A CGD Note. LICs are not only home to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, they are also fragile states at high risk of conflict, with limited capacity to provide global public goods from security to biodiversity and pandemic control. Providing coordinated support in areas from finance through market access and migration opportunities, the G20 could accelerate LIC progress towards comparative prosperity, self-reliance and stability to considerable global benefit.
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 Sanjeev Gupta. As the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings get underway, five CGD experts lay out what they’re paying attention to, from sovereign debt swaps to US comments about IMF mission creep.
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A CGD blog with Markus Goldstein. The United States-long the world’s largest provider of lifesaving assistance and the largest humanitarian donor to many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa-saw a sharp reversal in early 2025. The US administration imposed a temporary funding freeze, cancelled most assistance awards, and clos…
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A CGD blog with Ramona Godbole. After months of devastating news about cuts to US global health programming, the Trump administration’s America First Global Health Strategy presents some grounds for optimism. It signals continued US commitment to global health, including the delivery of lifesaving assistance, alongside containing …
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A CGD blog with Helen Dempster. Since January, the United States has adopted a range of foreign economic policies with negative impacts on the rest of the world, including higher tariffs on exports, taxes on remittances, and reductions in US foreign assistance. We construct a ranking assessing the combined impact of these changes:…
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A CGD blog. This week in New York, foundations that work in global development are busy discussing their role in a changed world. I think they have a critical role, but it is a role that acknowledges, advertises and responds to their limits. They can and should help directly save some of the lives and services …
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
Charles Kenny 