Teaching Comparative

Urbanization and policy

Rural to urban migration. Urban poverty. Slums and shanty towns surrounding fast growing cities. Unemployed and unskilled rural workers migrating to cities.

These problems are faced by most lesser developed countries. Often the reaction of public policy makers is to offer incentives for rural people to stay in rural areas or to make migration difficult or illegal.

The World Bank says, in essence, build more roads and railroads.

If your students look at public policy about urbanization, poverty, and infrastructure in the countries they are studying, what will they find? Will they find that countries following the World Bank recommendations are doing better than those who don't? Are the World Bank recommendations pollyanna-ish and blithely dismissive of large scale suffering? Or are they realistic routes to follow to improve prosperity? What policies should governments take toward urban growth?

Lump together and like it: The problems—and benefits—of urbanisation on a vast scale

"In 2005, more than half the poor countries surveyed by the UN Population Division said they wanted to reduce internal migration to rein in urban growth. The food crisis of the past 18 months has sharpened worries about how to feed the teeming slums...

"Such fears of urban over-concentration are reflected in the policies of many different countries...

"Yet new research published by the World Bank in its annual flagship World Development Report suggests that pessimism over the future of huge cities is wildly overdone. The bank argues that third-world cities grow so big and so fast precisely because they generate vast economic advantages, and that these gains may be increasing. Slowing urbanisation down, or pushing it towards places not linked with world markets, is costly and futile, the bank says. At a time of contagion and bail-outs, the research also reaffirms the unfashionable view that the basic facts of geography—where people live and work, how they get around—matter as much as financial and fiscal policies...

"The bank’s research yields lots of new insights...

"Cities are products of trade... Over the past 50 years world trade has expanded hugely, especially in services, and giant cities have thrived correspondingly. Among the most striking of these urban success stories are cities in southern China that most people outside the region have never heard of because they were collections of villages just 20 years ago...

"What has made such growth possible, argues the bank, is cheap transport. Falling transport costs in the 18th and 19th centuries enabled Britain and Portugal to trade wool and port (as the political economist David Ricardo memorably pointed out). Cheap transport in the past 25 years has produced a second sort of trade revolution. Countries now sell each other not final products like port but intermediate ones...

"In short, the bank suggests a formula: the fragmentation of production lines, plus the clustering together of particular stages in the production line, plus cheap transport, equals higher productivity in the biggest cities.

"If it is so important where economic activity takes place, what should countries do if they lack big cities—perhaps because they are landlocked, or cut off from world markets or have many poor people living in rural areas? These, the bank thinks, are the real problems of urbanisation, not the multiplication of slums or congestion. The answer, in the bank’s view, depends on why people are cut off.

"If they are trapped in underemployment in remote rural areas, the main task is to establish land markets and basic services (schools, streets, sanitation) to help cities grow...

"But countries are all too rarely willing to stand back and let cities grow: Tanzania and Ethiopia, to name just two, are busily trying to slow urbanisation down, despite the fact that three-quarters of their people are stuck in rural poverty.

"Where urbanisation has started but pockets of the population are trapped far away, governments have to focus more on transport and other sorts of infrastructure to connect lagging regions with fast-growing ones...

"These prescriptions have something in common. For poor countries, the key to development is to link up flagging and fast-growing regions. To do that, governments often overemphasise policies targeted on particular places. In practice, there are more powerful instruments of integration than “spatially targeted” efforts—eg, land markets that unify all places, or infrastructure that connects some places to others. Growth, says the bank, is inevitably lumpy. Governments must learn to like it."

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Labels: civil society, globalization, policy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:08 AM