Charles Kenny

Books, Papers and Articles

Charles Kenny is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More (Basic Books: 2011); The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West (Basic Books: 2014) and The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease (Scribner 2021). He spent fifteen years as an economist in the World Bank and now works at a Washington DC think tank, the Center for Global Development, where he researches and advocates for policies governing investment, trade, technology and migration that would be good for both developing and industrialized countries alike. In addition, he is a widely cited researcher on the economics of happiness. Kenny was a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and was a columnist for Bloomberg Business¸ where he wrote on global development and its impact on the US. He has also written for outlets including the Economist, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time, the Guardian, Salon and CNN. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, Aspen Institute and Legatum Institute events. He has given talks at numerous colleges and universities. He has appeared on PBS, Al Jazeera, CCTV, Vox, Reuters TV and Bloomberg TV. On radio he has been a guest on NPR and the BBC as well as numerous podcasts. Charles has a history degree from Cambridge University, Masters degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a PhD in Development Studies from Cambridge. The product and beneficiary of transoceanic romances, he thinks globalization is an immense force for good. He can be contacted at charlesjkenny at gmail.

recent posts

  • Aid Isn’t Fairy Dust

    Aid Isn’t Fairy Dust is a CGD note. Long-term changes and the lessons of the past decade suggest rhetoric around what aid can accomplish needs to be dialed down. It is largely macroeconomically irrelevant in middle-income countries and has a weak record in leveraging or crowding in other resources. But aid still has a vital role to play in the poorest countries, and this is where we should spend it.

  • Do Climate Targets Affect Lending at the World Bank?

    A CGD Policy Paper. The World Bank has “ambitious” climate targets that have been accompanied by a growing proportion of its lending being labeled as climate finance. At the same time, the way that finance is defined makes it difficult to know how different the World Bank’s portfolio would look absent a climate finance target. Similarly, the World Bank has introduced a shadow price of carbon (SPC) for use in project analysis, but it does not advertise cases (if any) where the use of the SPC has changed investment choices or project design. This paper takes a brief look at the World Bank’s lending portfolio as well as the economic analysis sections of recent World Bank project appraisal documents to see if they can provide any evidence on the question, “do climate targets and carbon prices change the portfolio?” The answer to “can they provide evidence’ is “suggestive at best.” But while there is some evidence of some impact, there are also reasons to doubt it is large.

  • The Role of MDB Local Content Rules in Industrial Strategy

    A CGD Note. As part of a general revival of interest in industrial strategy and job creation, some multilateral development bank (MDB) stakeholders suggest there may be a role for MDB-financed procurement to more strongly favor local suppliers through local content rules. This note discusses local procurement rules in general and the (small) role of MDBs in government procurement, and argues that MDB procurement rules around local content should make preferences flexible, optional, and justified on a case-by-case basis.

  • Zero LICs by 2040: A Call for G20 Action

    A CGD Note. LICs are not only home to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, they are also fragile states at high risk of conflict, with limited capacity to provide global public goods from security to biodiversity and pandemic control. Providing coordinated support in areas from finance through market access and migration opportunities, the G20 could accelerate LIC progress towards comparative prosperity, self-reliance and stability to considerable global benefit.

  • Review: In Praise of Scepticism: Trust But Verify (Pippa Norris)

    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.

  • The impact of US foreign aid cuts on global health

    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.

  • China’s Investment Pivot and Africa’s Industrial Prospects: Any Hope for African “Flying Geese”?

    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.

  • The Crisis of Climate and Development Finance

    A speech at the Oxford Martin School. The world’s richest nations have made considerable global financing promises to developing countries—including a $300 billion annual pledge for climate. But in the last few months aid budgets have been slashed across Europe and in the United States, even as financing is diverted from development and adaptation to projects that have little impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, attempts to unlock trillions in private investment at the project level using billions in aid have comprehensively failed. How can we effectively fund both climate action and development when current financing approaches are falling woefully short? Concessional finance for development and adaptation in the poorest countries, profitable lending for development and mitigation in richer developing countries. 

  • We’re Relearning What Pandemics Do to a Society

    For the New York Times. Some of the current disorder could be pandemic aftershocks.

  • Chinese Contractors and Development Project Quality

    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.