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…
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. 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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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A CEPR book chapter with Justin Sandefur. Despite pledges from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to protect life-saving interventions, we estimate that USAID program cancellations to date would lead to between 500,000 and 700,000 fewer lives saved.
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A CGD blog. Haiti finds itself on the list of countries facing a Trump administration travel ban for the second time in two terms. The official reasons are that Haitians often overstay their visas and that there is a risk of the “establishment of criminal networks, and other national security threats.” But Hait…
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A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. The White House has presented further details of its FY 2026 budget request. It includes a proposed two-thirds cut to global health and humanitarian funding. Such a reduction is impossible to reconcile with assurances from the administration that it is preserving life-saving assistance. A rough esti…
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A policy paper for CGD. This paper examines the changing shape of Chinese investment in Africa, as it evolves from large scale infrastructure toward small scale manufacturing. It looks at the opportunity for the region in the context of a deepening manufacturing labor shortage in China; discusses barriers to that opportunity in both China and the Africa region; and the potential response of Western countries. It may be possible for at least some economies in Africa to benefit from a combination of Chinese investment in manufactured export and processed commodity industries and preferential access to economies including the US and China if geopolitics allow, but there are many reasons this could fail and the geopolitics are increasingly hostile. A backup plan for regional growth would be wise.
Charles Kenny 