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"Lall, Somik V"
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Infrastructure and regional growth, growth dynamics and policy relevance for India
The role of infrastructure in economic growth has been the subject of considerable research in the fields of public policy, economics, and planning. In this paper, I examine the contribution of publicly supplied infrastructure to sub national regional growth in India. I first develop and numerically examine a regionally disaggregated model of economic growth to understand the dynamics of private capital and public infrastructure. For the empirical analysis, I use a pooled data set for Indian states to examine if publicly supplied infrastructure is a significant determinant of regional growth and whether there are spatial variations in the productivity effects of infrastructure. The main findings are that transport and communications infrastructure expenditures are significant determinants of regional growth, and the positive benefits accruing from these expenditures come not only from investments made by individual states, but there are positive externalities from network expenditures made by neighboring states. Finally, the out of sample simulated regional growth predictions show divergence in private capital formation between lagging and leading states. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Renewing expectations about Africa's cities
Built with great expectations to connect Africa with growing global trade in the nineteenth century, many of Africa's cities today have economies that are predominantly local—not regional or global in their reach. At the same time, Africa's cities are experiencing rapid population growth, with the urban population predicted to exceed 1 billion by 2040. Why have Africa's urban economies not been able to keep pace with their burgeoning populations and get into the production of regionally and globally tradable goods and services? And what should policy-makers focus on to renew expectations about Africa's cities? This paper makes the case that as long as African cities lack functioning land markets and regulations and early, coordinated infrastructure investments, they will remain local cities: closed to regional and global markets, trapped into producing only locally traded goods and services, and limited in their economic growth.
Journal Article
Jobs and Land Use within Cities
Over the last century, the urban spatial structure of cities has transformed dramatically from a traditional monocentric configuration to varying forms of decentralized organization. This paper reviews theory and empirical evidence to understand the urban morphology of jobs and land use within a city. Our survey highlights four broad insights: (i) The evolution of monocentric to polycentric centers have been accompanied by structural changes within the city. (ii) The internal geography of a city is an outcome of the trade-off between the pull from agglomeration economies and the push from congestion. (iii) The presence of externalities implies that the equilibrium spatial organization achieved by profit-maximizing firms may not necessarily be optimal. This justifies the role of public policy in addressing associated market failures. (iv) The productive edge and competitiveness of a city can be enhanced by introducing policies that increase the overall connectivity to take advantage of economic opportunities across the metropolitan area. The survey also puts together a wide range of policy instruments useful in closing the gap between equilibrium urban spatial structures and the optimal outcome.
Journal Article
Place, Productivity, and Prosperity
Place matters for productivity and prosperity. Myriad factors support a successful place, including not only the hard infrastructure such as roads, but also the softer elements such as worker skills, entrepreneurial ability, and well-functioning institutions. History suggests that prosperous places tend to persist, while “left behind” regions, or those hurt by climatic, technological, or commercial shocks, struggle to catch up. This division gives rise to demands to “do something” about the subsequent spatial inequality. Such pressures often result in costly spatially targeted policies whose outcomes disappoint because of a lack of analysis of the underlying barriers to growth and structural transformation and a fair appraisal of the possibility of overcoming them.
The latest volume of the World Bank Productivity Project series, Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development makes three broad contributions. First, it provides new analytical and empirical insights into the three drivers of economic geography—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance—and the way in which they interact. Second, it argues that these forces are playing out differently in developing countries than they have in advanced countries: urbanization is not accompanied by structural transformation, leaving cities simply crowded and accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization without being productively concentrated. Long-term amelioration of poverty in lagging regions requires advancing the overall national agenda of structural change and productivity growth. Third, the volume provides a heuristic framework with which to inform policy makers’ assessments of place-based policy proposals, enabling them to identify the regions in which policy is likely to have an impact and those that are nonviable; to clarify the implications of various policy options; to think critically about policy design priorities, including necessary complementary policies to, for instance, infrastructure investment; and to navigate implementation challenges.
eBook
Density and Disasters: Economics of Urban Hazard Risk
Today, 370 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, summarize estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discuss implications for individual mitigation and public policy. The main conclusions are that urban agglomeration economies change the cost—benefit calculation of hazard mitigation; that good hazard management is first and foremost good general urban management; and that the public sector must perform better in promoting market-based risk reduction by generating and disseminating credible information on hazard risk in cities.
Journal Article
Household Savings and Residential Mobility in Informal Settlements in Bhopal, India
Strategies to address the problem of informal settlements have focused on slum upgrading, sites-and-services programmes and tenure security. There has been less attention on what enables slum-dwellers to transition into the formal housing sector without direct intervention. This paper investigates residential mobility among slum-dwellers in Bhopal, India. One in five households succeeds in leaving a slum settlement and a major determinant is the ability to save on a regular basis. Due to limited outreach of institutional housing finance, most slum-dwellers rely solely on household savings for purchasing a house. These findings underscore the urgent need to improve savings instruments for slum-dwellers and to downmarket housing finance to reach the poorest residents of rapidly growing cities in developing countries.
Journal Article
Jobs and Land Use within Cities
Over the last century, the urban spatial structure of cities has transformed dramatically from a traditional monocentric configuration to varying forms of decentralized organization. This paper reviews theory and empirical evidence to understand the urban morphology of jobs and land use within a city. Our survey highlights four broad insights: (i) The evolution of monocentric to polycentric centers have been accompanied by structural changes within the city. (ii) The internal geography of a city is an outcome of the trade-off between the pull from agglomeration economies and the push from congestion. (iii) The presence of externalities implies that the equilibrium spatial organization achieved by profit-maximizing firms may not necessarily be optimal. This justifies the role of public policy in addressing associated market failures. (iv) The productive edge and competitiveness of a city can be enhanced by introducing policies that increase the overall connectivity to take advantage of economic opportunities across the metropolitan area. The survey also puts together a wide range of policy instruments useful in closing the gap between equilibrium urban spatial structures and the optimal outcome.
Journal Article
Density and Disasters : Economics of Urban Hazard Risk
Today, 370 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, summarize estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discuss implications for individual mitigation and public policy. The main conclusions are that urban agglomeration economies change the cost–benefit calculation of hazard mitigation; that good hazard management is first and foremost good general urban management; and that the public sector must perform better in promoting market-based risk reduction by generating and disseminating credible information on hazard risk in cities.
Journal Article
Africa's cities
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. This study, however, identifies a deeper reason: African cities are closed to the world. Compared with other developing cities, cities in Africa produce few goods and services for trade on regional and international markets.
eBook