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

Urbanization deserves urgent attention
from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social
reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many
opportunities for social and economic progress. The
urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the
transition from the Pleistocene to the milder and more
stable Holocene interglacial. In 2010, the urban population
in developing countries stood at 2.5 billion. The developing

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. The paper

Urbanization is undoubtedly a key driver
of development - cities provide the national platform for
prosperity, job creation, and poverty reduction. But
urbanization also poses enormous challenges that one is
familiar with: congestion, air pollution, social divisions,
crime, the breakdown of public services and infrastructure,
and the slums that one billion urban resident's call
home. Urbanization is perhaps the single most important

This paper focuses on several
interrelated key questions on the geography of development.
Although we herald cities with their industrial bases as
'engines of growth,' does industrialization in
fact drive urbanization?1 What economic activities do cities
of different sizes undertake? Does this change as countries
develop? If so, what are the policy implications? Do
development policies have a big-city bias? If so, what does

The accumulation of decent housing
matters both because of the difference it makes to living
standards and because of its centrality to economic
development. The consequences for living standards are
far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility,
decent housing improves health and enables children to do
homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to
participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its

A fundamental challenge for Vietnam is
to improve the affordability and efficiency of
infrastructure investment. The fragmentation of public
infrastructure investment results in duplication and waste,
and is a major underlying cause of investment inefficiency.
Bond issuance has been the most prominent form of debt
financing at the sub-national level. At the provincial
level, significant disconnects exist between total planned

In many Pacific island countries,
meeting non-food basic needs is a growing challenge and
further complicated by substantial economic and
environmental risks. Hardship and vulnerability are
increasingly prominent concerns in Pacific island countries,
but the knowledge base to guide policymaking is limited.
Family and community networks are central to life in most
Pacific island countries, providing critical support to

The Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias
(MDF) and the Java Reconstruction Fund (JRF) have played
significant roles in the remarkable recovery of Aceh, Nias
and Java, following some of the worst disasters in Indonesia
in recent years. The MDF and the JRF, which is patterned
after it, are each considered a highly successful model for
post-disaster reconstruction. This paper presents lessons
from the MDF and JRF's efforts to facilitate

Indonesia's Program Nasional
Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) is the largest Community
Driven Development (CDD) program in the world covering all
urban wards (PNPM-Urban) and rural villages (PNPM-Rural) in
Indonesia. This policy note summarizes a comprehensive
process evaluation of the PNPM-Urban program which has been
carried by the Research and Development (RAND) corporation
in collaboration with survey meter, as well as a rapid

Apart from a few oil exporters,
Sub-Saharan Africa consists of a large number of low-income
countries, many of which are highly dependent on oil imports
as a source of primary energy. The purpose of this study is
to provide information on a number of aspects of energy and
oil use in these countries, with a view to highlighting the
vulnerabilities of the different countries against sustained
or even increasing oil prices, and explore some of the

By Anthony Piaskowy, Communication and Urban Specialist for USAID's Land Tenure and Property Rights Division.