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

spillovers that range from lower fertility to higher civic engagement and from improvements in institutional quality to women’s empowerment and economy-wide innovation.

2015, the United Nations negotiated one of the world’s most powerful policy documents. Over 15 years, it will influence more than $2.5 trillion of development aid along with trillions from national budgets.

It is very difficult to know what exactly is promised, how governments should interpret it, let alone how it will be monitored or evaluated.

We can’t do it all. The cost of meeting all of the Sustainable Development Goals would be between USD$3.3 and $4.5 trillion annually according to the OECD,

properly monitoring all the targets of the Millennium Development Goals would have cost around $27bn.

everywhere in the world and, second, that these costs can be reasonably estimated using one or two well-designed impact assessments from particular times and places.

Prioritization is also needed to ensure that monitoring and evaluation is possible.

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 –

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