A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types...

The city of Medellín, Colombia was a cauldron of violence with 185 homicides per 100,000 people in 2002. By 2006, this rate had declined to 32.5. Such successful transformation was termed the 'Medellín miracle' and credited to policies of the city's mayor, Sergio Fajardo. Fajardo came to...

In an introductory section, this paper considers briefly the achievements and problems of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa through an assessment of three categories: administrative reform, developmental issues and conflicts over service delivery issues. It then goes on to assess...

This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons - for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the...

While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth-poverty accounting and countries' different compositions of economic...

Purposeful, well-targeted and successful transformation policies will be elusive for a country or region that does not understand the relative importance of its sectoral sources of growth. This study aims at eliciting our understanding in this respect by providing an assessment of the relative...

Current explanations for private consumption's diminished role in China focus on the expansion of exports and investments. Using structural path analysis, we find additional contributing factors. First, growth patterns during 1997-2007 favoured sectors with low production multipliers. Secondly,...

The paper reviews what we know about the possibilities of designing and implementing policy measures that raise the contribution of the extractive industries' production/consumption links to economic growth and wellbeing, and reviews how policies pursued by various governments have succeeded. It...