Why do people die in earthquakes? is a working paper issued in January 2009. A version was published in the journal Disasters in 2012. Every year, around 60,000 people die worldwide in natural disasters. The majority of the deaths are caused by building collapse in earthquakes, and the great majority occurs in the developing world. This is despite the fact that engineering solutions exist that can almost completely eliminate the risk of such deaths. Why is this? The engineering solutions are both expensive and technically demanding, so that the benefit-cost ratio of such solutions is often unfavorable compared with other interventions designed to save lives in developing countries. Nonetheless, a range of public disaster risk-reduction interventions (including construction activities) are highly cost effective. The fact that such interventions often remain unimplemented or ineffectively executed points to a role for issues of political economy. Building regulations in developing countries appear to have limited impact in many cases, perhaps because of limited capacity and the impact of corruption. Public construction is often of low quality – perhaps for similar reasons. This suggests approaches that emphasize simple and limited disaster risk regulation covering only the most at-risk structures and that (preferably) can be monitored by non-experts. It also suggests a range of transparency and oversight mechanisms for public construction projects.
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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The Next Decade of ICT Development: Access, Applications, and the Forces of Convergence was co-authored with Mohsen Khalil. It was published in Information Technology for International Development 4,3. Developing countries are already driving global innovation in technologies and business models related to information and communications. Ongoing technological change may give new life to business and regulatory models adopted and then abandoned in the era of the dot-com boom in developed countries, and developing countries may take the lead in such changes. As networks and applications spread, catalyzing the impact of ICTs for development will become a challenge of the broader environment for their exploitation
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Grand Corruption in Utilities, co-authored with Tina Soreide, was issued as a working paper in December 2008. The paper discusses mechanisms of grand corruption in private sector utility provision in developing countries. The paper focuses on decisions made at the government level involving private sector management, ownership, and provision of utility services. Corruption at that level may influence the pace and nature of private sector involvement and competition in utilities, as well as the level and form of investments, subsidies, and prices. On the basis of a literature review and interviews with firms and regulating authorities in two countries, Tanzania and the Philippines, this paper discusses the levels and determinants of grand corruption in utilities. The paper concludes by discussing a research program to extend this knowledge through a cross-country survey instrument.
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The Global Spread of Liberty and Democracy: A Brief Discussion is a short paper looking at the evidence regarding the level and change in access to liberties and democratic systems worldwide. It briefly discusses the history of the ideas of liberties and rights, long-term evidence regarding their extent, and two centuries of evidence regarding their spread as measured by the Polity dataset. In particular it looks at potential causes for the spread of liberties and democracy over that time period and suggests an important role for changes in the demand for such liberties which is weakly related to income change.
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What’s Not Converging? East Asia’s Relative Performance in Income, Health and Education is forthcoming in the Asian Economic Policy Review. The paper examines East Asia’s performance in terms of per capita GDP growth rates over the past forty years and compares that performance to progress primarily on measures of health. It also compares the region to the rest of the World on a set of broader development measures. It looks at the evidence of East Asian regional and global convergence in health and education, alongside evidence from the region matching global evidence of a comparatively weak link between income growth and health and education growth. This finding is echoed by available within-country evidence from the region. The paper discusses what might be behind these results, suggesting the importance of a few simple supply-side interventions coupled with the spread of demand for health and education services as sufficient to drive quality of life convergence.
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What Does the Eastern European Growth Experience Tell Us About the Policy and Convergence Debates? is an unpublished paper. While the human costs of communism in Eastern Europe were incalculably large, the impact on regional income growth may have been comparatively minor. Despite common perceptions of the efficacy of communism as a system for promoting growth, it appears that the region’s performance was better than any developing country group with the exception of the Asian miracle countries. The region would have grown faster if it had been part of a broader European ‘convergence club,’ however, and the paper discusses how much communism is to be blamed for Eastern Europe not being part of such a grouping –suggesting that this depends on the country. The paper concludes with a look at what these results might mean for the growth and convergence debates.
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Crisis? What Crisis? is an unpublished short paper. It asks if a sense of despair regarding the state of development worldwide can be justified, or if the record suggests grounds for greater optimism.
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A Century of the Infant Mortality Revolution is an unpublished paper. There has been rapid and widespread progress in reducing infant mortality over the last 100 years. In 1900, there was only one country worldwide where we know that infant mortality was below ten percent. A century later, out of the 187 countries for which we have data, only nineteen had an infant mortality rate of above ten percent. Better health outcomes have been achieved at lower incomes to the extent that income growth appears to be a minor factor in determining the course of the infant health transition. Instead, factors related to global progress appear to have been key –probably related to the spread of knowledge and cheap technologies. Only state collapse or health shocks as dramatic as the AIDS epidemic appear powerful enough to considerably slow this rate of progress.
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There’s More to Life than Money: Exploring the Levels/Growth Paradox in Income and Health is forthcoming in the Journal of International Development. It discusses historical and recent cross-country evidence relating income to measures of health. After a review of the literature on income and the quality of life, the paper looks at long-term historical evidence on the link between income change and health indicators. Using data on life expectancy, infant mortality and income for a small subset of largely wealthy countries over the 1913-1999 period, the paper examines correlations between income and health at period start and end as well as using the growth of the variables. Using a larger set of data over the period 1975-2000, the paper repeats these tests, as well as looking for any evidence of a larger impact of income when entered in conjunction with other potential determinants of quality of life improvement, when different data is used or the sample is split. Results suggest a strong cross-country link between income and health and considerable evidence of global improvements over time, but a comparatively weak relationship between improvements in income and improvements in health, even over the very long term. The paper discusses a model based on technology and institutions that might account for such results as well as some preliminary evidence in favor of such a model.
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The Global Expansion of Primary Education is an unpublished short paper. In 1830, near-universal primary education was limited to a few states in the United States, and the great majority of the World’s children received no formal education at all. By 1870, somewhere between 12 and 23 percent of the World’s children aged 5-14 were enrolled in a school, and by 1950 this figure had increased to 47 percent. By 2002, global net primary enrollment was around 87 percent, with a gross enrollment ratio of around 100 percent. For countries in Western Europe and Western offshoots including the US and Canada, the period of rapid growth began as early as the 1800s, while for much of the rest of the World, it would take at least another 100-150 years to see the takeoff towards universal primary education. This paper discusses the timing and speed of the transition around the World and discusses the causal mechanisms behind the growth to global ubiquity of basic education.
