7 reasons why urban growth is a natural and normal phenomenon

The town of Dubai first conducted a census in 1968 (with approximately 59,971 inhabitants then) ... According to the Statistics Centre of Dubai, the population of the emirate is estimated to be over 1,800,000 as of 2010 ... Do the math!  

(HT: Our Word is Our Weapon).

OK. I make that an annual growth rate of 108%. Dubai has more than doubled in population every year for the past 42 years.

Rapid urban growth is not an inherently evil thing. In fact it is probably quite a good thing. Professor Mario Polèse offers 7 reasons why:

Seven Pillars of Agglomeration:

1. Economies of scale in production: For many industries, the average cost of producing goods declines as the scale of production expands. This can make it very profitable to concentrate production in a few large facilities and to locate those facilities close to lots of workers, namely near cities.

2. Economies of scale in trade and transportation: Delivery costs are lower when the trucks, planes, and ships going to and from transit hubs are fully loaded with goods. Filling trucks, planes, and ships is easier when they’re moving between urban areas with large ports, airports, and distribution centers.

3. Falling transportation and communication costs: Falling transport costs allow firms to exploit economies of scale, producing in one place and distributing to a large and geographically diverse market by road, air, or sea. Similarly, declining communications costs allow firms to concentrate productive activity in one place and distribute services to a wider market via airwaves, radio frequencies, and fiber optic cables.

4. The need for proximity with other firms in the same industry: Face to face interaction is important in industries where creativity, inspiration, imagination, or the cultivation of trust are key inputs. Proximity with other firms also lowers recruitment and training costs since a firm will have ready access to workers with industry-relevant skills.

5. The advantage of diversity: For firms, such as ad agencies, that need a workforce with a diverse skill set, will be better able to find and recruit workers from many different speciallized backgrounds if they locate near large cities where many different industries cluster.

6. The quest for the center: Firms that need direct access to customers will naturally locate in the geographic center of their markets. In many cases, this will mean locating in or near big cities. Polèse points to the example of Broadway. The concentration of performing arts in New York reflects access to the large local population but also theatergoers from other metropolitan areas that are linked to New York by rail, air, and road.

7. Buzz and bright lights: Cities with amenities like food, nightlife, museums, recreation, culture, and shopping tend to attract more people. Economists Ed Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz find that high amenity cities grow faster than low amenity cities. They also observe that urban rents rise faster than urban wages, suggesting that people want to live in cities for reasons beyond rising wages. Even as information technology makes it possible for an increasing number of people to work from nearly anywhere in the world, the amenities associated with city life continue to attract and retain urban residents.

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy

O'Brien: Do you feel that we now take technology for granted?

Louis C.K.: Well yes, now we live an amazing world, and its wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that don't care.

Word.

HT: Kelly Bidwell via Chris Blattman

George Clooney in Southern Sudan

A few weeks back my Facebook newsfeed filled up with photos of grinning friends standing next to George Clooney in Juba's bars. Well this is what he was up to.



Kristof is somewhat predictably a fan.

I admire Clooney (and Ann Curry of NBC, who went with him and got an hour on Dateline) for trying to raise an alarm bell in the night. Let’s hope that the alarms, and the latest burst of diplomacy and spotlight on South Sudan, are enough to avert a new war.

Tom Murphy

worries that this over-simplifies what is going on in Sudan

I'm actually going to side with Kristof on this one. Whilst I don't think that a return to war is the most likely to outcome, it is a possibility, and given the track record of the US in helping to broker the 2005 CPA I do think that US diplomacy could be important in ensuring a peaceful outcome.

I don't think that a return to war is likely because I think that ultimately both sides are going to behave rationally, by which I mean in their own self-interest. The Khartoum government has a strong interest in not losing the oil revenues from the South, but an even stronger interest in not having all oil production come to a halt completely due to a return to war. The cost to the SPLM of building a new pipeline through Kenya is basically prohibitive, and they have already indicated that they would be willing to pay hefty pipeline fees to Khartoum, even to the point of extending the current 50:50 split.

