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Charles Kenny Profile picture
Charles Kenny
@charlesjkenny
Senior Fellow, CGD, author: Life, Liberty & Utility; Getting Better; The Upside of Down; & The Plague Cycle. Tweets are personal opinions.
Aric Profile picture 1 subscribed
Jul 10, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Welcome to 15 Leading CEOs & Chairs Joining the World Bank's Private Sector Investment Lab! I'm sure they'll help bring the masses of private investment to help meet the Sustainable Development Goals that the Bank’s International Finance Corporation...

worldbank.org/en/news/press-… ...IFC Advisory Facilities, the Bank’s Private Sector Advisory Services Department, its Public Private Partnership Legal Resource Center (and PPP Knowledge Lab), its Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility, its Global Infrastructure Facility...
May 8, 2023 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
. A thread and blog on what I thought was a really promising World Bank Group effort to support privately provided renewable power in Africa which turns out to be not what it seemed, and lessons for the IFC, the World Bank and donors.

cgdev.org/blog/ifc-and-d… Scaling Solar combines World Bank technical assistance and IFC financing to support private solar projects in Africa and beyond. Ex prez Jim Kim did a TED talk that lauded it,

Apr 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Great to see this from World Bank Executive Directors Wempi Saputra Erivaldo Alfredo Gomes and Abdoul Salam Bello, expressing what representatives from a large swath of World Bank client countries want from World Bank reform efforts. "[T]he Bank must refrain from compromising countries’ “ownership” of policies ... the Bank must ensure that concessional loans or grants aimed at [GPGs] do not lead to higher borrowing costs or trade-offs between middle-income countries and low-income countries."
Apr 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The World Bank's Updated Evolution Roadmap for presentation to the governors at the Spring meetings is a somewhat underwhelming advance on the version sent to the Board in December....

consultations.worldbank.org/sites/default/… ...there's more detail on stretching capital but it basically suggests it can raise a little more at no cost to borrowers or some more than that at a high cost to borrowers.

So you'd think there'd be details on a large capital increase to fund new mandates. But not really.
Apr 11, 2023 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
It is World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings week. Rich countries have a lot of distance to move if their demands for reform aren’t going to end up pushing the IFIs towards greater irrelevance. A thread... The World Bank can lend more with existing capital, but the amounts that can be raised absent risking higher borrowing costs aren’t huge.

Mar 9, 2023 • 22 tweets • 7 min read
"German universities should expand English language courses to recruit more international students and help fill labour shortages, the country’s academic exchange service has said. "

thepienews.com/news/boost-eng…
Feb 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
TIL, there is ~5 meters of Canadian coastline for each Canadian.

You wonder why they aren’t World Champions at beach volleyball. Australia only has 1m of coastline for each Australian. They should be bush-league at the sport.
Jan 26, 2023 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
@ThoughtfulFund @ThoughtfulFund "South Korea bringing in migrant workers amid labour shortage"

Dec 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Poland welcomed over two million Ukrainian refugees with open arms this year... 80% of Poles now support taking in refugees fleeing violence and war, up from 49% in 2018." "Niger became the first African country to eliminate river blindness, Malawi, Togo, Vanuatu and Saudi Arabia all eliminated trachoma, and Benin, Uganda, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea eliminated sleeping sickness"

futurecrunch.com/goodnews2022/
Apr 29, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
It’s 10yrs since paperback of Getting Better, my book about global development, came out.

I still agree with most of what’s in it, but I admit the last ten years have given plenty of reasons to wonder: *still* getting better?

I think (mostly) yes...

amazon.com/Getting-Better… Book mostly covers development trends up to the mid 2000s, so take statistics for 2005 to nowish:

There were 3,000,000 fewer under-five deaths/yr in 2019 than 2005 (a 33% decline). Global life expectancy rose from 68 to 73 years over the same period (note: pre-pandemic).
Apr 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The idea you can use a little bit of public money to bring to life a vast array of private investment projects in infrastructure and services isn’t just fiction, it is utter fantasy. It makes Shrek look like a documentary by Vaclav Smil.

