My Optimist column reports on improving global attitudes and behavior.
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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More Money or More Development is a CGD Working Paper with Andy Sumner. What have the MDGs achieved? And what might their achievements mean for any second generation of MDGs or MDGs 2.0? We argue that the MDGs may have played a role in increasing aid and that development policies beyond aid quantity have seen some limited improvement in rich countries (the evidence on policy change in poor countries is weaker). Further, there is some evidence of faster-than-expected progress improving quality of life in developing countries since the Millennium Declaration, but the contribution of the MDGs themselves in speeding that progress is—of course—difficult to demonstrate even assuming the MDGs induced policy changes after 2002. The paper reflects on what the global goal setting experience of the MDGs has taught us and how things might be done differently if there is a new round of MDGs after 2015. The authors conclude that any MDGs 2.0 need targets that are set realistically and directly link aid flows to social policy change and to results. It was picked up in the Ottowa Citizen.
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After the disappointment at Durban, this Businessweek article suggests that big, complex global problems like climate change can be tackled through other routes than a big, complex globally binding treaty like Kyoto.
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This essay for CGD critiques the UN Broadband Commision's reports which suggest broadband is vital to meet the Millennium Development Goals. It isn't.
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Why properly pricing water would be good for the environemnt and for poor people –this week's Optimist column.
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In the run-up to World AIDS day, an Optimist column on focusing on prevention over treatment.
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A Trio of Perspectives on Corruption: Bias, Speed Money and “Grand Theft Infrastructure” is a World Bank Working Paper on which I'm listed as an author but Michael Klein and Monika Sztajerowska did most of the work. A number of recent survey articles express hope that new data from enterprise surveys would shed new light on corruption complementing the corruption perception index by Transparency International. The paper explores this using the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey data globally and not just the data on Eastern Europe and Central Asia that have been used before. The authors find that in general the Enterprise Survey data provide aggregate views on corruption that are similar to the corruption perception index. However, massive differences exist for key countries, such as China and India. This suggests that idiosyncratic, country-specific biases are at work in one or both data sources. The authors use the Enterprise Survey data and relate them to measures of bureaucratic complexity from the World Bank’s Doing Business data, finding that more red tape is associated with higher corruption. The data are also consistent with the view that bribe payments reduce the burden of red tape. Finally, the paper looks at corruption in infrastructure. It has been suggested that the natural monopoly characteristics of infrastructure provide the lever to extract bribes. However, based on data on price-cost gaps, the authors find that infrastructure ventures in power and water typically charge prices below cost in developing economies, not anywhere near monopoly prices. Furthermore, the Enterprise Surveys do not suggest that infrastructure-related bribe payments are more significant than those, for example, related to tax payments or various forms of licensing. Existing sources on bribery surrounding specific projects suggest that the value of bribe payments may not be the biggest problem but the choice of uneconomic and inefficient projects. If infrastructure ventures were entirely dependent on revenue from user fees, they could not afford to pursue inefficient projects, thus reducing the cost of corrupt activity to society. Monopoly pricing would be better than the typical current pricing policy.
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I interviewed the Gates' —here's what FP printed.
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An FP column for Thanksgiving with ten things to be thankful for –first up: turkeys (and the rest of us) should be happy that vegetarianism is spreading.
Charles Kenny 