World must aim at smart development goals

By September, the world's 193 governments will meet in New York and agree on a set of ambitious, global targets for 2030. Over the next 15 years these targets will direct the $2.5 trillion to be spent on development assistance, as well as countless trillions in national budgets.

Based on peer-reviewed analyses from 82 of the world's top economists and 44 sector experts organized by the Copenhagen Consensus, three of us - Finn, Tom and Nancy - have prioritized more than a hundred of the proposed targets in terms of their value-for-money. They are certainly not all equal. Some targets generate much higher economic, social and environmental benefits than others, per dollar spent.

The natural political inclination is to promise all good things to everyone, and the UN is currently poised to pick 169 well-intentioned targets. But the evidence at hand, although limited, indicates pretty clearly that some of these targets are much more promising than others.