Nobel Laureate Douglass North seeks consensus on solving global woes

June 1, 2004 -- Douglass C. North, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts & Sciences and a co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, joined a panel of distinguished economists in Denmark May 24-28th for an intensive forum exploring the costs and benefits of ongoing efforts to address critical global challenges, such as war, famine and disease.

Douglass North

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Known as the Copenhagen Consensus, the project was hosted by the Denmark-based Environmental Assessment Institute, with support from the Danish government and The Economist magazine.

The initiative, which generated controversy and heated discussion from the start, was designed to provide the world with a serious, unbiased, scientific ranking of where scarce relief funds and resources might best be invested to reap the greatest "bang for the buck" in terms of making real improvements in the day-to-day lives of people in developing countries.

North himself acknowledged that the project was ambitious, noting that it is nearly impossible to get more than a few economists to agree on most any issue.

In the end, the Copenhagen Consensus identified a package of measures to control HIV/AIDS as the challenge most likely to yield the greatest return on global relief fund investments. Rounding out the top four places on the Consensus priority list of "very good" investments were interventions aimed at fighting malnutrition, actions to reduce trade barriers and eliminate agricultural subsidies and efforts to control malaria.

Rated as "bad" investments, meaning that costs were likely to outweigh benefits, were initiatives aimed at mitigating global climate change, including the Kyoto protocol, carbon taxes and programs designed to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions.

While the rankings have been hotly contested, North suggests the project has made a contribution by spurring economist and world leaders to examine these challenges in the context of broader, big-picture global issues. He hopes the discussion and related research will focus increased attention on the ills of developing nations and eventually, produce new approaches, new priorities, new solutions for problems that now cause so much needless suffering in the world.

"Finding a way to end warfare is probably the most important challenge facing mankind, but that's a problem for which there is no easy solution," North said. "On the other hand, we know how to provide people with clean drinking water. We have the medical tools to tackle devastating diseases, such as malaria. These problems are solvable -- that's where we should be focusing our resources."