Charles Kenny

Books, Papers and Articles

Charles Kenny is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More (Basic Books: 2011); The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West (Basic Books: 2014) and The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease (Scribner 2021). He spent fifteen years as an economist in the World Bank and now works at a Washington DC think tank, the Center for Global Development, where he researches and advocates for policies governing investment, trade, technology and migration that would be good for both developing and industrialized countries alike. In addition, he is a widely cited researcher on the economics of happiness. Kenny was a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and was a columnist for Bloomberg Business¸ where he wrote on global development and its impact on the US. He has also written for outlets including the Economist, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time, the Guardian, Salon and CNN. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, Aspen Institute and Legatum Institute events. He has given talks at numerous colleges and universities. He has appeared on PBS, Al Jazeera, CCTV, Vox, Reuters TV and Bloomberg TV. On radio he has been a guest on NPR and the BBC as well as numerous podcasts. Charles has a history degree from Cambridge University, Masters degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a PhD in Development Studies from Cambridge. The product and beneficiary of transoceanic romances, he thinks globalization is an immense force for good. He can be contacted at charlesjkenny at gmail.

recent posts

The Global Expansion of Primary Education

The Global Expansion of Primary Education is an unpublished short paper.  In 1830, near-universal primary education was limited to a few states in the United States, and the great majority of the World’s children received no formal education at all. By 1870, somewhere between 12 and 23 percent of the World’s children aged 5-14 were enrolled in a school, and by 1950 this figure had increased to 47 percent. By 2002, global net primary enrollment was around 87 percent, with a gross enrollment ratio of around 100 percent. For countries in Western Europe and Western offshoots including the US and Canada, the period of rapid growth began as early as the 1800s, while for much of the rest of the World, it would take at least another 100-150 years to see the takeoff towards universal primary education. This paper discusses the timing and speed of the transition around the World and discusses the causal mechanisms behind the growth to global ubiquity of basic education.

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