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.

About Charles

  • Overselling the Web Chapter Seven: Confronting the Costs

    Chapter Seven of Overselling the Web? notes the long tradition of linking technological advance to dramatic social change –stretching back to the Communist Manifesto which suggested that railways were catalysts to revolution.  And it is hard to argue with the fact there have been significant social changes as a result of the Internet.  But you only have to read Mike Daisey‘s description of working at Amazon.com to realize they aren’t all good:

    On weekends I loved Amazon and I would speak at great and windy length …’God, I love my company, I love working, it’s so great, we’re making history’… But when I came into work I flipped –while there I hated the place, hated the phone and the email and the endless tracking… 

    Similarly, there are arguments on both sides regarding the impact of the Internet on political advance.  Perhaps the Internet will spawn a technological dystopia rather than universal liberalism. 

    Regardless, these arguments largely apply to rich countries, where intensive Internet use is ubiquitous.  For good or ill, most people in poor countries are some distance from hours in front of the interactive telescreen.  For poor countries it is likely that the most significant impact of the Internet will be economic.  And we have seen that even this impact is likely to be comparatively muted.  There are important roles for the Internet in developing countries, both in the private and public sector, and some applications will have considerable rates of return, but the enabling environment is not such as to make it a revolutionary technology in either a social or economic sense.  The book concludes by quoting Bill Gates (wearing his philanthropy hat):

    I am suggesting that if somebody is interested in equity that you wouldn’t spend more than 20 percent of your time talking about access to computers, that you’d get back to literacy and health and things like that. So the balance that makes sense is that more money should be spent on malaria…   

  • Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable?

    Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable? was published in Kyklos 59, 2, 2006.  Standard economic theory would suggest close linkages between income, broader measures of the quality of life and ‘utility’. When we look at broader measures of objective and subjective wellbeing in both rich and poor countries today, however, the relationship to absolute income is perhaps surprisingly weak. Turning to the past, there is plentiful evidence that people in the past were nearly all absolutely poor and broadly worse off according to other objective quality of life measures, less evidence that these two were intimately linked, even less that everyone was miserable, and less again that those who did feel miserable felt so because they were absolutely poor.

  • The Trouble with the MDGs

    The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success, co-authored with Todd Moss and Michael Clemens was published as a Center for Global Development Working Paper (No. 40) in May 2004.  The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the UN in 2000. However, the rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. At the same time, there appear to be limits to the degree to which aid can contribute to development outcomes. Estimates of the ‘cost’ of reaching the MDGs are nevertheless frequently misinterpreted to mean that a certain quantity of aid—such as the oft-cited $50 billion—could cause the Goals to be met. Despite many benefits of the MDGs, there has been little discussion so far of potential costs of the specific form taken by these goals, especially the creation of unreasonable expectations about what is achievable in a short time frame and about the role of aid in the development process. Many countries making extraordinarily rapid progress on MDG indicators, due in large part to aid, will nonetheless not reach the MDGs. Unrealistic targets thus may turn successes into perceptions of failure, serving to undermine future constituencies for aid (in donors) and reform (in recipients). This would be unfortunate given the vital role of aid and reform in the development process and the need for long-term, sustained aid commitments. Though goal-setting can be useful, these particular goals might be better viewed not as practical targets but instead as valuable reminders of the stark contrast between the world we have and the world we want, and as a call to redouble our search for interventions to close the gap more rapidly.

    A summary version in French was issued by Courrier de la Planete No. 76.  A summary version in English appeared in Sustainable Development Law and Policy VI, 1, 2005.  A brief on the paper was issued by the Center for Global Development in September, 2005.  The paper is forthcoming in World Development.

  • Questioning the Monopoly-Supported Postal USO

    Questioning the Monopoly-Supported Postal USO in Developing Countries was published in M.A. Crew and P.R. Kleindorfer (eds.), Progress toward Liberalization of the Postal and Delivery Sector (Springer, 2005).  The monopoly-supported universal service obligation (USO) is usually defended on the grounds that the monopoly allows for cross-subsidy in letter services that in turn allows universal access to a service of great importance to all. This paper argues that letter delivery (as opposed to other services that may be provided by post offices) is not in universal demand in poor countries, that the size of the market in developing countries is such that USOs could not be met under the monopoly model, and that the monopoly carries heavy costs for sector development and consumer welfare. It proposes in the place of the postal USO a competitive approach involving universal access to a range of services that poor people have a need to access.

    The chapter is a revised version of papers in this volume, also issued as a World Bank/AEI-Brookings working paper.  The conclusions of the paper have been challenged by economists at the Universal Postal Union.

  • Why Are We Worried About Income?

    Why Are We Worried About Income? Everything That Matters is Converging was published in World Development 33, 1, 2005.  Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community.

