Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Summaries
- Chapter 1 Air Pollution: Global Damage Costs from 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 2 Armed Conflicts: The Economic Welfare Costs of Conflict
- Chapter 3 Climate Change: The Economic Impact of Climate Change in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Chapter 4 Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Economic Loss of Ecosystem Services from 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 5 Education: The Income and Equity Loss of not Having a Faster Rate of Human Capital Accumulation
- Chapter 6 Gender Inequality: A Key Global Challenge – Reducing Losses due to Gender Inequality
- Chapter 7 Human Health: The Twentieth-Century Transformation of Human Health – Its Magnitude and Value
- Chapter 8 Malnutrition: Global Economic Losses Attributable to Malnutrition 1900–2000 and Projections to 2050
- Chapter 9 Trade Barriers: Costing Global Trade Barriers, 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 10 Water and Sanitation: Economic Losses from Poor Water and Sanitation – Past, Present, and Future
- Index
- References
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Summaries
- Chapter 1 Air Pollution: Global Damage Costs from 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 2 Armed Conflicts: The Economic Welfare Costs of Conflict
- Chapter 3 Climate Change: The Economic Impact of Climate Change in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
- Chapter 4 Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Economic Loss of Ecosystem Services from 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 5 Education: The Income and Equity Loss of not Having a Faster Rate of Human Capital Accumulation
- Chapter 6 Gender Inequality: A Key Global Challenge – Reducing Losses due to Gender Inequality
- Chapter 7 Human Health: The Twentieth-Century Transformation of Human Health – Its Magnitude and Value
- Chapter 8 Malnutrition: Global Economic Losses Attributable to Malnutrition 1900–2000 and Projections to 2050
- Chapter 9 Trade Barriers: Costing Global Trade Barriers, 1900 to 2050
- Chapter 10 Water and Sanitation: Economic Losses from Poor Water and Sanitation – Past, Present, and Future
- Index
- References
Summary
The Costs of Human Challenges
The human race has always faced a wide range of challenges and, despite great progress, continues to do so. This book aims to produce a 150-year view of some of humanity’s biggest challenges, and to present these in a new and thought-provoking way. The research presented here uses in-depth economic data analysis to establish the cost to humankind caused by its biggest challenges, and how the impact of these challenges evolved over the twentieth century and will continue to change until the middle of this century.
Understanding the change in impact of the different problems across centuries or even just their relative sizes at a particular moment is fraught with difficulty, since our understanding of world problems and progress is to a large extent shaped by vocal interest groups, the length of the media’s attention span, and our perceptions – shaped by personal experience – of what matters and what does not.
In the developed world, the challenges that we hear the most about are not necessarily those that cause the biggest problems to humanity. Issues come and go from the front pages of newspapers: an African famine can be news one day, superseded by a terror threat in the developed world the next. Issues like the Y2K bug can create considerable alarm, and then fade away to nothing. Other times, there might be a perception that we have solved an issue – malnutrition, or the HIV epidemic, for example – because we hear a lot less about it than we once did.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?A Scorecard from 1900 to 2050, pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013