Jobs in the City

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.