Introduction

Major terrorist campaigns date back to the Jewish Zealots' struggle against the Roman Empire from 48 AD to 70 AD, the Hindu Thugs' brutal attacks against innocent travelers in India from 600 AD to 1836 AD, and the Assassins' actions against the Christian crusaders in the Middle East from 1090 AD to 1956 AD (Bloom, 2005; Rapoport, 1984). In fact, the Thugs may have murdered more than 800 people a year during their twelve-century existence (Hoffman, 2006, 82–83), making them twice as deadly on an annual basis as the modern era of terrorism (1968–2006). Some form of terrorism has characterized civilization for the last 2,000 years. Each of the two recent globalization periods has been associated with transnational terrorism that has international implications. In the earlier era of globalization starting in 1878 and ending in 1914, the anarchists waged a terrorist campaign that culminated in World War I. More recently, leftists and fundamentalists utilized transnational trrorism to capture headlines during the current era of globalization from the last third of the twentieth century to the present day.

During the modern era of transnational terrorism, terrorists crossed borders and, in some instances, staged incidents in foreign capitals to focus world attention on their cause or grievance.

The Goal of the Project

The goal of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 project was to set priorities among a series of proposals for confronting ten great global challenges: Air pollution, Conflicts, Diseases, Education, Global Warming, Malnutrition and Hunger, Sanitation and Water, Subsidies and Trade Barriers, Terrorism, and Women and Development.

Ranking the Proposals

A Panel of economic experts, comprising eight of the world's most distinguished economists, was invited to consider these issues. The Panel members were: Jagdish N. Bhagwati of Columbia University, Franois Bourguignon of Paris School of Economics and former World Bank chief economist, Finn E. Kydland of University of California, Santa Barbara (Nobel laureate), Robert Mundell of Columbia University in New York (Nobel laureate), Douglass C. North of Washington University in St. Louis (Nobel laureate), Thomas C. Schelling of University of Maryland (Nobel laureate), Vernon L. Smith of Chapman University (Nobel laureate), and Nancy L. Stokey of University of Chicago.

The Panel was asked to address the ten challenge areas and to answer the question: “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of the developing countries, illustrated by supposing that an additional $75 billion of resources were at their disposal over a four-year initial period?”

Ten Challenge papers, commissioned from acknowledged authorities in each area of policy (chapters 1–10 in this volume), set out more than thirty proposals for the Panel's consideration. During the week-long conference, the Panel examined these proposals in detail.

Overview

Definition of the Challenge

Large-scale violent conflict takes several forms, and our focus is far from comprehensive. Recent media attention has been dominated by Iraq and it is important to acknowledge at the outset that this type of situation is not covered in our analysis. Iraq is in many respects highly atypical of modern conflict. It began as an international war, yet over time international conflict has tended to become far less common. Most warfare in low-income countries is internal. The situation in Iraq has indeed evolved into what is currently probably best described as an ongoing civil war. While our focus is indeed civil war, the interventions that we evaluate here are designed to prevent rather than arrest such wars. In the first Challenge paper on Conflicts for the Copenhagen Consensus, Collier and Hoeffler (2004c) also chose to focus on civil wars. However, within this remit they were more ambitious than the present chapter, including the “deep prevention” of civil war, the ending of on-going conflicts, and the prevention of the recurrence of violence in post-conflict situations. In this chapter, our ambition is more limited. We focus predominantly on the prevention of the recurrence of violence in post-conflict societies. This restricted focus enables us to consider post-conflict instruments in more depth, and it is also the core of the problem of violent conflict.

This book is about doing what is rational instead of what is fashionable.

It is fashionable to declare that we want to tackle every major world problem. It is also a great thing to say. Unfortunately, it is not rational. We have limited resources. A dollar spent in one place cannot be spent elsewhere. But it is worse than that. When we say that we want to do everything, we are deceiving ourselves. A few big issues get the most air time, attention and money.

