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Following the launch of the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP, 2008), a number of initiatives were taken: states formulated their State Sanitation Strategies, and more than 150 cities drafted or are in the process of drafting the City Sanitation Plans (CSPs, by March 2014). The NUSP recommended development of special strategies for slums and poor settlements as an integral part of the CSPs. But the significant presence of slums in Indian cities (estimated between 9 and 14 million, or 12 to 16 percent of India's 79 million urban households), and the specific difficulties that these settlements face in accessing basic sanitation (and other) services, demanded a greater understanding of the conditions, and exploration of strategies used to address these. Section one presents a short introduction to the context of urban India and urban sanitation, followed by a brief review of programmatic responses by GoI to improve slum sanitation services. Thereafter, the guide draws out the critical factors or drivers using examples from successful community slum sanitation initiatives reported from the urban centers selected for this study. A set of generic activity clusters and steps are included at the end the preparatory, planning, implementation, and M&E stages of community sanitation initiatives.
Slums --- Urban Development --- Urban Slums Upgrading --- Urban Water & Waste Management --- Urban Water Supply and Sanitation --- Water Supply and Sanitation
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Many people in the global south access housing through informal rental markets, but remarkably little is known about how these markets work or the quality of the accommodations on offer. This paper draws on a unique new data set to analyze the informal rental market in a case study city: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The picture that emerges is one of a large, anonymous market in which there are clear price premiums for accommodation and neighborhood quality. At the same time, however, demand for quality housing outstrips supply, confining even upper-income households to slum conditions. The findings shed light on market dynamics that shape access to adequate housing in Dar es Salaam and other cities across the world. The paper closes by drawing on these insights to make recommendations to improve existing urban development policies such as slum upgrading, as well as to develop new approaches to rental housing that can materially improve living conditions in the rapidly expanding cities of the Global South.
Access to Housing --- Communities and Human Settlements --- Rental Market --- Slum Upgrading --- Urban Development --- Urban Housing --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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The trend toward ever greater urbanization continues unabated across the globe. According to the United Nations, by 2025 closes to 5 billion people will live in urban areas. Many cities, especially in the developing world, are set to explode in size. Over the next decade and a half, Lagos is expected to increase its population 50 percent, to nearly 16 million. Naturally, there is an active debate on whether restricting the growth of megacities is desirable and whether doing so can make residents of those cities and their countries better off. When analyzing whether megacities have become too large, policy makers often analyze a single city in depth. But no city is an island: improving urban infrastructure in one city might attract migrants, and a negative shock in one location can be mitigated because people can move to another. Considering the general equilibrium effects of any such urban policy is thus key. That is, when deciding whether to make medium-size cities more attractive, policy makers need to understand how cities of all sizes will be affected. The second section briefly summarizes the theoretical framework and discusses which data are needed. The third section implements the methodology for the benchmark case of the United States. The fourth section does the same for China and Mexico and compares the findings. And the last section concludes. A technical online appendix guides the reader through a practical, step-by-step, discussion of how to do the analysis.
Analysis --- Cities --- City Development Strategies --- Communities & Human Settlements --- Governance --- Growth --- Megacities --- Spatial --- Urban Development --- Urban Governance and Management --- Urban Services to the Poor --- Urban Slums Upgrading --- Urbanization
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Two of the great stylized predictions of development theory, and two of the great expectations of policy makers as indicators of progress in development, are inexorable urbanization and inexorable formalization. Urbanization is indeed happening, beyond the "tipping point" where half the world's population is now urban. However, formalization has slowed down significantly in the past quarter century. Indeed, informality has been increasing. This disconnect raises a number of questions for development analysis and development policy. Is the link between urbanization and formalization more complex than what had been thought? What does this mean for policy? The first core section of this paper asks what exactly is meant by formality and informality. The second core section turns to processes of urbanization and asks how these processes intersect with and interact with the incentives to formalize. The paper examines why cities attract the informal sector and the role that urbanization plays in growth and job creation through both the formal and informal sectors. Cities generate agglomeration benefits in the informal sector, perhaps more so than for the formal sector. The third core section is devoted to policy. At the current conjuncture, agglomeration benefits make a strong case for urbanization as an integral part of development strategy, but concerns about jobless growth and about urban poverty require a focus on the informal sector.
