A CGD blog. I utterly didn’t foresee the revolution in mobile internet services, and the incredibly innovative ways that it would be used. Back in 2002, 11 percent of the world’s population were internet users. Today, it is 63 percent-the considerable majority using connections over cheap mobile phones. Even in…
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. As new president Ajay Banga settles in to his position atop of the World Bank, his thoughts will be on institutional reform. Not least, the mandate he has been given to “evolve” the Bank to take on the mission of climate change. How do you redeploy 19,000 staff members in a new structure to get res….
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A paper written with Zack Gehan and Robert Kenny, forthcoming in Telecommunications Policy. Worldwide there is an ongoing policy and regulatory push to make very high speed broadband available as widely as possible. Underlying the policy interventions to support higher speeds is an implicit assumption that higher speeds will enable different (and socially valuable) use. In this paper we empirically test whether higher speed lines are associated with greater household data usage in the UK. We find that after allowing for demographic factors, higher speed in fact has a very limited relationship to traffic. This suggests that mid-speed broadband is not in fact a constraint on household usage (as measured by traffic), and thus the benefits of policy interventions to support higher speeds remain somewhat speculative.
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A CGD blog. I have already suggested some of what I’d like to see in UK party political manifestos on the topic of global development, and while some of that is outside the remit of a paper that apparently won’t discuss overall funding levels or institutional arrangements, there’s still a lot left. It would be …
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A CGD blog. A number of aid advocates have started (re)using the fear of migration flows to drum up support for increased, or at least sustained, development and climate finance. Their argument is that such finance will reduce migration flows that we should support and protect prosperous and sustainable econom…
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This was an evidence submission to the UK Parliament's International Development Committee. I argue that while BII (British International Investment) has been a leader amongst development finance institutions (DFIs) in important respects, and has a strong staff and management focused on improving development outcomes, it still suffers from constraints that limit the impact of DFIs as a whole in supporting sustainable development, especially in the poorest countries. Like other DFIs, BII is unable to mobilize significant capital by crowding in private finance to its investments, its efforts to create new markets for private finance have had limited success and its use of subsidized capital has been inefficient.
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A CGD blog. The post-conference statement from the recently concluded Paris Summit for A New Global Financing Pact undercuts the calculations at the core of the idea we could take billions of multilateral finance and ODA to mobilize trillions of private investment for climate and development. If the Paris Summi…
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A CGD blog. An interesting paper (and podcast) by Francis Fukuyama and Michael Bennon look at China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and recent debt distress in BRI project countries, building on work by Scott Morris and co-authors that examined 100 Chinese debt contracts with foreign governments. BRI has invol…
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A CGD blog. Subsequent statements and declarations made it fairly clear that all $100 billion was meant to be new and additional -presumably ‘new and additional’ to existing financial transfers to developing countries. But there is no consensus definition of “new and additional climate finance.” That raises th….
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A CGD blog. In the fight for more capital for climate at the World Bank Group, we should focus on the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development alone.
Charles Kenny 