ABSTRACT
In 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit sets the world eight ambitious goals to be achieved by 2015, and all member states, together with a range of global organisations, committed themselves to help achieve what became known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A particular criticism of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is that they are a mix of the cost-effective and the costly, and the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, an international think tank, would like to see a focus on a smaller number of the 169 targets, which would have a large impact on the problems. Although the SDGs are less clear than they might have been, they do a much better job of covering the interrelated economic, social and environmental issues the world faces. In that sense, they are more useful than the MDGs were, and they are a useful way of focusing the whole world's attention on what should be its priorities.
