A CGD blog with Vijaya Ramachandran et al. What counts as climate finance? We replicated the scraping technique of an earlier paper to look at World Bank climate projects in FY23 and FY24. It still appears that almost everything counts in small amounts: the pattern of labeling a little bit of a lot of projects as climate-focused continues.
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.
-
A CGD blog. The US Administration has made no secret of its intention to considerably reduce America’s engagement with international organizations. It has already announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and has declared it wi…
-
A CGD blog. The World Bank has issued a new procurement rule mandating that, for Bank-financed civil works contracting, bidders must allocate 30 percent or more of the total labor cost under the contract to employ local staff, unless otherwise agreed in project negotiations. The rule isn’t likely to have much e…
-
A CGD blog. The current picture of US foreign assistance suggests that the status of operations is in even worse shape than expected from the scale of the cancellation of awards announced in March and the rescissions package passed in July. Not least, obligations and payments are running considerably behind whe…
-
A CGD blog. The House Appropriations Committee has advanced a spending bill that suggests bipartisan support for continuing a similar level of global health funding next fiscal year. If realized that could help preserve the great majority of the million lives potentially at stake from the administration’s budge…
-
A CGD blog. Last week, Congress passed a rescissions package clawing back nearly $8 billion in funding for foreign assistance approved by lawmakers earlier this year. But looking at the size of the cuts alone underestimates the scale of the crisis facing US foreign assistance, where the immediate challenge is d…
-
A CGD blog. There is bipartisan concern-shared across the administration and Congress-in ensuring the US continues supporting highly effective lifesaving programs worldwide. The available evidence suggests that these programs were cut considerably less than other elements of USAID’s portfolio in the last few mo…
-
A review for the Economic Record ( word version). The good or bad news is that the World Values Survey data Norris presents suggests no strong global trend in surveyed trust in people or institutions over time.
-
A CGD blog. The process of procuring goods and services to deliver US development assistance remains shut down. June 17th marked 259 days into the 2025 fiscal year. At an equal daily rate, you’d expect cumulative new obligations across the US government at that point to be running at about 70 percent of the tot…
-
A CGD blog. China’s relationship with multilateral development institutions, including the World Bank, is of great interest to US lawmakers. In particular, there is concern over the fact that the World Bank lends to China and sometimes finances Chinese contractors to work on projects in its member countries, ev…
Charles Kenny 