Maybe… for Foreign Affairs.
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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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.
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A CGD note with Scott Morris. Rather than use aid to finance climate mitigation projects (it's the wrong instrument, mis-targeted and inadequate in scale), why not fund a World Bank and IFC capital increase: its cheaper, better targeted, more appropriate to the task, ensures common but differentiated financing, and gives the World Bank Group something useful to do in richer developing countries.
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A CGD blog with Ugonma Nwankwo. In the case of traditional knowledge, developing countries tend to be exporters rather than importers. They also tend to favor stronger protection of traditional knowledge through intellectual property laws, a position that distinctly contrasts with their calls for more flexible IP protect…
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For The Breakthrough Journal. In his Principles of Political Economy, JS Mill wrote a chapter “Of the Stationary State.” In it he argued that the need for economic growth in the richest countries had run its course. “It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.” I discuss that idea and some possible lessons for the modern degrowth movement.
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A CGD blog. One of President Biden’s foreign policy campaign commitments was to hold a “Summit of Democracies” in the first year of his presidency. While skeptics have raised valid concerns-not least which countries should appear on the guestlist- a summit could spur useful reforms at home and abroad.
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A CGD blog with Charles Kenny. Makhtar Diop, former minister of finance in Senegal and current vice president for infrastructure at the World Bank, has been tapped to be the next head of the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private sector investment arm. This is welcome news: Diop’s experience and talents…
Charles Kenny 