This covers official development assistance (ODA), spending on peacekeeping forces, research into vaccines and agricultural research for foreign food staples, efforts to reduce regional and global environmental issues, like global warming, and attempts to create more efficient trading systems, tackling terrorism, tax avoidance, and corruption on a

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.

the Sustainable Development Goals would be between USD$3.3 and $4.5 trillion annually according to the OECD,37 while

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

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

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?

the method can support overconfident rankings between outcomes that are not easily compared and invite generalization across contexts that differ in unmeasured ways.

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