A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. The World Bank’s evolution roadmap calls for the institution to reform and grow in response to global challenges and in particular climate change. But if the World Bank wants to do more on climate, it will also need to do more on migration-a topic only mentioned in passing. Successive briefings to t…
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 dialogue around World Bank reform proposals has been dominated by Northern voices. But in the last week, representatives of World Bank Group client countries both based in the city and visiting for the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings have helped to rebalance the discussion.
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A CGD blog. The world has never been more educated, our populations more connected. Technological advance in areas from solar and fusion power through batteries to satellites and cancer vaccines will help deliver sustained development. Ending extreme ($2.15 a day) poverty, while long overdue, is on a trajectory…
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A CGD blog. The World Bank shouldn’t become a dedicated climate bank: that’s not what its client countries want, and the global development agenda (the D in IBRD and IDA) is still urgent. But, with additional finance, the Bank could play an important part in the global response to the climate challenge. That sh…
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A CGD blog with Ian Mitchell. In the next few weeks, the OECD will release its estimate of ODA-Official Development Assistance-provided by member countries, and will no doubt claim yet another record high. But this inflated measure has lost its credibility, in large part because its definition is governed solely by ODA-providing…
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A CGD blog. I’m very grateful to Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, for his discussion of Zack Gehan and my paper on future growth forecasts and poverty in 2050. There is much to agree with in his analysis, but I’d disagree with his statement “our focus should be on….
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A CGD blog. In a recent note, Zack Gehan and I used a database of World Bank projects to examine the association between World Bank project types and environmental review procedures and project preparation times. We found that policy lending projects are significantly faster to design, while projects that under…
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A CGD Working Paper with Zack Gehan. We develop scenarios for the shape of the global economy in 2050 building on a simple regression of the historic relationship between current income and lagged income, demographic features, climate, and education, using the coefficients to develop a “central” forecast and error terms to set high and low bounds on country outcomes. Scenarios examine combinations of low and high outcomes for different country groupings. “Central” forecasts suggest slowing per capita growth rates for high income countries as well as many upper middle income countries including China, with continued global income convergence. Scenario exercises suggest the potential for considerable variation in outcomes including global share of the economy and voting power in international institutions..
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A CGD blog. Forecasts of the future shape of the global economy, if they are at least somewhat accurate, can help planning and policy discussions in areas from global governance through business expansion plans. At the same time, this relies on forecasts in fact being somewhat accurate, and it’s a cliche that p…
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A CGD blog. The Sustainable Development Goals commit the world to ending extreme poverty by 2030. More cautiously, the World Bank’s twin goals suggest it can help reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. Neither goal can be accomplished unless the extreme poverty line is (finally) fixed rather than constant…
Charles Kenny 