A CGD working paper with George Yang. There will be 95 million fewer working-age people in Europe in 2050 than in 2015, under business as usual. This will cause significant fiscal stress as well as slower economic growth. Potential responses include: (a) raising labor force participation by women and older workers; (b) automation; and (c) outsourcing. But none will be sufficient. This leaves immigration: while migrants create demand for jobs as well as fill them, they can help rebalance the ratio of working to non-working populations. The paper compares business as usual estimates of inflows to 2050 with the size of the labor gap in Europe. Under plausible estimates, business as usual will fill one-third of the labor gap. This suggests a need for an urgent shift if Europe is to avoid an aging crisis. Africa is the obvious source of immigrants, to mutual benefit. Here's a short video presenting the paper.
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 benefits to expanded vaccination programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) simply dwarf the cost. Rich countries should be donating more vaccines faster to poorer countries. It is difficult to think of a more urgent global priority and it is surely a best buy in international developm…
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A CGD blog with Charles Kenny. Government leaders worldwide are trumpeting the need for greater equality in the workplace. That’s the correct thing to do on the grounds of both rights and efficiency, but those leaders might want to start by looking within their own organizations. Today we publish a new policy paper that stu…
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A CGD Policy Paper with Ugonma Nwankwo and Megan O'Donnell. We look at available sources to ask (i) Where is data available on employment and wages allowing for comparisons between women and men, and the public and private sectors? (ii) How do women’s employment, compensation, and seniority compare with men’s in the public and private sectors? (iii) How do gender gaps vary by countries’ income level, education levels, and other factors? What are the policy implications of the data we analyze? (iv) Which countries’ efforts can be modeled by others, and how else can global gender gaps in employment and compensation be narrowed? We suggest the Open Government Partnership as a promising platform through which governments can commit to increased transparency around disaggregated employment and wage data, in turn improving policy decision-making aimed at closing gender gaps (or those rooted in other forms of inequality and discrimination). We suggest the Open Government Partnership as a promising platform through which governments can commit to increased transparency around disaggregated employment and wage data, in turn improving policy decision-making aimed at closing gender gaps (or those rooted in other forms of inequality and discrimination).
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A CGD blog. Recently, my colleague Clemence Landers argued that International Development Association (IDA), the largest source of concessional loans and grant finance for the world’s poorest countries, needs to “go big” in its next replenishment.
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Your World, Better: Global Progress and What You Can Do About It is a book written for the smart and engaged middle school student. It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader's parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression. It talks about the things that have gotten better, the sometimes-intensifying challenges that remain, and what readers can do about them.
Your World Better is optimistic, but it doesn’t shy away from the considerable problems we face: from inequality through discrimination and depression to climate change and infectious threats. It is meant to encourage kids to help make the world better themselves: tip them from a sense of powerlessness toward action, not into complacency.
The pdf of Your World Better is available to download here for free. Or you can buy a kindle version for 99 cents or a hard copy for $8.10 on Amazon (or six pounds on UK Amazon here). Any author royalties from those sales will be donated to UNICEF (so far, a bit more than $800 has been donated, thanks!). I talk about the book to Marian Tupy for the Human Progress podcast and to two (fantastic) middle schoolers for NPR. Then I did a Slack chat with five middle schoolers for Slate. A CGD discussion about the book and talking to children about progress is here. And here's a fifteen minute video about the book (or try it on Youtube). I am happy for the *text* (not pictures) to be copied or redistributed in any medium, and/or remixed or transformed for any purpose, with attribution.
"Everyone, no matter how old, or how young, should read this. I’m sending to grandkids and their parents." –Nancy Birdsall
"Great read for middle school kids who want to understand how the world is getting better — and can become even more so!" –Parag Khanna
"How can you pass up a free book?! And one that is so relevant for today? If you know a middle school student or teacher, pass this along! Incredibly fresh and honest." –Karen Schulte
"Kids are taught that everything's getting worse and we're all doomed–factually incorrect, and a message that leads to cynicism & fatalism, not constructive action. An antidote: Charles Kenny's new Your World, Better…" –Steven Pinker
I should note and apologize for two errors: my grandfather fought in France and Germany, not Italy, during World War Two, and one cup of Frosties has eleven grams not eleven ounces (!) of sugar.
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A CGD Working Paper with Megan O'Donnell Mayra Buvinic Shelby Bourgault George Yang. When health crises like COVID-19 emerge, the shocks to economic, social, and health systems can have different implications for women and girls, with gendered impacts across various dimensions of wellbeing. This paper, part of a series documenting the gendered impacts of the pandemic, focuses on women’s economic empowerment. It begins with a conceptual framework illustrating how the pandemic, associated response measures, economic contraction and different coping strategies intersect with underlying gender norms and inequality in ways that differentially affect the wellbeing of women and girls. It then synthesizes the existing evidence on how the COVID-19 crisis and associated response measures have impacted women’s paid and unpaid work, entrepreneurship, and earnings across sectors in low- and middle-income countries. The paper proceeds to outline economic response measures from national governments and multilateral development banks and the extent to which gender inequalities have been considered in these measures to date. The paper concludes with recommendations aimed at donors and policymakers to ensure the COVID-19 recovery does not exacerbate pre-existing gender gaps in the economy.
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A CGD note with Ian Mitchell and Atousa Tahmasebi. As ministers and officials meet in the coming year, they will make new financing commitments on climate and promise to ensure all of their activities are “Paris-compatible”—against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Any new commitments on climate finance will need to balance existing development challenges with the pressing need to tackle climate-related risks. This note outlines a set of principles to guide climate-related commitments so that they do more for both climate and development.
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A CGD blog with Euan Ritchie. There is not enough ODA to cope adequately with existing development challenges, and yet it is now being charged with funding a large share of donor country commitments toward global climate finance. We think it should be doubled.
Charles Kenny 