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

Category: E. Economic Development

  • There’s More to Life than Money

    There’s More to Life than Money: Exploring the Levels/Growth Paradox in Income and Health is forthcoming in the Journal of International Development.  It discusses historical and recent cross-country evidence relating income to measures of health.  After a review of the literature on income and the quality of life, the paper looks at long-term historical evidence…

  • What Do We Know About Economic Growth, Redux

    What Do We Know About Economic Growth, Redux is an unpublished short paper.  It revisits the cross-country growth literature six years after What Do We Know About Economic Growth Or, Why Don’t we Know Very Much?  Since then, even more evidence has piled up that growth is a complex, context-dependent process difficult to explain using…

  • Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap?

    Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap? is an unpublished short paper.  The key features of the Malthusian model are that (i) income determines population growth, with rising wages increasing survival rates and (ii) there is a vital factor of production (land) which is fixed, implying decreased returns to scale for all other factors. The…

  • Putting Life Back into Miracles

    Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper.  If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48…

  • Is Africa a Failure?

    Is Africa a Failure? is an unpublished short paper. The usual way to refer to the performance of African countries over the forty or so years since independence is as a ‘crisis,’ or even a ‘rot.’ In these versions of Africa’s recent history, there is but one thing to argue over –who is to blame.…

  • Why Are We Worried About Income?

    Why Are We Worried About Income? Everything That Matters is Converging was published in World Development 33, 1, 2005.  Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and…

  • What Do We Know About Economic Growth

    What Do We Know About Economic Growth Or, why don’t we know very much? was published in World Development 29, 1, 2001, co-authored with David Williams.  The last 10 years has seen an explosion in cross country econometric studies of growth, driven by two factors—new mathematical models of the growth process that lend themselves to…

  • Why Aren’t Countries Rich?

    Why Aren’t Countries Rich? Weak States and Bad Neighbourhoods was published in The Journal of Development Studies 35, 5, 1999.  This article challenges a common viewpoint that the policy choices made by state leaders are central to explanations of economic growth. It argues that there are two possible flaws in this viewpoint. First, that state…

  • Senegal and the Entropy Theory of Development

    Senegal and the Entropy Theory of Development was published in the European Journal of Development Research, 10, 1, 1998.  This analysis uses Senegal as a test case to study the assumptions made by the governance agenda.  After briefly charting the growth of the governance model and the theoretical assumptions on which it rests, the study…