A CGD blog. What’s the best way for a think tank fellow to demonstrate they’re washed up? Say there’s no need for new policy. And yet… This year, donors will negotiate the replenishment of the World Bank’s soft lending arm, IDA. World Bank president Ajay Banga wants to the replenishment amount to be the bigge…
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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A CGD blog. The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group has just issued a “Focused Assessment” of the IDA Private Sector Window, looking at the PSW’s first five years of operation. The PSW, launched in 2018, uses $5.6 billion of World Bank IDA financing to subsidize IFC and MIGA investments in the private sec…
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A CGD blog. More than 60 countries have data localization measures in place that restrict or prohibit the flow of certain types of data across their borders to other jurisdictions. A new CGD working paper by David Medine makes clear that these restrictions may have their greatest impact on smaller economies inc…
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A CGD blog. This year’s, COP, the big UN climate conference, opened with the Independent High-Level Expert Group in Climate Finance saying trillions of dollars were required annually for developing countries to meet climate goals, the ONE campaign documenting that donors had utterly failed to deliver on their e…
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A CGD blog with Eeshani Kandpal. Multilateral Development Banks say that diversity matters to development. But how do these institutions perform when it comes to their own staff do they lead by example? Sadly, looking at gender equality in particular, the picture is still mixed.
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A CGD blog. For all of the well-advertised risks of overdependence on subsoil assets, they are an important source of government revenues and well-renumerated employment for a number of low- and middle-income countries. But a global economy moving towards low-carbon production is going to dramatically shift dem…
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A speech at the Oxford Martin School. Richer countries are rapidly ageing and productivity is stagnating. Meanwhile, industry – the motor for rapid economic development in the past – employs ever fewer people worldwide. And yet there is still hope for greater, and shared, global prosperity. Declining working age populations in rich countries are demanding ever-more services. A rising, increasingly educated working age population in lower income economies can provide them. This is an immense, mutually beneficial opportunity to create a new development model, and a new model for development assistance. Aid for economic growth traditionally tried to foster the expansion of export-oriented industrial employment in recipient countries through physical investment. In the future, it can foster the expansion of expatriate employment through skills partnerships.
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A CGD Working Paper with Zack Gehan. In absolute dollar amounts official development assistance (ODA) reached an all-time high in 2021. But as a percentage of recipient country GDP, aid (and broader public investment) flows have been declining for some time. This paper looks at the scale of ODA and official financial flows (including multilateral flows) in comparison to donor and recipient GDP, and suggests some scenarios for the range of flows going forward, as well as examining the potential share of resources taken by climate finance. It concludes that there is a non-trivial chance that ODA for non-humanitarian and climate finance falls in absolute terms over the coming years and that aid becomes increasingly focused on richer countries. In terms of increasing aid available, the most promising strategy for bilateral ODA flows may be to increase the generosity of traditional donors but for broader finance for international development, and particularly multilateral finance, increasing the range of donors may have a larger payoff. This will be necessary, because demand for multilateral finance is likely to rise.
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A CGD Working Paper with Brian Webster and Ranil Dissanayake. We develop a simple empirical model of sector employment and output shares which, coupled with long-term projections of GDP per capita, provide indicative projections of the evolution and peak of manufacturing in lower income countries to 2050. These indicative projections suggest that cross-country income convergence will continue despite manufacturing peaking as a share of output. This forecast might seem implausible: countries have historically developed and become rich by shifting the composition of their production into manufacturing (and eventually out of manufacturing and into services). But we argue there is reason to think that this is a realistic possibility. First, we argue that there is the potential for a significant relocation of the global manufacturing base in the next two decades that are not fully captured in forecast estimates. Second, notwithstanding this potential relocation, we argue that the role of manufacturing as the unique path to prosperity has likely been overstated. We make the case for cautious, conditional optimism.
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A CGD blog. International finance is under considerable pressure: originally prioritized toward economic growth in poorer countries, it is now meant to deliver broad-based sustainable development including global public goods such as climate and pandemic response-to say nothing of refugee hosting costs. In a fu…
Charles Kenny 