Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure,...

This paper provides the first systematic empirical assessment of the pace at which housing investment has responded to rising demand from urbanization. The assessment used National Accounts Statistics to build a data set of residential housing investment for more than 90 countries. The data set...

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, due in part to Africa's relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This...

This paper illustrates how the capabilities of GIS and satellite imagery can be harnessed to explore and better understand the urban form of several large African cities (Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, and Dakar). To allow for comparability across very diverse cities, this work...

An important infrastructure policy issue for rapidly growing cities in developing countries is how to raise fiscal revenues to finance basic services in a fair and efficient manner. This paper applies hedonic analysis that explicitly accounts for spatial spillovers to derive the value of...

The marginal productivity of water used for industry varies among sectors in China, but there is great potential for the Chinese government to save water by raising water prices to industry, to encourage water conservation. - Using plant-level data on more than 1,000 Chinese industrial plants,...

Today 60 percent of Moroccans reside in urban areas, as opposed to 35 percent in 1970. By 2050, nearly three-quarters of the country's population will be living in cities. Along with the concentration of people, urbanization will lead to the increasing concentration of economic activities in...

Informal settlements are a permanent feature of South Africa's cities. Estimates from the General Household Survey by Statistics South Africa show that more than 26 percent of all households in the country's six metropolitan areas live in informal dwellings. The government's policy efforts have...