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.
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 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…
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A CGD blog. Chinese construction firms have captured a lot of the market in many developing countries and perhaps especially in African countries. By one estimate, they accounted for 31 percent of all construction projects in Africa with a value of $50m or more in 2020.
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A CGD Working Paper with Amanda Glassman and George Yang. At the start of 2022, profound inequities in the pace of access to COVID-19 vaccines and the level of coverage of COVID-19 vaccination remain, especially with regard to the world’s poorest countries. Yet despite this inequity, we find that global COVID-19 vaccine development and diffusion has been the most rapid in history, and this rapid scale-up is evident not only in high-income countries but also in upper- and lower-middle-income countries, home to the majority of the world’s population. This paper explores the historical record in the development and deployment of vaccines globally and puts the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in that context. Although far more can be done and should be done to speed equitable access to vaccines in the COVID-19 response, it is worth noting the revolutionary speed of both the vaccine development and the diffusion process, and the potential good news that this signals for the future of pandemic preparedness and response.
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A CGD blog with Amanda Glassman. The reaction to COVID-19 has been record-breaking. Today we release a paper that reports on the development and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in historical perspective, and it suggests a pattern of unparalleled, but still deeply inequitable, progress.
