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Though small towns are important for equitable and sustainable development in developing countries, research on understanding their growth dynamics is limited. Pertinent questions: what is the definition of small towns and factors responsible for their formation; what issues emerge in existing literature; what are the trends and patterns of growth rate of population; and what determines their growth dynamics are some issues analyzed in this paper, focusing on India, considering the latest 2011 Census data. Principal Component Analysis is used to construct an infrastructure index. Analysis shows that the definition of small towns varies with the researcher's intuition. Small towns are growing at a faster rate than large cities. Key elements influencing small-town development are the availability of facilities, infrastructure, a favorable climate, and government support. Longer distance to power and large cities deters their growth. They are experiencing severe infrastructure deficiencies. The population density of the nearest city also matters. Several policies are proposed to position small towns as growth drivers in developing countries. KCI Citation Count: 0

While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the historical presence of knowledge elites, we use city-level subscriptions to the famous Encyclopédie in mid-18th century France. We show that subscriber density is a strong predictor of city growth after the onset of French industrialization. Alternative measures of development such as soldier height, disposable income, and industrial activity confirm this pattern. Initial literacy levels, on the other hand, are associated with development in the cross-section, but they do not predict growth. Finally, by joining data on British patents with a large French firm survey from the 1840s, we shed light on the mechanism: upper-tail knowledge raised productivity in innovative industrial technology.

We exploit the construction and eventual demise of the colonial railroads in Ghana, and most of the rest of Africa, to study the impact of transportation investments in poor countries. Using new data on railroads and cities spanning over one century, we find that railroads had large effects on the distribution of economic activity during the colonial period and these effects have persisted to date, although railroads collapsed and road networks expanded considerably after independence. Initial transportation investments may thus have large effects in poor countries. As countries develop, increasing returns solidify their spatial distribution, and subsequent investments may have smaller effects.

This article investigates the role of intercity transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a port, I find that an oil price increase of the magnitude experienced between 2002 and 2008 induces the income of cities near that port to increase by 7% relative to otherwise identical cities 500 km farther away. Combined with external estimates, this implies an elasticity of city economic activity with respect to transport costs of –0.28 at 500 km from the port. Moreover, the effect differs by the surface of roads between cities. Cities connected to the port by paved roads are chiefly affected by transport costs to the port, while cities connected to the port by unpaved roads are more affected by connections to secondary centres.

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the literature on poverty traps. We document how human capital threshold effects, investment inertia, and a “policy trap” may prevent slum dwellers from seizing economic opportunities offered by geographic proximity to the city. We test the assumptions of another theory—that slums are a just transitory phenomenon characteristic of fastgrowing economies—by examining the relationship between economic growth, urban growth, and slum growth in the developing world, and whether standards of living of slum dwellers are improving over time, both within slums and across generations. Finally, we discuss why standard policy approaches have often failed to mitigate the expansion of slums in the developing world. Our aim is to inform public debate on the essential issues posed by slums in the developing world.

The US urban population increased by almost 50 percent between 1980 and 2020, with this growth heavily concentrated in the Sun Belt and at the fringes of metropolitan areas. This paper considers the role of housing supply in shaping the growth of cities and neighborhoods. Housing supply constraints have meant that demand growth has increasingly manifested as price growth rather than as increases in housing units or population in larger and denser metropolitan areas and neighborhoods. New housing is provided at increasingly higher cost in areas that have higher intensity of existing development and more restrictive regulatory environments. Both forces have strengthened over time, making quantity supplied less responsive to growing demand, driving housing price growth in many areas, and pushing housing quantity growth further out into urban fringes. As a result of such pressures on the cost of new construction, the United States has recently experienced more rapid price growth and a declining influence of new construction on the housing stock.

This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic world to Europe. Using a large new city-specific data set covering Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic world's stagnation and Europe's longterm success are specific to each region: any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel versus ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic world.

A large literature characterises urbanisation as resulting from productivity growth attracting rural workers to cities. Incorporating economic geography elements into a growth model, we suggest that causation runs the other way: when rural workers move to cities, the resulting urbanisation produces technological change and productivity growth. Urban density leads to knowledge exchange and innovation, thus creating a positive feedback loop between city size and productivity that initiates sustained economic growth. This model is consistent with the fact that urbanisation rates in western Europe, most notably England, reached unprecedented levels by the mid-eighteenth century, the eve of the Industrial Revolution.