Added to the mix for Khartoum is that arrest warrant for Bashir, the desire to get sanctions lifted, and the desire to get some relief on that $30bn of debt.

There is a lot of space for a mutually profitable deal to be made, if cool heads can be made to prevail.

Agricultural Production and Global Migration

Upon arriving in Sudan and witnessing the miles and miles of empty fertile land, my friend Abhijeet decided that the obvious solution to Sudan's economic development was importing Indians. Let some poor, land-starved Indian farmers come over and have some free land, and they'll revolutionise agricultural productivity.

It looks like Khartoum has been having similar ideas.

Islamabad government is negotiating with Khartoum way to provide land and family visas to Pakistani farmers to enable them to farm in Sudan, Pakistan’s ministry of agriculture said this week.

The issue was discussed when Pakistani Federal minister for Food & Agriculture, Nazar M. Gondal received in his office Sudanese ambassador to Pakistan, Mohamed Omer Moussa at his office in Islamabad last Thursday.

"Our farmers are the most hardworking people on the globe. If they are provided with chunks of land and duly supported, they could prove to be extremely beneficial for both countries. The farmers will transfer their valuable farming experiences and help to promote best agricultural practices in Sudan," said Gondal.

Ambassador Moussa praised the proposal adding that Sudan would cordially welcome to have Pakistani farming families and will ensure to facilitate and support them in all the possible ways.

"We really desire to benefit from your rich experience in agriculture sector. We already have Egyptian and Palestinian farming communities in Sudan and would be more than happy to have skilled Pakistani farmers" he said.

Sudan and Egypt agreed in September to encourage private companies to plant wheat in northern Sudan and settle Egyptian farmers there. The project had been agreed in the past by the two countries but the recent world grain crisis pushed the two countries to revive it.

The Pakistani minister said that the proposed plan to transfer Farming Families to Sudan will be included in the MoU, already under process, between Government of Sudan and Pakistan for Cooperation in the field of Agriculture.

From wikipedia:

India: the 32nd most densely populated country in the world (938 people per square mile)
Pakistan: the 58th most densely populated country in the world (552 people per square mile)

Sudan: the 202nd most densely populated country in the world (41 people per square mile)

Links (now on Twitter)

It has been well over a year since my experiment with Twitter began. Since then I have become thoroughly hooked, and there has been a corresponding drop-off in those "interesting links" blog posts.

As Tim Harford just tweeted (I still hate that word...)

"Twitter is siphoning off all the stuff we used to put on blogs that really wanted to be a tweet." http://bit.ly/g4u3Cp @doctorow on news

One the fascinating things about the medium is the way it has taken on a life of its own, being used pretty differently to how its creators intended.

So basically, you should really get yourself on twitter. You can always just dip your toe in and have a look around without actually signing up. You can also get my twitter RSS feed without signing up.

Google Beatbox

Beatboxing with Google Translate.

HT: The very excellent kmtlondon.com

The Economist still using made-up poverty stats

That 90% living on less than $1 a day stat? Pulled completely out of thin air about 5 years ago because there was no data. Literally just made up on the spot.
Now there is some data, thanks to the hard work of the staff at the Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, and some generous funding and technical assistance from various donors. And it is even ONLINE.
I used to think that statistics in poor countries were underfunded, but if we’re all going to ignore them anyway and just make stuff up….

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention, this one fully conforms to Easterly's "First Law of Development Stats: Whatever our Bizarre Methodology, We make Africa look Worse".

The actual real stats (not yet adjusted for PPP) would put the proportion of the population living on less than $1 a day at more like 50%.

