This paper assesses the state of research and examines priorities for future work in the area of urbanization and growth. This is done by reviewing and summarizing the findings of five scoping papers covering the following topics: urban poverty, the political economy of urban poverty, urban real...

This paper examines the effects of urbanization on development and growth. It begins with a labor market perspective and emphasizes the importance of agglomeration economies, both static and dynamic. It then argues that more productive jobs in cities do not exist in a void and underscores the...

The trend toward ever greater urbanization continues unabated across the globe. According to the United Nations, by 2025 closes to 5 billion people will live in urban areas. Many cities, especially in the developing world, are set to explode in size. Over the next decade and a half, Lagos is...

The authors contribute to the field of urban governance and globalization through an empirically-based exploration of determinants of the performance of cities. They construct a preliminary worldwide database for cities, containing variables and indicators of globalization (at the country and...

The authors examine the determinants of Brazilian city growth between 1970 and 2000. They consider a model of a city that combines aspects of standard urban economics and the new economic geography literatures. For the empirical analysis, the authors construct a dataset of 123 Brazilian...

The author identifies conditions under which the urban sector's share of the poor population in a developing country will be a strictly increasing and strictly convex function of its share of the total population. Cross-sectional data afor 39 countries and time-series data for for India are...

Informal settlements are an integral part of the urban landscape in developing countries. These settlements are widely distributed within cities, including central business centers and peripheral areas with environment hazards. In most cases, residents of these settlements do not have access to...

The authors provide new evidence on the extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the developing world, and the role that population urbanization has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that one-quarter of the world's consumption poor live in urban areas and that the...

This paper provides the key elements to develop an integrated approach for measuring and monitoring city performance globally. The paper reviews the role of cities and why indicators are important. Then it discusses past approaches to city indicators and the systems developed to date, including...

The objective of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the extent and nature of poverty in urban areas in transition countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, providing particular attention to the disparities within urban areas between capital cities and...