. The economic benefits from lower mortality and better health would total $1 billion, says Horton.
Five of the top 6 positions went to health initiatives. Using a cost–benefit analysis may be an effective way to improve global health, Horton says. “It's one thing to feel good about deworming children, but if at the same time you can show that you can save money in your education system or health system, those are strong arguments.”
Canada Research Chair of Health and Development Dr. Prabhat Jha, who heads the University of Toronto's Centre for Global Health Research, gave the session a mixed review. “I don't agree with all the conclusions, but it's an interesting exercise in getting different groups to see what are the best bets for the world.”
Prabhat hopes the project raises awareness of 3 causes he presented: raising tobacco taxes, providing low-cost drugs for heart attack victims, and improving surgical capacity at district hospitals in developing nations.
The panel should have more strongly stressed the importance of research and might have investigated how large countries allocate their foreign aid, he adds. “If you're shopping for the world and you're going down an aisle and looking for things to buy that will give the most benefits, you have to remember those products were placed on the shelf because of research and knowledge institutions. The Copenhagen Consensus didn't quite capture that.” — Roger Collier, CMAJ