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 with Justin Sandefur. The world’s poorest people have been getting richer recently. But they remain incredibly poor. The 10 percent of the world’s population still consuming $1.90 or less a day are subsisting on a small fraction of the resources available to people at the US poverty line. So you’d hope …
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A CGD blog with Mallika Snyder. Christal Morehouse, Alla Volkova, and Silvia Fierscu of The Open Society Foundation (OSF) have just issued a fascinating report on the gender breakdown of speakers at 23 high-level conferences across Europe including nine forums, six conferences, four meetings, three summits, and a ….
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A CGD blog with Tanvi Jaluka. Last year on International Women’s Day we talked about labor and financial equality as a prerequisite for women’s empowerment. This year, we’re being a little more introspective. Many nonprofits working in global development advocate for women’s empowerment and gender e…
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A CGD blog with Charles Kenny. Moving beyond low income countries makes sense for an institution focused on ending extreme poverty. But does the IFC follow through by focusing on the countries that are home to the extreme poor? Not really.
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A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. On Wednesday, Angus Deaton published an op-ed in the New York Times that paints a compelling picture of the depth of poverty in America, and the need for more money and more policy attention to fix it. It' s a sobering read, and we strongly agree that America’s most…
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A CGD blog with Vijaya Ramachandran. Since the publication of our paper on the IFC’s project portfolio last week, we have received several helpful comments from readers. They plausibly suggest that the portfolio may be (even) less risky than we suggested, with even more space to pivot towards the low income countries wh…
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A CGD blog with Michael Jarvis. Public-Private Partnership models continue to proliferate, backed by multilateral development banks old and new. But the volume of PPPs in developing countries has stagnated since the global financial crisis, and they won’t deliver unless they are designed and implemented well. …
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A CGD blog. Vijaya Ramachandran, Ben Leo, Jared Karlow and I have just published two papers looking at where and in what capacity the IFC, OPIC, and selected European development finance institutions (DFIs) are investing their money. The core of the papers is a dataset that Jared painstakingly put together by s…
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A CGD blog with Vijaya Ramachandran. The IFC is designed to catalyze investments in countries that investors might consider too risky to invest in alone. But our recent analysis of IFC’s portfolio found that it is shying away from risky investments, raising serious questions about whether the IFC is focusing on the…
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A CGD blog. Do the fifteen year targets of the SDGs stand in the way of their vision of integration and sustainability? If you wanted to achieve long term development progress, you’d probably focus on technology change, learning and innovation in policies, and improving institutional functioning. If you w…
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