A CGD blog with Dev Patel. Americans have three choices regarding the low-paying, often hazardous jobs most don’t want: keep foreign labor here, continue to import the needed products, or use robots. To pretend otherwise is doing everyone a disservice.
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 Dev Patel. The Trump administration has imposed a number of entry restrictions through executive order, justifying them on national security grounds. But one additional set of concerns regards the economic costs of tightening visa restrictions, which can be considerable even when looking solely at tempora…
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A CGD blog with Rajesh Mirchandani. Kellyanne Conway called him a man of action after a whirlwind first week in which President Trump signed 14 Executive Orders and presidential memoranda, covering most of his key campaign issue areas from health to immigration to trade. In a series of blogs, CGD experts h…
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A CGD Policy Paper with Kim Elliott and Janeen Madan. While the misuse of antimicrobials in human health is a key factor accelerating the emergence of drug resistance, we should not overlook the role of agriculture. In the livestock sector, a significant portion of antimicrobials are provided in subtherapeutic doses over long periods of time to speed growth and prevent disease, rather than to treat illness. Currently, the United States and countries across Europe are major users of antimicrobials in livestock, but there is rapid growth in key developing countries. Following the recent discovery of a bacterial gene in pigs and people that conveys resistance to a last resort antibiotic drug, addressing agriculture’s contribution to antimicrobial resistance is more urgent. Moreover, the fact that the gene was discovered within a relatively short time in both China and the United States underscores the global nature of the problem. Drug resistant superbugs do not respect borders. To date, however, there has been little concrete action at the global level.
This paper makes the case for a global treaty to reduce antimicrobial use in livestock. We propose that negotiations could begin with the two dozen or so key countries that account for the majority of global antimicrobial use in farm animals. This could help make significant inroads into the problem, even as those countries work to expand the treaty’s membership. Drawing on lessons learned from the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the paper outlines a framework for a global treaty to reduce livestock’s contribution to the health threat posed by the spread of antimicrobial resistant bacteria.
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A CGD blog with Rajesh Mirchandani. The scale of the turnout at the Women’s Marches across the world recently, along with President Trump’s early reinstatement of a ban on US funding for organizations that offer family planning services in foreign countries, seem to suggest an administration already at odds with …
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A CGD blog. The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump Administration is considering a new Executive Order that mandates cutting all funding to bodies that give full membership to the Palestinian Authority and fund abortion amongst other categories, but also suggests at least a 40 percent …
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A CGD blog with Charles Kenny. Earlier this month evidence emerged that a Nevada woman who died last September had contracted a superbug resistant to all 26 available antibiotics, including colistin, the drug of last resort. If left unchecked, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could cause up to 10 million d…
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A CGD blog. One of the questions reportedly from the Presidential transition team to the State Department was: With so much corruption in Africa, how much of our funding is stolen? During the nomination hearings for Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State, Senator Rand Paul…
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A CGD note with Megan O'Donnell, accompanied by a blog looking at the private sector's record of involving women in innovation (car companies: awful, biomed: better). It is a shocking waste of talent that women are just 15% of listed inventors on patents worldwide. There are things we could do to make that better.
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A CGD blog with Megan O’Donnell. Women account for just 15 percent of all listed inventors behind nine million patent applications across 182 countries. On current rates, we won’t achieve gender parity in inventors until around 2080. It would be in the interests of both innovative firms and the countries that house …
Charles Kenny 