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New initiative launched by Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute (under Bjorn Lomborg - the so-called "Skeptical Environmentalist") in co-operation with The Economist.
"What should come first? Where, among all the projects that governments might undertake to make the world a better place, are the net returns to their efforts likely to be greatest? It is easy to see why this question has rarely, if ever, been confronted head-on. Calculating the costs and benefits of acting on any one of the very many proposals for international action that are mooted from time to time is difficult enough. Attempting to impose a common cost-benefit framework on many such possibilities so that they can be meaningfully compared one with another is an ambitious exercise, to put it mildly. But that is what the institute, headed by Bjorn Lomborg (author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”), and abetted by this newspaper, has resolved to attempt-in a project dubbed, in an access of optimism, the Copenhagen Consensus...."
"The Copenhagen Consensus has already started an an important global debate on prioritizing resources. That debate will continue. I hope academics, politicians and citizens will each take part in this necessary discussion."
Combating HIV/AIDS should be at the top of the world's priority list. That is the recommendation from the Copenhagen Consensus 2004 expert panel of world-leading economists.
About 28 million cases could be prevented by 2010. The cost would be $27 billion, with benefits almost forty times as high.
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Gender Equality