During this decade, there has been an incredibly intense focus on terrorism and global warming. Some surveys show these two threats scare people in rich countries more than any other problems that the world faces. Terrorism and global warming have not only dominated some sections of the media, but have attracted billions of dollars and used vast amounts of political capital.

Terrorism and climate change are both serious problems that deserve attention. But, as this book will show, there are many other threats that we hear less about, that also deserve our attention.

The Copenhagen Consensus exercise started as a simple but untested idea of applying economic principles to prioritize global opportunities. In 2004, the process was carried out for the very first time. The result was a prioritized list of opportunities to solve or ameliorate some of the world's greatest problems, compiled by some of the world's top economists.

Multiple changes are occurring simultaneously around the globe at an increasing pace. Energy and resource scarcities have emerged or intensified. Different trade regimes have evolved. New communication and information technologies have exploded into daily life. New human health issues have appeared, and old health issues have, in some cases, been exacerbated. Changes in global climate and associated patterns of extreme weather events must be added to this list, especially for the global poor whose very livelihoods depend directly in many instances on the use of specific natural resources.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4, 2007), concluded that a portfolio of mitigation and adaptation will prove to be the best option for dealing with climate change; see IPCC (2007b, 2007c). In this Challenge paper, we provide some additional evidence in support of such a multi-faceted approach – a combination of mitigation, investment in research and development (R&D) on less-carbon-intensive technologies, and adaptation is found to be superior to adopting any single option at the expense of all others. In addition, it will become clear that ignoring climate change would mean that efforts which have been designed to ameliorate many of the other challenges contemplated in the Copenhagen Consensus exercise will ultimately be “swimming upstream” – i.e. expending effort unnecessarily simply to stay in place.

The net economic and social benefits of reducing most government subsidies and opening economies to trade are enormous relative to the costs of adjustment to such policy reform. While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. Addressing this challenge would therefore also assist in meeting several of the other challenges identified in this project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.

This chapter focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Three opportunities in particular are addressed. The most beneficial prospect is the Doha Development Agenda of the World Trade Organization (WTO). If that proves to be too difficult politically to bring to a conclusion in the near future, the other two prospects we consider are sub-global preferential reforms such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative, and the freeing up of the international movement of workers.

The chapter begins by defining the challenge. It then summarizes the arguments for removing trade and migration distortions, along with critiques by skeptics, before discussing the various opportunities for reducing subsidies and trade barriers and explaining why we chose to focus on the above-mentioned three.

This book represents the end of two years of work, since we last started approaching the experts who fill these chapters and asked them to identify the best ways to solve the world's biggest problems.

They have provided us with the ultimate overview of how global decision makers can best put their money to use when they intend to improve the state of the world. The next part is up to you, the reader. Which of these projects do you think deserves attention first? Where do you think additional money should be spent? Where will you donate your money?

Prioritization is hard. It is much easier to say that we want to do everything. It's much easier to say that every global problem is important and we should solve them all, right now.

It is important not just to talk about what is the best thing to do right now, but also to acknowledge that some things should not be our top priority.

When the expert panel of economists made their findings in Copenhagen in 2008, they ranked lowest the proposal of combating climate change policies with mitigation only. The benefits of mitigation alone would be lower than the costs. Spending a dollar would get back less than a dollar worth of good.

Similarly, solutions to the problem of outdoor pollution have very low cost–benefit ratios when seen in a developing nation context because they are so expensive.

Introduction

This Challenge paper identifies priorities for disease control as an input into the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus project (hereafter, CC08). As such, it updates the evidence and differs somewhat in its conclusions from the communicable disease paper (Mills and Shilcutt 2004) prepared for the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, which Lomborg (2006) summarizes.

