A brief for Cato's Defending Globalization series: global connections are the only way to a high income low carbon world.
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.
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On March 21, 2024, I gave testimony before the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability at a hearing titled “Accountable Assistance: Reviewing Controls to Prevent Mismanagement of Foreign Aid.” Luckily, I didn't get too many questions.
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A CGD blog. On Thursday, I delivered testimony before the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs at a hearing titled “Accountable Assistance: Reviewing Controls to Prevent Mismanagement of Foreign Aid.” I argued that the financial flow of assistanc….
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A CGD note. An increasing proportion of official development assistance (ODA) is being dedicated to climate, and climate mitigation in particular. Even were that spending highly effective, and despite reaching about $30 billion in 2020, it is not large enough to finance investment that would significantly slow global climate change. But were it effective, 20 years of mitigation finance should have been significant enough to at least bend the curve on emissions in countries receiving large amounts relative to their GNI. Sadly, existing project-level and country-level evidence suggests that, in terms of carbon dioxide abated per dollar of spending, mitigation finance is a considerable distance from being highly effective. That only adds to concerns that the net costs to the world’s poorest countries of diverting development ODA to mitigation may be large. In this note I look at existing evidence and provide additional analysis to suggest past mitigation finance may have had little impact on emissions.
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A CGD note. Marginal abatement cost curves, which suggest the cheapest approaches to reducing carbon emissions, are out of favor in international climate finance discussions because they are not good tools to use when thinking about systemic and urgent change. On the other hand, international
financing studies based on adding up the investment requirements linked to an emissions path to 1.5 degrees of warming produce historically implausible numbers and endanger existing development finance. To close the gap, we need to push the cost curve down (through technology
advance) and lower the price of finance (through scalable multilateral development bank support) while protecting development finance and focusing it on where it is most needed: the poorest countries suffering the most from climate change. -
A working paper for CGD with Eeshani Kapandal and Brian Webster. Research highlights the gains to the quality of policymaking from diversifying the body of policymakers. International financial institutions (IFIs) appear to agree, all issuing diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. But how do these institutions perform when it comes to their own staff—do they lead by example? We put together a unique dataset of 20 years of HR staffing data from seven major IFIs that are collectively responsible for more than a quarter trillion dollars of lending and employed 33,775 individuals in 2022. The picture is quite mixed: on the one hand, the share of women in any management position has almost doubled over the past two decades, from 20 percent in the year 2000 to just under 40 percent in 2023. The share of women in senior management (observed for a subset of 5 IFIs) grew from around 5 percent to around 30 percent in the same period. On the other hand, not one IFI has achieved gender parity across managerial ranks. Women make up almost 70 percent of the administrative support grades, but only about 35 percent of managerial grades. Senior management positions are less diverse again, with the proportion ranging from six percent to about forty percent. When it comes to boards (appointed by shareholders rather than by the institutions themselves) the situation is even worse: fewer than one in five IFI board members are women. In the professional ranks, many IFIs are close to or even beyond parity, but men are still disproportionately likely to make it out of professional ranks into the managerial ones.
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A CGD blog. So: how do donor governments actually use their subsidies to the private sector to support mitigation and development projects around the world? The process usually starts with a private company (the project sponsor) asking a development finance institution (DFI) like the World Bank Group’s Internat…
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A CGD blog. In a new note, I suggest there’s little evidence that aid (official development assistance, or ODA) spent on climate mitigation is actually reducing emissions. That’s not to say the finance is wasted: much will have been spent on projects with considerable development impact and some, surely, reduce…
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A CGD blog. There is some good news on global climate change. The International Energy Agency suggests we are “at the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, with ‘peak fossil’ likely this decade. And the consensus amongst climate modelers appears to be that the worse scenarios historically used by the IP…
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A CGD blog. I said in an earlier blog that I thought IDA is the world’s most effective source of external finance for overall development in its poorest countries. Perhaps it’s worth setting out the evidence for that in a little more detail.
Charles Kenny 