Chapter 43 Urbanization in transforming economies

Global urbanization projections for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

“…We produce alternative urbanization projections that span a plausible range of uncertainty by extending and modifying the method used by the UN (United Nations, 2010), which draws on historical experience with urbanization at the national level to derive single urbanization projection for each country of the world. While there are critiques of the UN's approach (Bocquire, 2005;Dyson, 2011;Becker and Morrison, 1999;Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1986), our modifications to the methodology address several shortcomings. For example, while the UN assumes that all countries eventually follow a single ''global norm'' relating differences in urban and rural growth rates to the level of urbanization based on historical data (United Nations, 1998), we define the ''norm'' separately for each country to allow for alternative outcomes and the possibility that urbanization trends in the long run may not be direct extrapolations of their past experiences due to different economic, demographic and institutional conditions (Satterthwaite, 1996).…”

Economic growth, size of the agricultural sector, and urbanization in Africa

“…The significant response of GDP per capita growth and the share of agricultural value added in African countries to these plausibly exogenous shocks provides a unique opportunity to construct instrumental variables estimates of the causal effect that variations in GDP per capita growth and the size of the agricultural sector have on the urbanization rate. From a policy perspective the paper's focus on African countries is also justified as there is a fierce policy debate on 1 For theoretical papers that provide a model on how economic growth and sectoral shocks can affect the urbanization rate see for example Brueckner (1990) or Becker and Morrison (1999). 2 Moreover, lagged variables will not necessarily mitigate omitted variables bias.…”

International handbook of development economics

“…Confirming strong selective out-migration, Mberu (2006) finds that migrants in Ethiopia actually have higher living standards than non-movers, with no effective difference once one controls for education and non-agricultural income differences, a commonplace finding (Becker and Morrison, 1999 and not simply to retire. Most urban families maintain rural ties, and will send children or adult family members back to the countryside when urban conditions deteriorate, both in terms of income and security.…”

“…Yet, evidence has mounted that in most countries neither rural nor urban earnings are stable in the face of either positive or negative shocks (Becker and Morrison, 1999;Jamal and Weeks, 1988). There is now irrefutable evidence that real wages are rising in rapidly growing areas of China and Southeast Asia today, even though a vast number of low income workers remain in rural areas (The Economist, 2007).…”

“…Mazumdar (1983) was perhaps the first to note that unemployment was a luxury status that few poor could afford, and that it was less prevalent among recent migrants than among long-standing city dwellers. Considerable evidence from many countries also has pointed to a pattern of pre-arranged jobs for new migrants, who tend to be assisted by relatives and networks based on common origin regions (Becker and Morrison, 1999).…”