Charles Kenny

What Do We Know About Economic Growth, Redux

What Do We Know About Economic Growth, Redux is an unpublished short paper.  It revisits the cross-country growth literature six years after What Do We Know About Economic Growth Or, Why Don't we Know Very Much?  Since then, even more evidence has piled up that growth is a complex, context-dependent process difficult to explain using linear growth models.  We do know that the best way to be rich today is to have been rich yesterday, however. That result has led some researchers to revisit Nineteenth Century explanations including God and superior breeding as the ultimate determinants of wealth.  But the 'truly ultimate' answer may as well turn out to be geography.

Baywatch: Bigger than Aid?

Baywatch: Bigger than Aid? is an unpublished short paper.  It ponders the economic impact of the television program Baywatch --an everyday tale of lifesaving folk-- on people in the developing world.  It concludes that, without considerably greater academic attention to the subject, we may never know the coefficient of Baywatch episodes on per capita income growth.

Ending Global Poverty Through Tax Breaks to Bill Gates

Ending Global Poverty Through Tax Breaks to Bill Gates is an unpublished short paper. Many developing countries have enacted or are considering subsidies and tax breaks for the ICT industry.  This paper argues that the economic justification for such favoritism is very weak.  It is based in part on material from Overselling the Web.

Why Globalizers Should be Depressed by Regional Economics

Why Globalizers Should be Depressed by Regional Economics is an unpublished short paper.  Most countries have (internal) free movement of goods, money and people --they are microcosms of a perfectly globalized world.  But within-country regional inequality remains very large.  Furthermore, the most powerful force for within-country income convergence is the ability of people to move from declining regions to prosperous areas --and this is the part of globalization which is least advanced.  These twin facts suggest the world remains anything but flat.