Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure,...

Rapid urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa places immense pressure on urban services to meet the needs of the burgeoning urban population. Although several country- or city-level reports offer insight into the housing challenges of specific places, little is known about regional patterns affecting...

Today, more than half of Haiti's population calls cities and towns their home, in a major shift from the 1950s when around 90 percent of Haitians lived in the countryside. Urbanization is usually paired with economic growth, increased productivity, and higher living standards, but in Haiti it...

This paper provides the first systematic empirical assessment of the pace at which housing investment has responded to rising demand from urbanization. The assessment used National Accounts Statistics to build a data set of residential housing investment for more than 90 countries. The data set...

An important infrastructure policy issue for rapidly growing cities in developing countries is how to raise fiscal revenues to finance basic services in a fair and efficient manner. This paper applies hedonic analysis that explicitly accounts for spatial spillovers to derive the value of...

Many cities and urban centers around the world experience high air pollution episodes attributable to increased anthropogenic alterations of natural environmental systems. World Health Organization estimates indicate strong exceedances of prescribed limits in developing countries. However, the...

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa's relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This...