Development policy --- Development strategy --- Industrialization --- Inexorable formalization --- Labor Markets --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- National Urban Development Policies & Strategies --- Population Policies --- Poverty Reduction --- Urban Slums Upgrading --- Urbanization
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This paper seeks to shed some light on the extent to which infrastructure sub-sectors - energy, telecommunications, water supply, sanitation, and transport - contributed to growth in East Asia during 1985-2004. It also attempts to provide additional insights on whether the relationship between infrastructure and growth depends on five additional variables: the degree of private participation in infrastructure, the quality of governance, the extent of rural-urban inequality in access to infrastructure services, country income levels, as well as geography. The findings show that greater stocks of infrastructure were indeed associated with higher growth. However, a more nuanced look at the sensitivity of infrastructure impacts on the five additional variables yields different results, with some sectors supporting conventional expectations and others yielding mixed or counter-intuitive results. In particular, the telecom and sanitation sectors yield statistically significant results supporting the a priori hypotheses; electricity and water infrastructure provide mixed results; and road infrastructure consistently contradicts a priori expectations. The results are consistent with the widely-accepted idea in policy research that infrastructure plays an important role in promoting growth, as well as with the viewpoint that certain countries' endowments influence the growth-related impacts of infrastructure.
Banks and Banking Reform --- Communities & Human Settlements --- Externalities --- Finance infrastructure --- Governance --- Governance Indicators --- Infrastructure development --- Road --- Road infrastructure --- Roads --- Sanitation --- Tax --- Transparency --- Transport --- Transport Economics, Policy and Planning --- Urban Development --- Urban Services to the Poor --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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Over the last century, the urban spatial structure of cities has transformed dramatically from the traditional monocentric configuration to varying forms of decentralized organization. This paper reviews the theory and empirical evidence to understand the urban morphology of jobs and land use within a city. This survey highlights four broad insights: (i) The evolution of monocentric to polycentric centers has been accompanied by structural changes in 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 the 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 that are useful in closing the gap between equilibrium urban spatial structure and the optimal outcome.
Agglomeration --- Communities & human settlements --- Environment --- Environmental economics & policies --- Land use regulations --- Monocentric --- National urban development policies & strategies --- Polycentric --- Spatial --- Transport --- Transport economics policy and planning --- Urban development --- Urban housing and land settlements --- Urban slums upgrading
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This paper complements the results of earlier work on factor misallocation. The paper first expands the methodology and provides two important decompositions for the main indices. The main result is that factor and output misallocation across districts is at least as important as misallocation within districts. Second, the paper provides an exploration of the service sector that complements earlier work on manufacturing. The analysis shows that labor plays a fundamental role for misallocation in services, whereas land is the determining factor in manufacturing. Third, the paper expands our earlier work on the effects of policies on misallocation by looking at a much broader range of policies, and find strong evidence of their effects on misallocation. Finally, the paper take steps towards the identification of the causal effect of misallocation on output per worker by developing a novel instrumental variable approach and a simulation approach that allows for checking the consistency of the empirical results.
Agglomeration --- Cities --- Communities & Human Settlements --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Firm Selection --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Private Sector Development --- Productivity --- Social Protections and Labor --- Urban Development --- Urban Services to the Poor --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation. Although more-productive establishments in India tend to produce more output, factors of production are grossly misallocated. A better allocation of output and factors of production is associated with greater output per worker. Misallocation of land plays a particularly important role in these challenges.
Economic Theory & Research --- Labor Policies --- Land Misallocation --- Misallocation Metrics --- Output Misallocation --- Private Sector Development --- Productive Establishments --- Property Markets --- Urban Development --- Urban Housing --- Urban Services to the Poor --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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In the last two decades the Indian economy has been growing unabatedly, with memories of the Hindu rate of growth rapidly fading. But this unprecedented growth has also resulted in widening spatial disparities. While cities such as Hyderabad have emerged as major clusters of high development, many rural areas have been left behind with little development benefits accruing to them. India's mega-cities have continued to grow. This situation raises a number of important policy questions. Should India aim to spread development more equally across space? Are India's cities becoming too large? Should the government invest in infrastructure in the large cities to reduce congestion or in medium-sized locations to facilitate the emergence of new economic clusters? What are the tradeoffs between agglomeration economies and congestion costs? How different is Indias experience compared with China and USA?
E-Business --- High-density clusters --- Housing & Human Habitats --- Information and Communication Technology --- Infrastructure investment --- Labor Markets --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty Reduction --- Spatial disparities --- Spatial growth patterns --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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This paper complements the results of earlier work on factor misallocation. The paper first expands the methodology and provides two important decompositions for the main indices. The main result is that factor and output misallocation across districts is at least as important as misallocation within districts. Second, the paper provides an exploration of the service sector that complements earlier work on manufacturing. The analysis shows that labor plays a fundamental role for misallocation in services, whereas land is the determining factor in manufacturing. Third, the paper expands our earlier work on the effects of policies on misallocation by looking at a much broader range of policies, and find strong evidence of their effects on misallocation. Finally, the paper take steps towards the identification of the causal effect of misallocation on output per worker by developing a novel instrumental variable approach and a simulation approach that allows for checking the consistency of the empirical results.
Agglomeration --- Cities --- Communities & Human Settlements --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Firm Selection --- Labor Policies --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Private Sector Development --- Productivity --- Social Protections and Labor --- Urban Development --- Urban Services to the Poor --- Urban Slums Upgrading
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