In this (introductory) paper, we present i) some basic figures about the rise of cities in the developing world, and ii) the four papers of this special issue. This paper and the other four papers in the issue intend to bring the reality of cities of the developing world in the 21st century to...

Rapid urbanization, and particularly the associated problems of urban poverty, unsustainable development and environmental degradation, pose an enormous challenge to many developing countries. In the last decade more foreign aid has been diverted to urbanization and green city development. This...

Despite its reputation as a car-oriented city, the Los Angeles metropolitan area has made substantial investments in developing rail transit since 1990. In cities with older "legacy" rail systems, the built environment has developed over time around fixed transit infrastructure, creating land...

In this letter I summarise the main results and contributions from my Ph.D. thesis on concentration of resources and economic development. The empirical analysis performed in the thesis, and summarised here, focuses on two mayor world trends in modern economic development, namely increasing...

Rapid urbanization, and particularly the associated problems of urban poverty, unsustainable development and environmental degradation, pose an enormous challenge to many developing countries. In the last decade more foreign aid has been diverted to urbanization and green city development. This...

This study has analyzed the overall and regional trends in Indian direct investment flows into developing region since 1960s and explored various development impacts they have on host developing countries. Evidence tends to indicate that developing region was the initial destination for Indian...

In developed economies, agglomeration is skill-biased: larger cities are skill-abundant and exhibit higher skilled wage premia. This paper characterizes the spatial distributions of skills in Brazil, China, and India. To facilitate comparisons with developed-economy findings, we construct...

This study addresses the question of financial innovation in developing countries by focusing on the determinants of mobile banking development in Africa. Data on mobile banking across countries is partially constructed by the author, to which is applied panel data and cross-sectional...