Charles Kenny

A CGD blog. The ban’s effects will encompass families split apart, jobs opportunities lost, businesses unfounded, and trade and investment deals unsigned. Fewer kids will go to school, others will get sick.

A CGD blog. In December, UN Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher launched an appeal for 2026 humanitarian funding, reporting that in 2025 “hunger surged… millions went without essential food, healthcare and protection.” He suggested that in 2026, by focusing on those in greatest need, the global humanitarian syste…

A CGD blog. In February last year, the White House issued an Executive Order for a State Department review of international organizations, conventions, and treaties to which the United States was a party, in order to exit those it considered “contrary to the interests of the United States.” On January 7, a Pre….

A CGD blog. Three recent papers make the point that we need higher standards and more gradation in our views of global poverty than the World Bank’s extreme poverty line (now set at $3.00) allows, and suggest solutions. But I think they also demonstrate no single metric will achieve all of what we want from a p…

A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. In this blog, we report on an update to our earlier estimates of the potential mortality impacts of the administration’s aid cuts. A similar approach to our original estimates using financial data to the end of the fiscal year suggests that lives lost based on the decline in outlays may be in the ra…

A CGD blog. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation’s scorecard system has long included flawed measures around governance and corruption, but reforms this year have made the impact of these indicators even worse, ensuring scorecards systematically discriminate against the poorest countries where MCC’s support …

A CGD blog. The first year of the second Trump administration has seen a broad assault on global flows of goods, services, finance, and people, with an outsize impact on low- and middle-income countries. As a side effect of some of these policies and the direct intent of others, these actions have had a particu…

Aid Isn’t Fairy Dust is a CGD note. Long-term changes and the lessons of the past decade suggest rhetoric around what aid can accomplish needs to be dialed down. It is largely macroeconomically irrelevant in middle-income countries and has a weak record in leveraging or crowding in other resources. But aid still has a vital role to play in the poorest countries, and this is where we should spend it.

A CGD Policy Paper. The World Bank has “ambitious” climate targets that have been accompanied by a growing proportion of its lending being labeled as climate finance. At the same time, the way that finance is defined makes it difficult to know how different the World Bank’s portfolio would look absent a climate finance target. Similarly, the World Bank has introduced a shadow price of carbon (SPC) for use in project analysis, but it does not advertise cases (if any) where the use of the SPC has changed investment choices or project design. This paper takes a brief look at the World Bank’s lending portfolio as well as the economic analysis sections of recent World Bank project appraisal documents to see if they can provide any evidence on the question, “do climate targets and carbon prices change the portfolio?” The answer to “can they provide evidence’ is “suggestive at best.” But while there is some evidence of some impact, there are also reasons to doubt it is large.