As part of a national experiment in 2008, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. A triple difference approach using the Statistics Bureau’s regular household panel suggests that the reforms increased consumption and income, especially for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation.

Urban areas tend to have much more productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers that invest in much more research and development than areas with low salaries and low productivity. This paper addresses two questions. First, it discusses the causes of these vast geographical differences in wages, human capital, and innovation. The second part of the paper discusses regional economic development policies.

Inexorable urbanization and formalization have been the expectations in development discourse. Indeed, measures of urbanization and formalization have been provided and used as indicators of development. But while urbanization has proceeded apace in developing countries, formalization has slowed significantly over the past quarter century. These disconnect raises questions for development analysis and development policy. Why did one expect urbanization and formalization to go together in the first place?

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.

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is not straightforward. Among developing countries, changes in income or industrialization correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This suggests that policy and institutional factors may also influence the urbanization process.

The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration's externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders.

This paper provides a brief overview of the intersection of state and customary laws governing land in peri-urban settlements around Honiara, focusing on their impact upon landowners, particularly women landowners. It suggests that the intersection of customary and state legal systems allows a small number of individuals, predominantly men, to solidify their control over customary land. This has occurred to the detriment of many landowners, who have often found themselves excluded from both decision-making processes and the distribution of financial benefits from the use of land.

This Fifth Edition of the Uganda Economic Update presents evidence that if the urbanization process is well managed, it has the potential to stimulate economic growth and to provide productive jobs for a greater proportion of Uganda’s young and rapidly expanding population. In many countries across the world, the growth of cities has stimulated the establishment and expansion of productive businesses by reducing the distance between suppliers and customers. The growth of cities has also facilitated provision of social services and infrastructure through economies of scale.

The reform of China's collectively owned forest land, began in 2008, is arguably the largest land-reform undertaking in modern times in terms of area and people affected. Under the reform, forest lands have been contracted to rural households, allowing them more independence in exercising their rights and interests in the forest lands, giving them more opportunities to improve family incomes, and creating incentives for them to cultivate, conserve, and manage forests. These lands are home to some 610 million people, many of them poor.

Moldova has experienced rapid economic growth in the past decade, which has been accompanied by reductions in poverty and good performance in shared prosperity. Nonetheless, Moldova remains one of the poorest countries in Europe and faces challenges in sustaining the progress. The challenges for progress include spatial and cross-group inequalities, particularly because of unequal access to assets, services and economic opportunities.

Recent surveys show considerable progress in maternal and child health in Ethiopia. The improvement has been in health outcomes and health services coverage. The study examines how different groups have fared in this progress. It tracked 11 health outcome indicators and health interventions related to Millennium Development Goals 1, 4, and 5. These are stunting, underweight, wasting, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, under-five mortality, measles vaccination, full immunization, modern contraceptive use by currently married women, antenatal care visits, and skilled birth attendance.

This report summarizes the results, lessons and recommendations to the Government of Lao PDR from two Technical Assistance projects (TA) “Supporting Demand Creation for Sanitation through Community Led Total Sanitation” and “Sanitation Marketing in Lao PDR” carried out by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program between October 2012 and December 2015. The development objective of the TAs was to increase improved sanitation and hygiene practices and change community behavior to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status at the village level.