This study aims to assess the degree of institutional fragmentation of transport and land use planning in Chicago and to assess the main challenges related to this institutional fragmentation. It provides an overview of local governments in metropolitan Chicago and mechanisms for metropolitan...

This paper analyses the spatial patterns of regional economic growth in Europe over the 1995 to 2010 period. It finds that regions, which contain large urban agglomerations, have been growing significantly faster than those that do not. Furthermore, proximity to large urban agglomerations has...

This paper provides an overview of country specific approaches to metropolitan area governance. It provides brief descriptions of the typical structures of metropolitan governance, with a particular focus on the involved organisations. It points out metropolitan areas that have unusual...

The development of Asian cities is characterised by rapid and continuous urbanisation on an unprecedented scale, with rapid economic growth led in most places by the manufacturing industry, and rapidly increasing motorisation. The result has been escalating greenhouse gas emissions, sprawling...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how income inequality is associated with economic growth in OECD regions and whether the degree and type of urban concentration affects this relationship. Both income inequality and urban concentration can be seen as patterns of resource allocation that...

This paper presents a new set of estimates of exposure to air pollution (fine particulate matter - PM2.5) at the city, regional and national levels for the 34 OECD countries, and at the regional and national levels for Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa. The estimates are developed by...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence documents that city-size distribution within a country follows a power law, often in the form of Zipf’s law. This paper provides new comparative evidence on city size distribution across OECD countries. It uses a database where urban agglomerations...

This paper investigates the contribution of regions to aggregate growth in the OECD. We find a great degree of heterogeneity in the performance of OECD TL3 regions and among the OECD regional typology (urban, intermediate and rural). While the distribution in GDP and GDP per capita growth rates...

Growth and jobs are top concerns for policy makers confronting difficult economic conditions in many OECD countries. Sub-national governments are important contributors to national growth, but in many cases their economies are struggling as well. Faced with tight fiscal conditions, all levels of...

This paper benchmarks the performance of OECD rural regions with other types of OECD regions over the period 1995-2010. OECD regions are classified into three types according to the OECD regional typology and into four types according to the extended OECD typology. The latter classifies rural...