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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Well, mostly, anyway. For @BW.
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A CGD Policy Working Paper. The total scale of incremental investment requirements in infrastructure in developing countries has been estimated at around USD 1 trillion a year, with a range of related studies suggesting numbers between $815 billion to $1.3 trillion. While all such numbers are open to considerable debate, and were not designed to measure the cost of delivering the specific SDG infrastructure targets, they suggest the likely scale of the financing challenge for an SDG agenda which includes universal coverage to adequate housing, water, sanitation, modern energy and communications technologies. The complexity of infrastructure finance in developing countries suggests that external private investment will remain a minor player in the financing of infrastructure for development. Nonetheless, reforms of development finance institutions and multilateral development banks alongside infrastructure pricing in recipient countries could considerably increase financial flows, and the Addis Financing Conference later this year could help provide the authorizing environment for such reforms.
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A CGD blog. Meeting the SDG targets for infrastructure in developing countries is going to cost around USD 1 trillion a year. With official development assistance at around $150 billion, other official flows at $27 billion, and investment in infrastructure with private involvement at about $181 billion, it…
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Slightly misleading headline. Go, just remember you'll be pretty useless, and see it as a learning experience –the start and motivation for a life of advocating or working for development. For @BW.
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A CGD blog with Owen Barder. New technologies are central to the kind of global progress outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals, and those technologies need to reach people in the developing world who can benefit from them. But technology transfer is a terrible way to think about the issues involved. …
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This CGD Policy Paper focuses on invented or created technologies of the type that could (theoretically) be subject to patents and the potential for international agreements including the Addis Financing Conference to better create and share such technologies. It discusses the nature of invented technologies and the standard policy tools used to support its development. It then addresses two separate questions related to inventions and development: ‘what is invented’ and ‘how it diffuses.’ With this background, it goes on to discuss the role of policy tools including patents, tiered pricing, research support, advance market commitments, and prizes in creating development-friendly technology. It concludes with some recommendations for language to be inserted in the Addis Declaration
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The FIFA scandal is a reminder that the size of bribes pales in comparison with the economic damage they inflict –for @BW.
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By 2030 we may have managed to eradicate being poor by the average definition two or three decades ago of the poorest 15 countries with available statistics updated by more or less reliable inflation and purchasing power numbers since then…. That's what happens when you have to change the method of calculating extreme poverty because your boss said it could be eradicated. For @BW.
[That said, should note that means in the last few years I've suggested (a) it may be possible to end extreme poverty defined as $1.25/day, which would be good; (b) that it wouldn't be good enough (c) if the SDGs are going to have the goal of ending extreme poverty we should fix the goal posts and (d) fixing the goalposts means that 'extreme poverty' will be increasingly removed from any country's actual definition of poverty…]
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A CGD blog with Amanda Glassman. After a successful replenishment earlier this year, the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is thinking through how to maximize the impact of the money it has raised. One hot issue is graduation from Gavi support. Currently, the Alliance uses an income cutoff loosely based on eligibility …
Charles Kenny 