A CGD blog. Our new paper forecasts global structural transformation over the next thirty years. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that it suggests the planetary shift toward services employment and out of both agriculture and manufacturing will continue. But it does suggest something many find might novel …
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. World Bank president Ajay Banga’s declared strategy is to lead with a better bank before pushing for a bigger bank. I hope it works. His shoutout to the dribs of finance offered by Germany and the US toward guarantees and hybrid capital in his Annual Meetings speech today only served to emphasize ho…
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A CGD blog. As the World Bank and IMF meetings wrap up in Morocco, hopes for an imminent revolution in multilateral finance look forlorn. A dollar of capital can support five dollars of lending at the IBRD and the costs of subsidized finance for the poorest countries through IDA are shared amongst more than fif…
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A CGD blog with Karen Mathiasen. Next week, finance ministers and other officials from around the world will descend on Marrakech for the World Bank and IMF annual meetings. Read on for a range of quick reactions from CGD’s experts on what will happen next week, and what should happen-and how we get from one to the other.
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A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. This blog outlines the potential impacts on both earnings and carbon emissions from expanding skilled migration to support the green transition.
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A CGD blog. The likelihood of capital increase for the World Bank’s non-concessional lending arm, the IBRD, appears to be climbing. At least an odd European government appears to be doing some preparatory work for it. But any negotiations around a capital increase may be complex. Large shareholders and borrowe….
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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…
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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 …
Charles Kenny 