This paper explores the links between city competitiveness and air pollution and the business environment. Because competitive cities not only attract more productive firms, but also facilitate their business, the paper look at firm performance as a proxy for city competitiveness. It focuses on...

As cities grow, the negative effects of congestion start to play their part, often affecting the cities' ability to become and remain competitive. Although many studies have focused on these negative effects, the links between pollution and city competitiveness are less explored. This paper...

This paper surveys the recent literature exploring the causes of urban pollution in the developing world and the implications of such pollution for a city's competitiveness. Within a system of cities, cities compete for jobs and people. Those cities that specialize in heavy industrial activity...

Land titling has been a policy priority for developing country cities for decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa and across the world, tenure formalization has been promoted as a tool to improve the quality and value of urban housing. The track record of these projects, however, has generally been...

Many people in the global south access housing through informal rental markets, but remarkably little is known about how these markets work or the quality of the accommodations on offer. This paper draws on a unique new data set to analyze the informal rental market in a case study city: Dar es...

Despite the increasing attention in recent years to the spatial dimensions of economic development, consideration of the importance of space and the recognition that macro, aspatial perspectives can prove to be misleading are not new. Around the world, much of the disappointment with the...

Developing countries suffer from rising urban pollution levels, with associated negative effects on health and worker productivity. This paper studies how managers in developing country cities cope with the polluted environment. High-resolution pollution measurements were collected in Ugandan...

Can countries reorient their productive capacity to become more environmentally friendly and inclusive? To investigate this question, this paper uses a standard input-output modeling framework and data from 141 countries and regions to construct a new global data set of employment, value-added,...

What is the impact of climate change on labor Reviewing the evidence, this paper finds five areas of potential impact. Climate change may have an immediate effect on labor demand, labor supply and time allocation, on-the-job productivity, and income and vulnerability among the self-employed. In...

Infrastructure industries-including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas-underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition economies....