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.
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 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.
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Three years ago I wrote a 'novel'. Even got as far as getting an agent, and by golly my timing was good. It was a story about a new infectious disease spreading worldwide and the bungling US response. But in the end what the process demonstrated is that I should probably stick to non-fiction. If you can't sell umbrellas when the skies are fast-darkening, maybe it says something about your umbrellas. One editor's response from January 2020: "I thought the story had a certain resonance that might appeal to readers worried about real-world pandemics, but I didn’t always feel the plot had a fresh enough hook." That was kind: there are parts that I already cringe at having written. Still, I find it of minor personal historical interest, –not least that there were things I though were stretching plausibility in fiction that turned out to happen in real life a few months later. Here it is.
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A CGD blog. We look at the challenges that Europe faces with an aging population, and ask if the challenges that Africa faces with a burgeoning working-age population might be a mutually beneficial part of the answer. We think they might, but the scale of migration under “business as usual” is grossly…
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For Foreign Policy. More equitable vaccination, new vaccines, more sustainable power, India will be the world's largest country, renewed economic growth and some hope for tigers.
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A CGD blog. The Updated International Health Regulations Need Better Rules for Travel Restrictions
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A CGD blog with Scott Morris. While hopes for mobilizing private finance for climate response were boosted by the investment firms managing a collective $130 trillion who signed onto net zero pledges at the COP, actually getting the private trillions to move south remains a huge challenge. And two leading proposals point to the …
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A CGD blog. The world’s poorest countries-those classified as low- and lower-middle-income-contribute just one seventh of global emissions despite being home to half of the global population. A just solution to these countries’ dual challenges of climate change and development should be a central concern of the…
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A CGD blog. This is the seventh in a series of blogs looking at regional aspects of future global demographic and migration patterns discussed in my paper Global Mobility: Confronting A World Workforce Imbalance. You can read other blogs in the series here.
Charles Kenny 