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: Q. Academic writing

  • Learning About Schools in Development

    Learning About Schools in Development is an unpublished short paper.  It briefly discusses a number of links in the chain between school construction and improvements in the quality of life –between construction and enrollment, between enrollment and learning, and between schooling and both economic growth and health outcomes.  Given what is suggested by the evidence regarding…

  • Why do people die in earthquakes ? the costs, benefits and institutions of disaster risk reduction in developing countries

    Why do people die in earthquakes? is a working paper issued in January 2009.  A version was published in the journal Disasters in 2012. Every year, around 60,000 people die worldwide in natural disasters. The majority of the deaths are caused by building collapse in earthquakes, and the great majority occurs in the developing world.…

  • The Next Decade of ICT Development

    The Next Decade of ICT Development: Access, Applications, and the Forces of Convergence was co-authored with Mohsen Khalil.  It was published in Information Technology for International Development 4,3. Developing countries are already driving global innovation in technologies and business models related to information and communications. Ongoing technological change may give new life to business and regulatory…

  • Grand Corruption in Utilities

    Grand Corruption in Utilities, co-authored with Tina Soreide, was issued as a working paper in December 2008.  The paper discusses mechanisms of grand corruption in private sector utility provision in developing countries. The paper focuses on decisions made at the government level involving private sector management, ownership, and provision of utility services.  Corruption at that level may…

  • The Global Spread of Liberty and Democracy

    The Global Spread of Liberty and Democracy: A Brief Discussion is a short paper looking at the evidence regarding the level and change in access to liberties and democratic systems worldwide. It briefly discusses the history of the ideas of liberties and rights, long-term evidence regarding their extent, and two centuries of evidence regarding their spread as…

  • What’s Not Converging? East Asia’s Relative Performance in Income, Health and Education

    What’s Not Converging? East Asia’s Relative Performance in Income, Health and Education is forthcoming in the Asian Economic Policy Review.  The paper examines East Asia’s performance in terms of per capita GDP growth rates over the past forty years and compares that performance to progress primarily on measures of health.  It also compares the region…

  • What Does the Eastern European Growth Experience Tell Us About the Policy and Convergence Debates?

    What Does the Eastern European Growth Experience Tell Us About the Policy and Convergence Debates? is an unpublished paper. While the human costs of communism in Eastern Europe were incalculably large, the impact on regional income growth may have been comparatively minor. Despite common perceptions of the efficacy of communism as a system for promoting…

  • A Century of the Infant Mortality Revolution

    A Century of the Infant Mortality Revolution is an unpublished paper.  There has been rapid and widespread progress in reducing infant mortality over the last 100 years. In 1900, there was only one country worldwide where we know that infant mortality was below ten percent. A century later, out of the 187 countries for which…

  • 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…

  • 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…