Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals

outside a nation’s borders

given the unavoidable distortions of having to assume, first, that interventions at a given global scale encounter the same unit costs

But authors were also asked to place dollar-equivalent values on all benefits, so that users could compare global temperature targets with completion of the Doha round and coral reef preservation with reductions in maternal mortality.

when resources to improve the lives of the poor are scarce, how can we get these resources to go further – much further?

Calculations of the social return to schooling, for example, are often famously modest in the sense of including only the social costs of schooling and none of the spillover benefits that a vast and admittedly contentious literature has emphasized over the years –

Three key features shape these chapters and the resulting rankings sufficiently to warrant some general observations for nonspecialist readers. The first is the curse of diminishing returns.

MDG and SDG campaigns but curiously absent in the cost-benefit calculation we described earlier.

Also of note is the problematic fact that many targets aim for absolute goals

The final feature relates to distributional objectives, which are central to the