A CGD blog with Brian Webster. Yesterday, President Trump announced a sweeping change to US trade policy, imposing tariffs larger than those enacted under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that helped deepen the Great Depression. US markets are responding based on the implications for US business and consumers. But the consequences for…
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 Erin Collinson. On Friday, the administration sent a memo on the future of USAID to the agency’s staff. It makes clear that the strategy continues to be “cut and reorganize first, ask permission later”-putting forward a vision for the full abolition of USAID. Regarding reorganization, remaining USAID staff have re….
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A CGD blog. As the USAID cuts shutter projects worldwide, Chinese officials are certainly making the most of the opportunity. The country has stepped in to fund child literacy, nutrition, and landmine clearance programs in Cambodia previously backed by the US and has made overtures to Nepal and Colombia about f…
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A CGD blog with Janeen Madan Keller. In a list of thousands of terminated USAID awards that was sent to Congress this week is a devastating cut suggesting the Trump administration might be planning to end funding to Gavi, the global initiative that helps provide life-saving vaccines for children in the poorest countries in the world. T…
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A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. Last week, we published an estimate of cuts to USAID programs at the sectoral level based on two leaked documents covering cancelled and retained awards. Since then, a new version of the terminated and retained awards list was shared with Congress. Using that updated list, we revise our earlier sect…
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A CGD blog. Aid agencies across Europe and North America are seeing their budgets slashed. Replenishments to multilateral agencies from the International Development Association (IDA) through Gavi to the Global Fund are under threat. The countries most at risk are those most reliant on foreign assistance to fun…
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A CGD blog. The State Department is floating foreign assistance reorganization proposals. While there is surely a lot that could be done to make US foreign assistance more effective, I hope Congress focuses on the far more urgent task of ensuring the foreign assistance funding it has already appropriated can be…
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A CGD blog. The US Administration has presented a weak case for its argument that US foreign assistance was so riddled with abuse and fraud that the only answer was to shut down USAID and reboot. The lists of terrible projects and “appalling waste” don’t show any evidence of fraud or abuse, and I’d argue most o…
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A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. Last week we presented some estimates of the extent and distribution of cuts to USAID assistance. Since then, a list of active USAID projects has also been leaked. We recalculate our estimates of active and cancelled USAID grants from this data.
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A CGD Working Paper with Sogtao Duan and Zack Gehan. This paper tests the hypothesis that the growing proportion of World Bank contracts granted to Chinese firms, particularly in the infrastructure sector, may undermine results by exposing projects to lower standards of work. We find that such concerns are unfounded. We create a dataset of World Bank projects that merges data on contracts under the project and project features and outcomes. We examine the association between contracting features and outcomes including the proportion of contract values awarded to non-borrower firms from major supplier countries. We find that the share of project contract value awarded to Chinese firms is not a correlate with better or worse project outcomes. More broadly, borrower country features explain some variance in outcomes but indicators including sector, year, the proportion of contracts awarded competitively, and the proportion that are for goods or civil works have little explanatory value. This (non-causal) evidence is consistent with the idea that World Bank procurement rules broadly work to ensure poor contracting choices are not a major determinant of project outcomes.
Charles Kenny 