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...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is suffering from spatially divergent development. The uprisings of the Arab Spring in part reflected grievances of citizens who were or perceived to have been left behind, particularly by accidents of where they were born. This memo introduces a report...

This paper revisits the relationship between energy intensity and economic growth, using a flexible piecewise linear regression model. Based on a panel data set of 137 economies during 1990-2014, the analysis identifies a threshold effect of income growth on energy intensity change: although...

Location is one of the main characteristics households consider when buying a property or deciding where to live, since it determines accessibility to employment subcenters and public transport stations. Using a geographically-referenced data set on new housing developments, this paper estimates...

Air pollution from vehicular traffic is a major source of health damage in urban areas. The problems of urban traffic and pollution are essentially geographic, because their incidence and impacts depend on the spatial distribution of economic activities, households, and transport links. This...

This paper examines how cities and regions within countries are likely to adjust to trade openness and improved connectivity driven by large transport investments from China's Belt and Road Initiative. The paper presents a quantitative economic geography model alongside spatially detailed...

This paper describes how different policy distortions have been impeding better integration of Brazil's external and internal product markets and discusses how these distortions have prevented domestic firms from benefiting from multiple sources of efficiency gains. The paper first focuses on...

"China proposed the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 to improve connectivity and cooperation on a transcontinental scale. This study, by a team of World Bank Group economists led by Michele Ruta, analyzes the economics of the initiative. It assesses the connectivity gaps between economies along...

Today, over 4 billion people around the world-more than half the global population-live in cities. By 2050, with the urban population more than doubling its current size, nearly 7 of 10 people in the world will live in cities. Evidence from today's developed countries and rapidly emerging...

Over the last century, the urban spatial structure of cities has transformed dramatically from the traditional monocentric configuration to varying forms of decentralized organization. This paper reviews the theory and empirical evidence to understand the urban morphology of jobs and land use...