Industrial Transformations for Growth and Development

Every government minister, senior civil servant or charity official is familiar with the pitch. Spend money on my project, says the supplicant: it will bring such large benefits that you will actually save money in the long run. At this, the official sighs, knowing that another supplicant with an equally bold pitch is waiting outside. How can he pick among competing pleas for bridges, IT systems, deworming medicines and a thousand other things?

This week, at a conference in Dhaka, the Copenhagen Consensus will try to answer that question, reports the Economist.

What is the point of climate change policy? To make the world a better place for all of us, and for future generations.

In my new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, I analyze a lot of ways to make smart climate policy—and many that unfortunately waste resources. But we also need to ask ourselves the broader question: If the goal is to make the world a better place, is climate change policy the most important thing to focus on?

Global free trade provides the greatest opportunity to improve human welfare over the next decade and a half. It has already helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty over the past quarter-century. Lowering trade barriers even more could double average incomes in the poorest parts of the world over the next 15 years.

Yes, there are costs to free trade that must be better addressed; but the costs are vastly outweighed by the benefits. Yet, in rich countries today, the mood has turned against free trade. That is a tragedy.