Charles Kenny

What’s Not Converging? East Asia’s Relative Performance in Income, Health and Education

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.

A Century of the Infant Mortality Revolution

A Century of the Infant Mortality Revolution is an unpublished paper.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.

There’s More to Life than Money

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.

The Global Expansion of Primary Education

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.

Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap?

Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap? is an unpublished short paper.  The key features of the Malthusian model are that (i) income determines population growth, with rising wages increasing survival rates and (ii) there is a vital factor of production (land) which is fixed, implying decreased returns to scale for all other factors. The equilibrium state in such a model is a population living on subsistence incomes. The analysis in this paper suggests that (i) the link between income and population growth is (almost) everywhere broken and (ii) there is little evidence of declining returns to scale because of constraints imposed by land carrying capacity at the macro level anywhere. Population dynamics are being driven by non-income factors in a manner that is reducing population growth rates everywhere. At the same time, output is increasing everywhere, in a manner inconsistent with significantly declining returns to scale based on land being a vital factor of production.

Putting Life Back into Miracles

Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper.  If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48 years to 69 years –the strongest growth in any region's health in history. It might, then, be worth questioning the assumption that economic growth is the only development grail we need quest after, and examining a wider range of miracles (and tragedies) might help uncover a range of different causal factors for success in a broader development effort.

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.

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.