World leaders at the United Nations have adopted the global goals for development for 2016-2030.
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus and one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers says the Millennium Development Goals largely worked because there were 18 clear and short targets.
After 4 years of bureaucratic negotiations the United Nations replaced them with what has been termed as unwieldy list of 169 development targets.
Dr. Lomborg says governments the list of aspirations tries to please everyone and yet will end up doing much less for the most vulnerable people.
Research carried out for Copenhagen consensus by 82 leading economist found large variations in how much social benefit each target would achieve.
Based on this research, a panel of experts including several Nobel laureate economists has established that focusing on just 19 development targets would achieve four times better for every dollar spent than spreading money across all 169.
If spent smarter, the trillions of dollars being spent on the Global Goals can do four times better.
He said this is a generational opportunity that is about to be lost.
He also urged leaders to concentrate on the smartest targets during the implementation of the goals as it will be difficult to monitor and evaluate 169 different targets.
