Towns and cities are economic and social microcosms in which large numbers of people and firms interact. These interactions largely shape how a city looks, how it functions, and how it grows. But how exactly does this many-sided relationship work? What are the specific drivers of urban economic...

The erosion of its competitiveness is raising concerns about the sustainability of Bangladesh's growth model based on exports of ready-made garments. To safeguard its comparative advantage in ready-made garments and diversify its exports basket, Bangladesh needs to increase its competitiveness....

Access to infrastructure support economic development through both capital accumulation and structural transformation. This paper investigates the links between investments in electricity, Internet, and road infrastructure, in isolation and bundled, and economic development in the Horn of...

Today 60 percent of Moroccans reside in urban areas, as opposed to 35 percent in 1970. By 2050, nearly three-quarters of the country’s population will be living in cities. Along with the concentration of people, urbanization will lead to the increasing concentration of economic activities in...

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...

Well-functioning cities reduce the economic distance between people and economic opportunities. Cities thrive because they enable matchmaking -- among people, among firms, and between people and job opportunities. This paper examines employment accessibility in Nairobi, Kenya and evaluates...

Rapid growth of Internet use in high-income economies, has raised the specter of a "digital divide" that will marginalize developing countries, because they can neither afford Internet access, nor use it effectively when it is available. Using a new cross-country data set, the authors...

"New" economic geography theory, and the development of innovative methods of analysis have renewed interest in the location, and spatial concentration of economic activities. The authors examine the extent to which agglomeration economies contribute to economic productivity. They distinguish...

This paper estimates an urban carbon dioxide emissions model using satellite-measured carbon dioxide concentrations from 2014 to 2020, for 1,236 cities in 138 countries. The model incorporates the global trend in carbon dioxide concentration, seasonal fluctuations by hemisphere, and a large 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...