A CGD Note. In short: we want lots of investment in developing countries; it has to be financially sustainable; direct private project investment is very expensive, indirect private finance through multilateral development banks is a lot cheaper; so scaling through WB/AfDB/ADB/IADB is the sustainable (affordable) model.
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 MCC is particular about which countries it supports. Among the requirements, Ukraine passes the agency’s (important and legitimate) hurdle that it only works in the world’s low- and lower-middle-income countries. It also passes a lot of other tests the MCC lays out for support, based on a scorec…
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A co-authored Foreign Affairs piece with Scott Morris. The US should leave infrastructure to the World Bank and 'compete' bilaterally with China on human rather than physical capital.
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Co-authored CGD working paper with George Yang. We present data on the global diffusion of technologies over time, updating and adding to Comin and Mestieri’s "CHAT" database. We analyze usage primarily based on per capita measures and divide technologies into the two broad categories of production and consumption. We conclude that there has been strong convergence in use of consumption technologies with somewhat slower and more partial convergence in production technologies. This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income, but we note that universal convergence in use of production technologies is not required for income convergence (only that countries are approaching the technology frontier in the goods and services that they produce). Dataset here.
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A CGD blog with Samuel Huckstep. In this piece, we explore how training combined with mobility could play a big role in creating the required skills needed- and we offer recommendations to policymakers to pursue this two-pronged plan.
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A CGD blog with Euan Ritchie. In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.
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A CGD blog. It’s Davos week, so I just checked… and I qualify for writing a global “we are the 99 percent” blog! Indeed, my household is actually all the way toward the bottom end of the 99th income percentile worldwide (the lower cutoff is around $200,000 for a family of four). So, what do I think the 1 perc…
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With Scott Morris in Foreign Policy. Only 3.9 percent of US foreign assistance is actually executed by recipient country governments. Take out Jordan and that's less than one percent. Pathetic and diplomatically counter-productive.
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A CGD blog. The idea that shavings of public gold sprinkled like fairy dust on private investment projects would bring to life a giant array of infrastructure and services which in turn would gift us wondrous progress in development hasn’t worked out. It is time to drop the fantasy and focus instead on the test…
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A CGD blog. On March 14-15th, the US National Academies hosted a discussion on Africa-US science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) university partnerships, as part of an effort to design a new partnership mechanism. The program opened with representatives from African institutions talking about their ex…
Charles Kenny 