The only question is why we have never done this before. It’s an unprecedented approach which I have not seen from any of the think-tanks or advisory groups that work in Bangladesh, and the results are going to be powerful and practical.

In 2008, eight of the world’s leading economists, including five Nobel Laureates, in the so-called Copenhagen Consensus, recommended priorities for confronting the top ten global challenges. They ranked providing young children with micronutrients the number one most cost-effective way to advance global welfare.

Across all of the government, from the Prime Minister’s office to those responsible for education or agriculture or poverty alleviation, we see great potential in this approach to help Bangladesh focus on areas where our spending will achieve the most.

This book is a bracing tonic. An excellent survey for students, teachers, and the general public with a wealth of thought-provoking material. If you want to know how the world is doing, and get hard, comparable numbers to back it up, this is where to go.

Policy-makers prioritize between competing options many times every single day. This project will help us to take a step back and ask, where are the areas where we should focus more attention and resources?

This project is going to transform the way we think about priorities in Bangladesh, both with the implementation of the 7th Five Year Plan and in attaining the Vision 2021

This 150-year view of humanity's biggest challenges, measured in economic terms, gives unique data on the globe's important issues to students, teachers and the general public. Ultimately, it affords everyone the opportunity to answer with facts the questions of humanity's scorecard: are we doing better or worse? Overall, there is more good news than bad, but we could still do better.

This collaboration between BRAC and Copenhagen Consensus Center has brought some of the foremost economists from Bangladesh together with their global counterparts, to focus on positive, smart ways to improve this country. Despite limitations, it has identified new interventions with high potential benefits and confirmed the potential of some of the current priorities. This will be a valuable resource for policy-makers and anybody interested in Bangladesh's future.

For a volume covering such a large number of grim subjects, ranging from climate change and violent conflict to loss of biodiversity and malnutrition, this is a surprisingly uplifting read. While mankind has succeeded in creating some depressingly disastrous social, natural and humanitarian disaster, we also have the power to alleviate and overcome these self-inflicted challenges. Bjorn Lomborg reminds us that for every part of mankind that can destroy, there is also one part that can create.

The Copenhagen Consensus has proven a game changer for the nutrition field. The Nobel Prize panel’s endorsement of nutrition interventions as the most effective investments has moved the nutrition community to the center of development policy. By highlighting the significant benefits of nutrition, the Copenhagen Consensus has helped unleash billions of aid dollars to do amazing work in the world.