Charles Kenny

For In Development with Erin Collinson. The U.S. is now operating an aid program without an aid agency. It isn’t going so well.

A blog for CGD. Hopefully there’s about to be a lot more effective-altruist-adjacent philanthropic money around. My pitch on spending it: vaccinate everyone against everything all the time.

A note for CGD. The early period of China’s Belt and Road initiative involved significant sovereign lending, much of it directed to poorer developing countries, with considerable support for major infrastructure projects. A number of those projects generated healthy economic returns, but the lending was comparatively expensive and non-transparent, and so increasingly financially unsustainable. The Belt and Road model evolved partially as a result, with new sovereign lending focused more on restructuring, while new investment projects are increasingly ‘private’ and frequently linked with extraction. Again, many of these deals may be economically valuable, but they remain both opaque and may generate contingent liabilities. Traditional donors might respond to the changed direction of BRI by (i) better filling the public sector gap: offering the finance China was offering for public infrastructure projects, but doing so transparently and ensuring financial sustainability; (ii) providing private finance through development finance institutions using competitive and transparent approaches that contrast with current practice in both Chinese and traditional donor financing; and (iii) providing support to developing country governments and state-owned enterprises regarding infrastructure planning, competitive selection of private sector partners, and negotiation support.

An article for the German journal Welternährung. More on emigration as a growth strategy, with some German examples. Also available in German.

A CGD note and blog with (mostly by) Euan Ritchie. If you are going to change ODA income eligibility lower the threshold and make it PPP (we live in hope).

A CGD blog. The private sector should be engaged with the World Bank Group. But this necessary and important relationship needs guardrails and these are being tested by a closer relationship between firms and World Bank leadership, as well as reforms to bring the Bank Group’s private and public sector arms closer together.

An article for In Development. Lower income countries need a new path to rapid growth. Higher income countries need workers. It’s a match made in heaven. Part- subject of an Effective Altruism Forum discussion.

A CGD Policy Paper. The IFC has the potential to be a macroeconomically significant player in the world’s poorest countries that most need a more vibrant private sector. Sadly, however, it provides very little finance to firms in those countries. The IDA Private Sector Window was designed to help that problem by subsidizing both IFC and MIGA operations in IDA and fragile states. But it is not delivering in terms of IFC own-account investing or development impact. MIGA is claiming significant leverage by using PSW funds to guarantee activities with considerable private investment, but these investments would occur without MIGA engagement. The IFC is frequently using PSW funds to support deals that might well not exist without public support, but take such a considerable amount of that finance that leverage and demonstration effects are both low. Neither organization is finding the sweet spot in the middle, likely because so few investable deals are available that hit such a sweet spot. It is time for a new approach: supporting country industrial development strategies with governments rather than firms as the primary client.

A CGD blog. We need an honest reckoning: about what is affordable, about where it makes more sense for the public sector to directly invest, about more realistic ways to spark structural transformation in the poorest countries-and about the role of development finance institutions.