Smash hit

Douglass North, a Nobel prize-winning Professor of Economics at Washington University in St Louis, and a member of the expert panel, said: “It has immediate and important consequences for improving the wellbeing of poor people around the world - that’s why it should be our number one priority.”

Other important nutritional initiatives highlighted by the panel included fortifying food with iron, and salt with iodine, to prevent other avoidable deficiencies. Another highly-recommended solution, in fifth place, was breeding nutritionally enhanced crops, such as “Golden Rice”, a GM variety with added vitamin A.

A less glamorous issue made sixth place on the list – the treatment of worm infestations that are a common cause of malnutrition and disease. “As one of the experts said: ‘We’d rather the kids were benefiting from nutrition, and not the worms,’” Dr Lomborg said.

The economists’ second-place priority was removing subsidies and tariffs that exclude developing countries from western markets, as is currently being proposed in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round of negotiations. While this is not a spending matter as such, but instead requires political agreement, it was considered so critical to growth in developed countries that it deserved a high placing.

An introduction to the Copenhagen Consensus

Economists battle it out to rank possible solutions for the great challenges in global stability and security

Multimedia

• Make your own rankings on our interactive table

BACKGROUND

• Copenhagen Consensus: conflict

• Copenhagen Consensus: disease

• Copenhagen Consensus: global warming

• Copenhagen Consensus: hunger

• Copenhagen Consensus: terrorism

Related Links

• Times Online readers back nutrition

Nancy Stokey, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, said: “There was heated debate about whether Doha belonged to this list at all, because it is a matter of political will, not budgeting. But the potential benefits are so enormous, running maybe into trillions of dollars.”

“Models estimate the net benefits could be up to $3,000 billion, five sixths of which would benefit the developing world,” Dr Lomborg said.

Further high priorities included the extension of childhood vaccination, ranked fourth overall, and improvements to education, particularly for girls.

Efforts to control HIV with antiretroviral drugs, which was the top priority of the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, finished lower down this time, in 19th place. This reflects improvements in the situation since 2004, such as the wider availability of cheap generic drugs following agreements with pharmaceutical companies.

The low priority given to mitigating climate change was criticised by environmentalists, who questioned the economic assumptions presented to the panel. They also argued that the case for containing emissions should not anyway be considered purely in terms of value per dollar spent.

Critics of Dr Lomborg’s position and the two Copenhagen verdicts, say he undervalues the impact of rising temperatures on biodiversity and ecology, which are hard to quantify in financial terms. Others say the economists’ calculations take too little account of the potential for catastrophic effects of global warming, and the threat posed by rising sea levels to whole societies, such as low-lying islands and countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands.

Dr Lomborg, however, said mitigation alone offered poor value for money. “Spending a dollar would get back less than one dollar of good,” he said.

Economists on the panel added that mitigation of climate change will mainly require policy decisions and fiscal instruments, such as carbon taxes, rather than direct investment of the sort they were considering for issues such as malnutrition. “Most of what we would do does not involve spending public money,” said Thomas Schelling, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, another Nobel laureate.

The Copenhagen recommendation on climate change stands in stark contrast to the conclusions of a group of 1,700 scientists, including six Nobel laureates, who yesterday issued an open letter calling on the US Government to implement carbon emission cuts.

The table has been drawn up after a week of deliberations, during which the panel has heard presentations on ten global challenges - terrorism; conflict; malnutrition and hunger; education; the role of women; air pollution; subsidies and trade barriers; disease; sanitation and water; and global warming.

In each case, three leading specialists in the field were asked to make the case for particular solutions and present evidence on their costs and benefits. The economists were then asked to judge all these against one another, to come up with a list of priorities.

About a quarter of the 44 solutions originally presented to the economists were dropped from the final list, as the panel considered there was insufficient evidence to assess them properly. These included all five of the solutions offered to international terrorism, and four of the five for preventing conflicts and civil wars.

Times recommends

• Energy-saving ideas from switched-on professor
• Rooks are as clever with tools as chimpanzees
• Burping of the lambs blows roast off menu