Our analysis builds on the results of the Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP). The DCPP engaged over 350 authors and among its outputs were estimates of the cost-effectiveness of 315 interventions. These estimates vary a good deal in their thoroughness and in the extent to which they provide region-specific estimates of both cost and effectiveness. Taken as a whole, however, they represent a comprehensive canvas of disease control opportunities. Some interventions are clearly low priority. Others are attractive and worth doing, but either address only a relatively small proportion of disease burden or are simply not quite as attractive as a few key interventions. This chapter identifies seven priority interventions in terms of their cost-effectiveness, the size of the disease burden they address, and other criteria. Separate but related papers for CC08 deal with malnutrition (Horton et al. 2008, see chapter 6 in this volume), with water and sanitation (Hutton 2007), with air pollution (Larsen et al. 2008, see chapter 1 in this volume), and with education (Orazem et al., 2008, see chapter 4 in this volume).

Despite significant reductions in income poverty in recent years, under-nutrition remains widespread. Estimates published in the Lancet (Black et al. 2008) suggest that “maternal and child Under-nutrition is the underlying cause of 3.5 million deaths, 35 percent of the disease burden in children younger than 5 years, and 11 percent of total global DALYs.” Under-nutrition can be indicated both by anthropometric indices (underweight, stunting, and wasting) and by missing micronutrients in poor-quality diets.

Under-nutrition in turn has negative effects on income and on economic growth. Undernutrition leads to increased mortality and morbidity, which lead to loss of economic output and increased spending on health. Poor nutrition means that individuals are less productive (due to both physical and mental impairment), and that children benefit less from education. The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus paper on the topic discusses these mechanisms in detail (Behrman, Alderman, and Hoddinott 2004) (hereafter, BAH 2004). Reducing under-nutrition is one of the MDGs (Goal 1 aims to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), and is also a key factor underpinning several others. Achieving goals in primary education, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases all depend crucially on nutrition.

There are cost-effective interventions for improving nutrition. The first section below discusses the challenge in more detail, the second describes selected priority solutions; the third section undertakes more detailed economic analysis of these solutions, and the fourth and final section discusses the implications of the analysis.

Introduction

Gender shapes one's role at home, in society, and in the economy. All cultures interpret and translate men's and women's biological differences into expectations about what behaviors and activities are appropriate for them and what rights, resources, and power they possess. Over the past three decades, these gender differences have increasingly gained prominence in the development agenda. More attention is being given to the plight of poor and disadvantaged women in developing countries, as well as to the unfinished gender agenda in more developed countries. Recognizing the importance of ensuring equal opportunities for females and males on grounds of both fairness and efficiency and as an instrument for achieving poverty reduction and economic growth, the international development community has included gender equality among the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

MDG3 reflects the strong belief by the development community that starkly unequal access to assets and opportunities between men and women produce further inequalities, harming not only women but also their families, and their communities. For example, disparities in education, employment, and wages hurt the women affected and also reduce the overall efficiency of the economy. Gender disparities that begin at a young age have significant long-term effects and are more costly to overcome later. Restricting the pool of educated people to boys reduces the overall talent pool.

Introduction

Air pollution in its broadest sense refers to suspended particulate matter (PM: dust, fumes, mist, and smoke), gaseous pollutants, and odors (Kjellstrom et al. 2006). To this may be added heavy metals, chemicals and hazardous substances. A large proportion of air pollution worldwide is due to human activity, from combustion of fuels for transportation and industry, electric power generation, resource extraction and processing industries, and domestic cooking and heating, among others. Air pollution has many impacts, most importantly affecting human and animal health, buildings and materials, crops, and visibility.

In addressing the multiple burdens of air pollution, its related causes, and possible solutions, a broad distinction is necessary between indoor and outdoor air pollution:

• Human-induced indoor air pollution is to a large extent caused by household solid fuel use (SFU) for cooking and heating, usually involving open fires or traditional stoves in conditions of low combustion efficiency and poor ventilation. Indoor air pollution also originates from other “modern” indoor air pollutants associated with industrialization, with a variety of suspected health effects such as sick-building syndrome. However, from a global burden of disease point of view, these modern indoor air pollutants are relatively minor; this study therefore focuses on air pollution from SFU. Due to the close proximity and low or zero cost of solid fuels such as biomass in most rural areas, indoor air pollution is more of an issue in rural than in urban areas, although in many urban areas coal and charcoal are common household energy sources.