This paper investigates the costs and benefits of three ex ante flood management strategies - risk-based insurance, zoning, and subsidized insurance - in an urban economics framework that takes land scarcity into account. In a theoretical setting and in the absence of market failures, risk-based...

Fifty years ago, less than 20 per cent of the people in Africa lived in urban areas. Now, 40 percent of them do so. Africa now has megacities (cities inhabited by more than 10 million people) in Egypt (Cairo) and Nigeria (Lagos). Soon, Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly, Zaire)...