The concept of the green economy presented in three reports from leading global organizations is examined in this paper. These include the United Nations Environment Programme's Towards a Green Economy, the World Bank's Inclusive Green Growth and the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development's Towards Green Growth. The main critiques of the concept of the green economy are also considered. Contrary to views that the green economy merely represents ‘green‐washing’ and tweaking of the current economic system, this paper concludes that the green economy has the potential to effect substantive and transformative change towards the goal of sustainable development. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

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The debate over whether or not the deindustrialisation of cities is accompanied by the occupational and income polarisation of their working populations has been characterised by some confusion over the relationship between incomes and occupations in the service sector. Specifically, many scholars have misunderstood the significance of middle-income service-sector occupations for their interpretations of the post-industrial class structure of cities. Through a comparative study of deindustrialisation in Cape Town, evidence is presented to show that the growth of service-sector employment can produce a large middle-income occupational class of clerks, sales and personal services workers. The growth of this class can offset the decline of middle-income jobs caused by the loss of artisans, machine operators and drivers in the declining manufacturing sector. These results therefore suggest that many studies have overestimated the extent of occupational polarisation and underestimated the extent of professionalisation.

This article addresses the debate over the causes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation in Zambia: Are urbanisation and counter-urbanisation caused mostly by net migration or are they caused mostly by the natural growth or decline of the urban population? Using population censuses, we apply the intercensal forward survival ratio method to measure net migration and the natural population growth of urban and rural areas in 1990, 2000 and 2010. The results show that the most important cause of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation was net migration rather than natural urban population growth or decline. Although natural urban population growth was roughly twice that of net migration, this had very little influence on urbanisation because it was matched by the natural growth of the rural population. We also address the causes of migration by examining employment trends. These results indicate that economic decline during the 1990s resulted in decreased urban employment and a dramatic rise in urban unemployment, which in turn caused migration from urban to rural areas. Conversely, during the 2000s, absolute employment grew and unemployment decreased, which corresponded with increased rural–urban migration (resulting in net urbanisation). Our findings also show that even during the period of net out-migration from urban areas and high urban unemployment levels, the resident urban-born workforce continued to grow strongly through natural increase. Thus, these results also show that urban population growth can increase substantially in the absence of urban economic growth, thereby increasing urban unemployment and urban–rural migration.

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