Charles Kenny
Books, Papers and Articles
Charles Kenny writes about global development — what’s working, what isn’t, and how the world can do better. An economist who spent fifteen years at the World Bank, he is now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
Category: Uncategorized
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A CGD blog. It is surely an urgent moment for multilateral support from the IMF and World Bank. And yet, the institutions’ financial statements suggest that support is declining. Figuring out why and what to do about it should be priority one at the upcoming World Bank-IMF annual meetings.
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A CGD blog. Once you’ve looked at policy as a source of societal progress and regress, especially over the long term, it is hard to look at anything else. As a result, I hope ever-more people in the EA community in town this week decide to work in government, or work on making government work…
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A CGD blog. A lot of people working in global development-including many at CGD like me-would like to see the World Bank’s lending arm for richer developing countries play a larger role financing global public goods like climate change mitigation and pandemic preparedness. That would take a larger IBRD, likely….
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A CGD blog. The existing MCC income cutoff is based on the robust principle that the best buys in global development are concentrated in the world’s poorest countries. (Indeed, when the Corporation started, it only worked in low-income countries for that reason). There is a declining marginal utility of a dolla…
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A CGD blog. For all that investment is far from all we need, we will still need a massive amount of it if we are to meet global targets on sustainable development. Low and zero-carbon power plants expanded electricity, water and sanitation networks universal health and education systems-none come cheap. Estim…
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A CGD blog with Erin Collinson. DFC has been the subject of a growing list of proposals from lawmakers that envision the agency tackling a wider range of challenges than initially envisioned. The agency may find ways to leverage this heightened interest. However, delivering on the bipartisan, foundational vision for DFC amid evolv…
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A CGD blog. The MCC is particular about which countries it supports. Among the requirements, Ukraine passes the agency’s (important and legitimate) hurdle that it only works in the world’s low- and lower-middle-income countries. It also passes a lot of other tests the MCC lays out for support, based on a scorec…
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A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. In this piece, we explore how training combined with mobility could play a big role in creating the required skills needed- and we offer recommendations to policymakers to pursue this two-pronged plan.
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A CGD blog. It’s Davos week, so I just checked… and I qualify for writing a global “we are the 99 percent” blog! Indeed, my household is actually all the way toward the bottom end of the 99th income percentile worldwide (the lower cutoff is around $200,000 for a family of four). So, what do…
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A CGD blog with Euan Ritchie. In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.