So, what next? cgdev.org/blog/billions-… There’s an irony that the institution that perhaps sold the “billions to trillions” fantasy the hardest -the World Bank Group- actually sits on a ‘leverage’ approach that works. Small amounts of paid in capital at the Bank allow multiples in lending power to governments.
Feb 14, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I think ending $1.90/day poverty utterly *isn’t* ‘ending poverty,’ looking at absolute numbers is a valid way to look at the data and there is stuff in this thread that brings important perspective, but three things… First, the number of people living on less than $10 a day is rising because fewer people are dying young in poorer countries (that’s true in absolute numbers and as a percentage).

More than what’s happening to income, that I think is the best single measure of human progress.
Aug 11, 2021 • 317 tweets • >60 min read
The real migrant crisis: not enough immigrants "bringing in more automation is the [New Zealand] Government's plan to resolve current labour shortages in the meat industry...We have many, many roles within the industry for which there simply isn’t any automation or technical solutions available"

newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/early-e…
Apr 7, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
My new book for middle schoolers, Your World Better: Global Progress and What You Can Do About It, available to download free from my blog, or you can buy kindle or hard copies (with author payments going to UNICEF).

charleskenny.blogs.com/weblog/2021/04… Broad message: America and the world are better places to live than they were when your parents or grandparents were young, but there’s still a lot wrong and some stuff getting worse. Working together, your generation can help fix that.
Apr 6, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I just got vaccinated by a woman born in Vietnam, with a vaccine created by two Turkish refugees living in Germany and manufactured by a US company run by a Greek migrant. Thank you, world. (Apologies re. "Turkish refugees" actually a Turkish migrant and a German born to Turkish parents).
Mar 19, 2021 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
I'm told people in the UK who ordered The Plague Cycle are going to have to wait a little longer to get it. In very partial recompense, I present my utterly arguable list of top ten pandemics, ranked by impact on human history.... 1. Neanderthal herpes: Neanderthals were already at home and well adapted to life outside Africa before anatomically modern humans arrived. Why did the Neanderthals end up extinct?
Mar 5, 2021 • 297 tweets • >60 min read
The real migrant crisis.. Demand for migrants is high and growing
Sep 30, 2020 • 167 tweets • 50 min read
"The pandemic has highlighted the value of social care workers and the challenging nature of their work. Moreover, there is a significant recruitment challenge within the sector that cannot be solved from the UK labour market."

fenews.co.uk/fevoices/55767… “The [Taiwan] interior ministry has proposed changes to rules on the use of migrant workers in the construction industry. The proposed rule change is intended to fill a labor shortage and keep building costs under control.”

en.rti.org.tw/news/view/id/2…
Sep 24, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
A short thread on liberty and public health in the US, with snakes (guest appearance by a worm). The rod of Asclepius, symbol of medicine –here on a CDC logo (l). Clinical parasitologist Rosemary Drisdelle thinks the rod might originally reference a treatment for the guinea worm –healers remove the worm from your leg by slowly winding its tail end around a match stick (r).
Sep 15, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Justin and Dev gave a test to 2,300 students in India that combined questions from TIMSS, PIRLS and tests given in West Africa and Latin America. That allowed them to accurately compare learning outcomes across 80 countries. Fantastic work, but depressing results. Some findings: in poor countries, more spending per student associated with higher test scores (not so much in rich); family *and* national income both associated with higher scores; learning inequality higher where income inequality is higher; [...]
Sep 7, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Just for example, here’s H. Clinton on Kissinger: a "friend" whose counsel she has "relied on." No one should be friends with this man. To be clear, Clinton is far from unique —Bloomberg, Albright, all sorts of Democrats have embraced the man alongside Trump and loads of Republicans.