Thanks for sharing, David! People can find some good ideas in Copenhagen Consensus Center’s best investment papers for the sustainable development goals.
Each paper does a cost-benefit analysis which accounts for health and economic benefits. The benefit-to-cost ratios across the 12 papers range from 18 (nutrition) to 125 (e-Government procurement).
All 12 ratios are much higher than the 2.4 estimated for GiveDirectly’s cash transfers to poor households in Kenya.
4 are similar to and 8 are higher than GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness bar of around 24 (= 10*2.4), equal to 10 times the above.
Cash transfers are often preferred due to being highly scalable, but the 12 papers deal with large investments too. As can be seen in the table below, taken from a companion post, all 12 interventions together have:
An annual cost of 41 G 2020-$ (41 billion 2020 USD).
Annual benefits of 2.14 T 2020-$ (2.14 trillion 2020 USD), of which 1.12 T 2020-$ are economic benefits corresponding to 14.6 % (= 1.12*1.13/(8.17 + 0.528)) of the gross domestic product (GDP) of low and lower-middle income countries in 2022.
A benefit-to-cost ratio of 52.2 (= 2.14/0.041), 21.8 (= 52.2/2.4) times that of GiveDirectly’s cash transfers to poor households in Kenya.
I think 3 of the papers focus on areas which have not been funded by GiveWell nor Open Philanthropy[1]:
e-Government procurement (benefit-to-cost ratio of 125).
Thanks for sharing, David! People can find some good ideas in Copenhagen Consensus Center’s best investment papers for the sustainable development goals.