A CGD blog. Official Development Assistance (ODA) isn’t what it used to be: each aid dollar is worth a lot less in terms of development outcomes. In large part that’s because the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the donor club within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that …
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 management’s Evolution Roadmap suggests the institution is reconsidering its ‘twin goals’ mission statement of eradicating extreme poverty (ending $2.15 poverty by 2030) and boosting shared prosperity (raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country). It is reassuring tha…
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A CGD Working Paper. Julian Simon argued that more people were associated with more prosperity: human talents were the “ultimate resource” and the force behind rising living standards. The last 30 years have been consistent with that view. But, globally, we are making fewer workers—and, more importantly, fewer potential innovators. In rich countries, human capital is growing considerably more slowly than in the past. Meanwhile innovation per researcher appears to be dropping as the population of researchers ages, while it takes longer to get to the knowledge frontier and more collaboration to expand it. Combined with the fact we are increasingly intolerant of risk and increasingly desirous of innovations in sectors where it is particularly hard to increase productivity, it is little surprise that productivity growth is indeed declining. To extend our two-century era of comparatively rapid progress, we need radically reduced discrimination in the global opportunity to innovate.
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A CGD blog. At the Annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF last year, shareholders asked the World Bank to come up with a set of proposals to evolve a larger role in climate and other global public goods. The Bank’s first response came pretty quick: by mid December, only a couple of months after the request, …
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A CGD blog. Late last year, the World Bank Group issued a roadmap on its potential evolution in response to shareholder pressure at this year’s Bank-Fund annual meetings. The roadmap document has been widely shared with member governments. As reported by Reuters and Devex on the basis of leaked copies, it propo…
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Technology and trade can ensure water scarcity is not a constraint on progress. In PERC Reports.
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A CGD blog. What’s to love about the Effective Altruism movement (beyond the fact that it is a bunch of people who are committed to working to make things better for others) is that it thinks about everybody worldwide equally when looking for problems to solve. What’s to love a little less is that, when it come…
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A CGD blog. It’s important that the upcoming US-Africa Leaders Summit focuses on much more than aid and security. The Biden administration should say a lot about US financial flows to the region and how they will be improved, but summit commitments must go far beyond that.
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This is an *old* paper (2012) that I submitted to CGD for peer review and it got shot down. I can’t remember why, and I re-used some of the material in Results not Receipts but it has some interesting data in it and I still think I broadly agree with it so, with that caveat lector, here it is. For many donors throughout most of their history, the major assistance model has involved the tool of the investment project. This is based on a theory of aid and development that the key constraint facing developing countries seeking rapid growth is lack of investment and that donor financing to overcome that ‘investment gap’ can be overseen through the project process to ensure that it is efficiently spent to generate high returns. In reality, filling an ‘investment gap’ is neither an empirically well justified nor a practically well-implemented aid strategy. Furthermore, procurement oversight mechanisms appear to be doing a poor job at ensuring the average effectiveness of an investment portfolio in a country is significantly enhanced, or transferring knowledge, or building institutions. The procurement-focused project investment model should be limited in use to in cases where (i) a project design is significantly innovative and/or delivers regional or global public goods and/or aid is a large percentage of country investment and no agreement can be reached between donors and government on overall investment priorities in that country and (ii) alternate project approaches like output-based or cash on delivery models are deemed inappropriate.
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A CGD blog. The IFC isn’t finding more private sector projects to support in IDA countries even with the backing of both PSW financing and retained earnings used to hire more staff to look for projects. Absent actual projects to invest in, PSW resources are increasingly committed to regional and global faciliti…
Charles Kenny 