    It was reviewed by Todd Moss in a piece in Foreign Policy, and recieved some attention from bloggers as well as a newspaper in Hawaii.

  • Does Development Make You Happy?

    Does Development Make You Happy? Subjective Wellbeing and Economic Growth in Developing Countries was published in Social Indicators Research, 73, 2, 2005. The evidence for any relationship between GDP/capita growth and growth in subjective wellbeing (SWB) in wealthier countries is disputed, at best. However, there are a number of reasons commonly articulated for thinking the relationship should be stronger in less developed countries (LDCs). This paper looks at both reasons for expecting the relationship to be stronger in developing countries, and those for a weak link that might still apply in LDCs. Finally, it turns to a limited data set to see what that might tell us. The results suggest that, at least in middle-income countries, there is little strong evidence in favor of a connection between growth and SWB.

  • A Short Review of Information and Communication Technologies and Basic Education in LDCs

    A Short Review of Information and Communication Technologies and Basic Education in LDCs: What is Useful, What is Sustainable? was co-authored with Jeremy Grace and published in the International Journal of Educational Development 23 (2003). Information and communication technologies such as radio and television have long been used in education. The advent of the technology of the Internet has created pressure for Internet access in primary and secondary schools across the world. This paper reviews some of the available evidence on the impact and cost of such technologies in developing countries. It concludes that while there is strong evidence for the efficacy and efficiency of interactive radio instruction, the evidence on the impact of computer-supported education remains mixed, and costs are prohibitive for many LDCs (less developed countries).

  • W(h)ither the Digital Divide?

    W(h)ither the Digital Divide?, written with Carsten Fink, was published in info 5,6, in 2003. The "widening digital divide" has the status of fact in most discussions of the global distribution of information and communications technologies (ICTs), and that this divide is a problem is widely accepted. This paper challenges both assumptions. First, looking at various measures of the digital divide, there is a divide in per-capita access to ICTs but developing countries show faster rates of growth in network development than developed countries. Moreover, when employing a per-income measure of access, developing countries already "digitally leapfrog" the developed world. Second, the paper examines the prediction that disparities in absolute access to ICTs between countries will lead to reduced development prospects in poor countries. Past experience has shown that it is very difficult to make predictions of this type. The paper concludes that we may be posing the wrong policy questions when focusing on a "digital divide" as it is commonly understood.

    The article was discussed in The Economist’s Economics Focus.

  • The Internet and Economic Growth in Less-developed Countries

    The Internet and Economic Growth in Less-developed Countries: A Case of Managing Expectations? was published in Oxford Development Studies 31, 1, 2003.  A discussion of the theory of technology and economic growth suggests potentially negative implications for the impact of the Internet on developing countries. Technology in general is undoubtedly central to the growth process, but economists define technology in very broad terms. The impact of any particular, invented, technology is likely to be small. This theoretical perspective is supported by the empirical evidence on the limited impact of past "information revolutions" on less-developed countries (LDCs) and the present impact of the Internet on advanced economies. Furthermore, LDCs appear ill-prepared to benefit from the opportunities that the Internet does present–they lack the physical and human capital, along with the institutions required, to exploit the e-economy. Finally, even optimistic forecasts of the Internet’s global economic impact are small in scale compared with the challenge of development. This has significant implications for development policy.

    The paper was previosuly issued as a WIDER discussion paper, it will be published as a chapter in A. D’Costa (ed) The New Economy in Development (London: Palgrave).

  • Can Information and Communication Technologies be Pro-Poor?

    Can Information and Communication Technologies be Pro-Poor? co-authored with Emmanuel Forestier and Jeremy Grace, published in Telecommunications Policy, 26, 11, 2002. There is over 20 years of accumulated cross-country evidence on the link between telecommunications provision and economic growth. Looking at micro-studies from a range of countries including Bangladesh, Botswana and Zimbabwe, there is also some evidence that provision of telephony has a dramatic effect on the income and quality of life of the rural poor. This paper examines cross-country evidence to discover if teledensity (the number of telephones per capita) has a pro-poor growth impact—fostering increased average incomes while reducing inequality. It also examines the impact of telecommunications rollout on quality of life variables including infant mortality and literacy. It finds that, historically, telecommunications rollout has had a positive and significant impact on increasing inequality and little impact on quality of life variables. A reason for this is tested and preliminarily confirmed that rollout has (historically) only benefited the wealthy. The paper will then turn to emerging evidence on the role of the Internet in poverty relief and statistics on the access gap in provision between rich and poor, suggesting that this new ICT will also be a force for income divergence. Using the results of the cross-country analysis on telecommunications, the paper will conclude with a discussion of potential policy responses (such as sector reform and universal access programs) to turn telecommunications from a source of growth that also increases inequality to a source of growth that diminishes it.