Cities exist, grow, and prosper because they take advantage of scale economies and specialization wrought by agglomeration. But output growth inevitably stresses transport infrastructure because production requires space and mobility. To prevent congestion from crowding out agglomeration benefits and to expand the supply of urban land, cities must invest in transport infrastructure. Yet balancing the growing demand for infrastructure with its supply is often difficult. In particular, many cities lack the funding to maintain and expand streets and urban highways.

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.

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities that government officials face in designing coherent 'rules of the game' for achieving urban sustainability during times of growth. Sustainability is judged by three criteria. The first involves elements of day-to-day quality of life, such as having clean air and water and green space. The provision of these public goods has direct effects on the urban public's health and productivity. The second focuses on the city's greenhouse gas emissions.

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.

...Through research on Myanmar, we argue that in authoritarian settings where legality has drastically declined, the starting point for cause lawyering lies in advocacy for law itself, in advocating for the regular application of law’s rules.

The authors use data from Ethiopia to
empirically assess determinants of participation in land
rental markets, compare these to those of administrative
land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact
of households' expectations regarding future
redistribution. Results indicate that rental markets
outperform administrative reallocation in terms of
efficiency and poverty. Households who have part-time jobs

The authors use a large data set from
Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and
transferability to explore determinants of different types
of land-related investment and its possible impact on
productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity
of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces.
Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The
large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even

The extent to which households should be
allowed to transfer their land rights in post-socialist
transition economies is of considerable policy interest. The
authors use data from Vietnam, a transition country that
allows rental and sales of land use rights, to identify
factors conducive to the development of land markets and to
assess the extent to which land transfers enhance productive
efficiency and transfer land to the poor. They find that

This document proposes a set of
generally applicable recommendations and good practices for
creating a Mineral Rights Cadastre (MRC), an administrative
body responsible for overseeing the process of granting and
managing mineral licenses throughout a country. The document
reviews lessons learned from World Bank-funded projects
aimed at reforming mineral rights management and assesses
the impacts and benefits of the implemented changes. The

Climate change is both a cause and an
effect of biodiversity change. Along with anthropogenic
dispersion, climate change is the main driver of change in
the geographical distribution of both beneficial and harmful
species, crops, livestock, harvested wild species, pests,
predators and pathogens. And the capacity of ecosystems to
adapt to climate change depends on the diversity of species
they currently support. This paper considers the connection

Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs)
provide a central framework for macroeconomic, structural,
and social policies in developing countries. Because of the
numerous and complex links between environment and poverty,
it is important that environmental issues are taken into
account in the PRS process. This paper follows six previous
assessments of the degree of mainstreaming environment in
the PRS process using a similar methodology to present

The current assessment builds on
previously published reviews of poverty reduction strategy
programs (PRSPs), and is the sixth report in a series. This
paper aims at presenting a clearer picture of how PRSPs
influence the developmental agenda in 11 African countries
by assessing the level of environmental mainstreaming in the
Poverty Reduction Strategy Process. The paper includes the
following headings: introduction; framework for assessment;