Every two minutes, a woman dies of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most of these deaths are preventable — and the world has been working on a solution for decades. The problem is the funds dedicated to solving the problem never go far enough. There are inexpensive and effective solutions that could help bring down the number of mothers who die from childbirth. A new analysis published last week by Copenhagen Consensus, the think tank I lead, shows how a modest investment of less than $3 billion a year could avert 162,000 maternal deaths,...

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 in an attempt to jump-start the market for electric cars in the UK. Bjorn Lomborg cautions in Britain's largest-circulating broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph that electric cars won't be a miracle cure for climate change, as they provide only marginal emission reductions at a very high cost.

Promising to spend $2 trillion on climate over the next four years, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden is taking a path similar to that of politicians from many other rich countries, vowing costly policies to help address global warming. Along with his fellow Democrats, he pledges to end fossil fuels in the power sector by 2035 and cut net U.S. emissions to zero by 2050. Global warming is a real problem we need to tackle smartly. President Donald Trump has incorrectly suggested that climate change is a hoax and has offered almost no effective climate policy. Better approaches are...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom made headlines by signing an executive order Wednesday banning the future sale of new gasoline-powered cars and trucks. In the wake of the devastating California fires, he said more ambitious steps are needed to reduce climate change. Banning gas transport, he said in a statement, “is the most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change.” Poetically, he stressed that “our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse.” While the governor is correct that climate change is a real problem that we should fix smartly, most of his analysis is seriously flawed, and...

Ghana's economic growth has been rapid since the start of the new millennium, reaching 14% in 2011, but economic performance has been relatively lower since then, particularly from 2013-2016. Important factors for the slowing of development are the huge infrastructural deficit and the limited fiscal space, but Ghana has the potential for improvement thanks to its large natural resource deposits. The country has historically relied on the extraction of these abundant resources for economic and social development, and global business attention has focused on several sectors, including oil and...

Ghana has been experiencing steady economic development, but GDP growth has not been supported with enough infrastructure to boost welfare sustainably in the long term. One of the sectors requiring urgent improvement is transport. The road network comprises over 78,000 kilometers, but only 49% of it is maintained or rehabilitated. Up to 60% of the 1300-kilometer rail network is not used regularly due to lack of maintenance. This absence of necessary infrastructure limits commerce and exports, and slows down Ghana’s economic growth prospects and even tourism, given that many of the major...

The massive fires raging in California are being blamed squarely on climate change. Alongside ominous photographs of orange skies, the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times blared: “California’s Climate Apocalypse.” Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom says the cause is climate change. Anyone who thinks differently, he insists, is in denial. The governor is right that climate change is real, man-made and something we need to deal with smartly. But the claim that the fires are caused by climate change is grossly misleading. Translated into policy, it would steer the state to the worst way to...