This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is not straightforward. Among developing countries, changes in income or industrialization correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This suggests that policy and institutional factors may also influence the urbanization process.

The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration's externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders.

This paper provides a brief overview of the intersection of state and customary laws governing land in peri-urban settlements around Honiara, focusing on their impact upon landowners, particularly women landowners. It suggests that the intersection of customary and state legal systems allows a small number of individuals, predominantly men, to solidify their control over customary land. This has occurred to the detriment of many landowners, who have often found themselves excluded from both decision-making processes and the distribution of financial benefits from the use of land.

This Fifth Edition of the Uganda Economic Update presents evidence that if the urbanization process is well managed, it has the potential to stimulate economic growth and to provide productive jobs for a greater proportion of Uganda’s young and rapidly expanding population. In many countries across the world, the growth of cities has stimulated the establishment and expansion of productive businesses by reducing the distance between suppliers and customers. The growth of cities has also facilitated provision of social services and infrastructure through economies of scale.

Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This paper disaggregates how parks are built and how they fail. It contextualizes parks in India, followed by a thick case study of an innovative scheme that appears to buck the trend. This performance is then explained by the way in which the scheme's design and action fit India's political economy.

As part of a national experiment in 2008, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. A triple difference approach using the Statistics Bureau’s regular household panel suggests that the reforms increased consumption and income, especially for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation.

Urban areas tend to have much more productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers that invest in much more research and development than areas with low salaries and low productivity. This paper addresses two questions. First, it discusses the causes of these vast geographical differences in wages, human capital, and innovation. The second part of the paper discusses regional economic development policies.

Inexorable urbanization and formalization have been the expectations in development discourse. Indeed, measures of urbanization and formalization have been provided and used as indicators of development. But while urbanization has proceeded apace in developing countries, formalization has slowed significantly over the past quarter century. These disconnect raises questions for development analysis and development policy. Why did one expect urbanization and formalization to go together in the first place?

This report summarizes the results, lessons and recommendations to the Government of Lao PDR from two Technical Assistance projects (TA) “Supporting Demand Creation for Sanitation through Community Led Total Sanitation” and “Sanitation Marketing in Lao PDR” carried out by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program between October 2012 and December 2015. The development objective of the TAs was to increase improved sanitation and hygiene practices and change community behavior to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status at the village level.

This note aims to provide information and analysis as a basis for a better understanding of the challenges and constraints of achieving gender equality in Bolivia, with a special focus on the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity. Combining and analyzing existing evidence and new data, it seeks to document gender-specific disparities in development outcomes, highlight opportunities and constraints to women’s empowerment, and identify areas in which continuing knowledge gaps are particularly important to understand and address gender inequalities.

Romania aims to be a country in which all citizens are provided with an equal opportunity toparticipate in society, where their basic needs are met and their differences respected, and whereall people feel valued and can live in dignity.Our society is still far from this ideal. One in every five Romanian people is income poor. Most of the people living in relative poverty in Romania are in persistent poverty, meening that they have been in poverty for at least the last three years.

In Romania, as well as in many other East European countries, transport sector Green House Gas (GHG) emissions are increasing fast and their growth is expected to continue into the future, accompanying the on-going economic convergence with the European Union (EU). The objective of the analysis was to assess the impact of green policies and investments on transport emissions. For this purpose, the Romania Transport Strategic Emission Prediction Tool (TRANSEPT) was developed.