A CGD blog. This is the second of 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. The first blog in the series focused on East Asia.
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. East Asia’s miracle countries are the stuff of both economic legend and considerable debate. One part of the story may be demographics: East Asia saw rising life expectancy and declining birth rates that dramatically, if temporarily, increased the proportion of the population that was of working age…
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A GCD Policy Paper with Todd Moss and Mohamed Rali Badissy. The purpose of a nation’s power sector is to deliver reliable electricity at the lowest cost and for the greatest benefit. At the heart of any private electricity generation project is a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), a contract that contains key provisions such as price, payment stipulations, and obligations by the offtaker utility and/or host-government. Despite their significant effects on service quality and public finances, these contracts are often negotiated and signed in secret, with even the most basic terms shielded from the citizenry. This opacity has created risks and, in a growing number of cases, contributed to costly and damaging outcomes, such as overpayment, overcapacity, large debts, and grid instability. Drawing on examples from enhanced transparency in public budgets, sovereign debt, and extractive industries, we propose that governments agree to publish PPAs with any public sector obligation and that funders of private generation projects also agree to minimum disclosure standards. The objective is to create incentives for better practice, improve governance of the power sector, reduce transaction costs, and ultimately, to deliver cheaper and more reliable power for people and businesses. Transparency of PPAs would support the efforts of government policymakers and planners, investors, and development finance institutions to accelerate energy market development and to reap the benefits of open competition. Greater disclosure would also provide crucial information for citizens to hold their own governments accountable for the contracts they sign on behalf of the public.
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A CGD blog with Todd Moss. In 2019, Ghana paid an estimated $620 million for electricity that the country did not need or use. That’s a sign of the damage done by secret deals for power.
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A CGD blog. If your toolbox is overflowing with precision guided munitions, the problems you will focus on are ones that (arguably) can be solved with precision guided munitions. Our comparatively tepid response to the pandemic is another sign of the longstanding and excessive prioritization of potential violen…
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A CGD note. Donors vary considerably in how much they focus their spending on poorer countries. There are good reasons to believe that the utility-maximizing allocation is focused heavily on the world’s poorest countries, where an extra dollar is likely to make the greatest difference to welfare. However, donors may also allocate resources towards humanitarian causes: particularly seeing disadvantaged subgroups within countries including refugees fleeing violence or natural disasters as deserving particular attention. In addition, donors might believe their aid will achieve more in democratic or ‘well governed’ countries. Perhaps less legitimately, donors might prefer to allocate more aid to countries with closer political or economic ties: ex-colonies, allies, supporters in the UN, or trade partners. Similarly, they might choose to focus their aid on the ‘near abroad,’ as a tool of diplomacy or reflecting higher immediate self-interest. This paper uses some of the indicators highlighted as significant by that literature to examine if they can help explain the variation in poverty focus of donor aid.
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A CGD blog with George Yang. John Norris’ fascinating new book The Enduring Struggle: The History of the US Agency for International Development, provides an authoritative history of US foreign assistance from the end of the Second World War until today. It is packed with anecdotes and quotes from people who were working on pro…
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A CGD blog. If B3W is to be the better Belt and Road, it will have to embrace the role of government in infrastructure provision and ensure private sector infrastructure projects are designed and run in the public interest. Otherwise, and despite the denials-, low- and middle-income countries would be right to …
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A CGD note. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is in the process of a considerable transformation, designed to grow its operations and expand their development impact. This paper discusses the rationale and elements of a continuing change agenda, focused on ensuring the IFC best serves its ultimate clients –people in developing countries.
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Both CGD notes with George Yang. "New Estimates of the Impact of COVID-19 on Women’s Jobs and Enterprises" estimates majority women owned and equally owned firms were 1.4 times as likely to close during 2020 than majority men-owned firms. "The Global Childcare Workload from School and Preschool Closures During the COVID-19 Pandemic" estimates school and preschool closures created the need for 672 billion hours of additional unpaid childcare in 2020 through October. If the global care split was similar to that prior to COVID-19, it would suggest 173 additional unpaid childcare in 2020 per working age (15-64) woman, and 59 additional hours for men.
Charles Kenny 