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

Saving the very last person from poverty or hunger is much more expensive than saving each of the first 30, 50, or 80 percent.

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.

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 –

Specifically, we have set low and high values of a DALY at $1,000 and $5,000,

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

These covered the eight key areas of poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, disease, the environment, and global partnership.

The Copenhagen Consensus approach has always been to look at important issues and to ask: how can economic analysis help us do the most good here?

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.

The second feature relates to the valuation of benefits. Within development agencies and governments, it is often sufficient to treat in-kind targets as given and focus on the search for cost-effective interventions.