Suchergebnisse

Front Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Memorandum to a Concerned Finance Minister -- About the Authors -- Abbreviations -- Overview -- Why do so many place-based interventions fail? -- How can the region's countries approach convergence? -- Fragmented cities, stuck people, walled-off countries: The symptoms of institutional constraints on growth -- Place-based and centralized: How national policies and institutions in the Middle East and North Africa perpetuate economic inefficiency and spatial inequity -- Five transitional steps to reduce institutional inefficiency, speed the Middle East and North Africa's economic development, and enable convergent growth -- The prospects for regional integration: Distant yet vital to the Middle East and North Africa -- Notes -- References -- 1 Fragmented Cities, Constrained Growth -- Rapid urbanization has not brought commensurate economic benefits to the Middle East and North Africa -- Modernist planning and informality play crucial roles in the fragmented urban fabric -- Concluding remarks -- Annex 1A Methodology for calculating the agglomeration index -- Annex 1B Methodology for developing indicators of urban form -- Annex 1C Methodology for analyzing road and intersection densities -- Annex 1D Comparison of Global Human Settlement Layers and Global Urban Footprint datasets -- Notes -- References -- 2 Unequal Spaces and Stuck People -- High disparities and low migration hinder economic mobility -- Low migration suppresses labor mobility in the Middle East and North Africa -- Credential-oriented education systems offer one explanation for low internal mobility -- Concluding remarks -- Annex 2A Data sources and coverage -- Notes -- References -- 3 Walled Urban Economies -- Large cities will remain important in the Middle East and North Africa landscape.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is suffering from spatially divergent development. The uprisings of the Arab Spring in part reflected grievances of citizens who were or perceived to have been left behind, particularly by accidents of where they were born. This memo introduces a report that one may find useful and interesting. Focusing on actions that can put countries in the MENA on a path to territorial convergence, it concludes that governments can take the lead by tackling the economic and institutional causes of spatial exclusion. Rising spatial disparities are threatening economic growth and social inclusion in the country and across the region. This report shows that opportunities for the citizens are shaped more by accidents of where they were born - much more than in any other part of the world. One can reduce territorial disparities more immediately and effectively by taking five steps: strengthen coordination and complementarities across sectoral interventions; redistribute roles and responsibilities across tiers of government; enable greater mobility of the people between lagging and leading areas; build dense and connected cities; and enhance market access for lagging areas, nationally, and regionally.

Today, 370 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, summarize estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discuss implications for individual mitigation and public policy. The main conclusions are that urban agglomeration economies change the cost–benefit calculation of hazard mitigation; that good hazard management is first and foremost good general urban management; and that the public sector must perform better in promoting market-based risk reduction by generating and disseminating credible information on hazard risk in cities.

This paper examines the spatial organization of jobs in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, and applies the Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) model to explain the observed patterns in terms of the agglomeration forces and the commuting costs of workers. The paper suggests that: (i) Economic activities are concentrated in the downtown -- beyond which employment is spatially dispersed. (ii) Geographically weighted regressions identify five potential subcenters in 2011; however, none of these contribute significantly to employment. When explaining the variation in employment density across localities in Kampala, the research highlights that (i) density falls by 23.5 percent per kilometer increase in distance from the nearest potential subcenter; (ii) an increase in local production externalities of 10 percent increases density by 3.7 percent; and (iii) production externalities in Kampala's potential subcenters are extremely weak to have any significant impact even on nearby tracts.