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 Ian Mitchell. As the possibility of a new Cold War between the US and China gains traction in some foreign policy circles, the scale of Chinese development finance has taken center stage. A closer examination suggests the cost to China of this lending is distinctly underwhelming. It would be cheap for the US and …
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On the fact we're a nation of immigrants worried about immigration. In the Dallas Morning News.
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A CGD blog. The UK is about to merge development and diplomacy in a single department: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about that, but CGD colleagues have pointed out some opportunities as well. One area where combining the talents of DFID and Foreig…
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A CGD blog with Charles Kenny. We need to move forward-or backward-in what we expect development finance institutions (DFIs) to do in terms of financing private sector development in the world’s poorest countries.
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A CGD blog with Prashant Yadav. Policy forged at pace and during extreme circumstances will often leave something wanting. We want more resilient supply chains, but we shouldn’t sacrifice the benefits that existing supply chains have created, nor should we needlessly penalize developing countries in the race for resilience.
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A CGD blog. Over the last sixty years, we have seen many changes in what constitutes a “rich” country, but little difference in what counts as a poor country requiring significant development assistance. While donor status appears more closely tied to relative income, significant recipient status appears to hav…
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For Slate. Title says it all.
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A CGD policy paper with Euan Ritchie and Lee Robinson. This paper outlines the broad rationale for approaches beyond patents to support the development of technologies specifically useful to developing countries and the role for aid-funded approaches within that. It outlines some of the mechanisms that can be used and summarizes their strengths and weaknesses. The exercise suggests the need for an ecosystem of support mechanisms, and a concluding section asks how the United Kingdom’s official development assistance (ODA) for R&D could better support such an ecosystem. The UK government has committed to establishing a new institution to fund non-ODA R&D, modelled on the Advanced Research Projects Agency. We talk about how a similar model would work for development-orientated research, and what amendments may need to be made to ensure ODA-funded R&D reaches its potential. (see also the policy brief on our conclusions of the research overall. Bottom line: ODA for R&D is good, how the UK is spending it is bad).
Charles Kenny 