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Funding preschooling has long-lasting benefits
The UN has promised universal education since 1950, and we've not delivered. Now this target is again considered for the UN's 2015-2030 development goals. More achievable and cost-effective goals are needed.
 New Post-2015 Consensus research suggests increasing preschool enrollment in Sub-Saharan Africa from the present 18% to 59% is the best target: For every dollar spent the benefit is 33 dollars.
Read Bjorn Lomborg's column on how to prioritize our education targets in six languages on Project Syndicate. The article has been published around the globe, e.g. in The Australian, Korea Times, AllAfrica, Clarin (Argentina) or Koha Ditore (Kosovo). Articles with regional data have been published in Daily Graphic (Ghana) and El Universal (Venezuela).  
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Too many targets
to be sustainable
After more than a year of negotiations, the 70 nations in the UN’s Open Working Group agreed on a common report. The agreement is an achievement.
But is it smart? Copenhagen Consensus asked 30+ of the world’s top economists to analyze their 169 targets and highlight the smart ones in green.
In Financial Times Lomborg calls for prioritization: while the UN's original Millennium Development Goals had just 18 targets set out in 374 words, the new report has 169 targets in 4,369 words.
 
Better economic information from the post-2015 project will help world leaders prioritize, Lomborg writes in the newspapers of record in Germany and Spain, FAZ and El Mundo.
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How to raise $770bn for African Development
20 sub-Saharan Africa countries have lost more than 10% of their GDPs every year since 1980 to illicit financial flows, the Wall Street Journal reports on new Post-2015 Consensus research. The cost of enforcing a policy to "Make all beneficial ownership public" would bring back $49 on every dollar spent.
 The Daily Graphic (Ghana) brings the same argument with regional data. In countries like Swaziland, a tiny monarchy, eliminating illicit financial flows could speed up progress toward certain international development milestones by more than 100 years.
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Who is more irrational?
On September 1, the EU outlawed high-wattage vacuum cleaners due to climate change concerns. But this won't reduce COâ‚‚ emissions, and the assumption of government agencies having to correct "consumer irrationality" is unreasonable. In his new article for Forbes, Lomborg cites a study showing that many regulatory efforts to save energy have negligible environmental benefits while patronizing consumers.
The article can also be read in German.
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Who's afraid of the big bad energy bill?
A new survey shows that rising energy prices is the biggest fear of European households.
As Lomborg has pointed out repeatedly over the past years, green policies such as subsidies for renewables primarily hurt the poor, and energy poverty becomes an increasingly bigger problem even in the EU.
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Zsuzsa Horvath
Executive Assistant to Bjorn Lomborg
US online phone number: +1-347-903-0979
Office cell in Budapest: +36-306920720
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