A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. COP27, just concluded in Sharm El-Sheikh, was dubbed the ‘implementation COP’ by its Egyptian hosts. But it’s very difficult to implement without workers. The COP27 agreement emphasises that a “just and equitable transition” must include “workforce and other dimensions.” This short, vague language c…
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 Open Contracting movement, pushing to make government procurement worldwide considerably more transparent and efficient, has been a huge success. Today, more than 50 countries and cities are implementing policy changes from open electronic bid processes and publishing contracts to posting inspec…
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A CGD blog. Last month, I spent an enjoyable if fractious couple of days in Vienna, taking part in a meeting of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime 2nd Task Force on the Measurement of Corruption. The task force is meant to help the office “define and refine methodologies for measuring corruption and to formulate …
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A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. The UK currently has a shortage of nearly 47,000 nurses in the NHS a Global Skill Partnership could help solve NHS staff shortages. The UK will gain much-needed skilled nurses at a cheaper cost than if they had been trained in the US, while the sending country benefits from nurse training that cove…
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A CGD note. The long run global estimates of climate impact on GDP are small. That hides the fact that there are big volatility shocks and impacts are concentrated in poorer countries. And that matters a lot for policy response.
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A CGD Working Paper with George Yang. There is considerable interest in increasing private participation in infrastructure to meet the twin goals of climate mitigation and development in low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, this infrastructure needs to make returns in order to be financially sustainable. This paper reviews evidence on the economics of infrastructure investment and the role of human capital and uses two approaches to provide additional evidence on the link between human capital and infrastructure returns: (i) using estimated returns to individual World Bank infrastructure projects and their relationship to country levels of human capital and (ii) broader approaches linking the macroeconomic impact of infrastructure investment in the presence of varying human capital stocks.
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A CGD blog. It is worth emphasizing that a healthy population is needed to produce the workforce that will generate economic returns from new infrastructure capacity. The relationship between health and economic dynamism runs in both directions, and that includes with infrastructure.
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A CGD blog. The kind of investment sustainability that’s getting the most love at the moment is environmental sustainability: we want our buildings, machines, and infrastructure to be low carbon (as we should). But financial sustainability still matters, too: if they are to be a success, solar power plants and …
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A CGD blog. It is surely an urgent moment for multilateral support from the IMF and World Bank. And yet, the institutions’ financial statements suggest that support is declining. Figuring out why and what to do about it should be priority one at the upcoming World Bank-IMF annual meetings.
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A CGD blog. Once you’ve looked at policy as a source of societal progress and regress, especially over the long term, it is hard to look at anything else. As a result, I hope ever-more people in the EA community in town this week decide to work in government, or work on making government work better.
Charles Kenny 