The Lottery of Life

Save the Children have what I think is a fantastic new ad campaign highlighting the importance of luck in determining life chances. Being born in the UK almost automatically guarantees you a position as one of the richest 15% of people on the planet (that is at the basic rate of unemployment benefit for 18 year olds, excluding additional benefits).

the policy-induced portion of the place premium in wages represents one of the largest remaining price distortions in any global market; is much larger than wage discrimination in spatially integrated markets; and makes labor mobility capable of reducing households’ poverty at the margin by much more than any known in situ intervention (Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett).

People worry about the ethical implications of randomly allocating treatments in small research projects. Yet when people are randomly born in hopeless economies with tyrannical rulers, we do everything we can to prevent them escaping.

Spin the wheel for yourself and see where you could have ended up.

HT: @viewfromthecave @laurenist

Is Aid Fungible?

No this has nothing to do with mushrooms.

“Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution.”

In the world of aid, this refers to the question of whether or not donors are able to successfully ring-fence their additional funds. If a rich donor gives £50m to the Ministry of Health in a poor country, can and will the poor country just cut its own MoH funding by £50m, freeing up that cash to spend on whatever it wants?

A new CSAE working paper by Nicolas Van de Sijpe suggests that aid fungibility is not so important. He uses a new datatset to test cross-country correlations between the sectoral distribution of government spending and donor spending.

The lack of fungibility of technical cooperation may be a consequence of effective donor conditionality. If donors are able to monitor the recipient government’s spending, they may be able to credibly enforce the condition that the government does not cut back its planned expenditure after receiving technical cooperation. An additional reason to explain the low degree of fungibility found, that applies specifically to technical cooperation and less to the other aid types, is the observation made by Gramlich (1977) that heterogeneity in government expenditure might contribute to reduced fungibility. To the extent that governments in developing countries spend few of their resources on the type of goods and services that are provided by technical cooperation, it becomes impossible to reduce this class of expenditure by much, as it quickly hits a lower bound of zero. If, in addition, the substitutability between different types of expenditure in the recipient government’s utility function is limited, low fungibility for technical cooperation may ensue. Finally, a lack of information on the recipient government’s part may also reduce the degree of fungibility.

Rachman: UK Immigration Policy is “idiocy”

The problem is that the government has promised to cut the number of migrants coming into the country. But it is fiendishly hard to tackle the kind of migration that actually worries the great British public [Semi-skilled workers from Europe, Asylum Seekers, and Muslims].

So, unable effectively to tackle the kind of immigration that actually upsets people, the British government is taking aim at the one group of migrants that are largely uncontroversial and that unambiguously contribute to the country’s well-being. What idiocy.

Rachmanblog, HT: TH

This is not a warzone

“The risk assessments are done by some wanker who’s just come from Kabul who is under the impression that we’re all about to be blown up,” Mr Woodward sighs. “The real ones that I have a problem with are the Americans who tell you within the first minute that ‘I’ve been to Pakistan and Haiti and Afghanistan’ as if this is really fucking dangerous. This is not in that circle. This is not a warzone. People are not trying to kill us. This is not anything like Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia.

“I think the world’s got a very incorrect perception of South Sudan, and I think the world also confuses Darfur with South Sudan, which is an entirely different matter,” he says. “Americans have definitely got the wrong idea, and George fucking Clooney parading around town is not in anybody’s best interests.”

Michael Woodward of Terrain Services (another quote from the excellent-but-unfortunately-titled This is Africa magazine produced by the FT).

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Across the vast majority of countries, Africans perceive respect to be asymmetric. In other words, they believe they respect Americans and the Chinese but they don’t believe these two groups of foreigners respect them.

That’s from Gallup survey data. It’s such a shame all of Gallup’s fascinating data is private. Perhaps this is an area for more international public funding.

When Gallup asked Africans about the presence of foreigners in their respective countries, an average of 44 percent said there are “too many” Chinese and 16 percent said there are “too many” Americans. These figures hardly tell the whole story. Strong majorities in many of China’s trading partners perceive the Chinese presence to be overwhelming. For example, 93 percent of Botswanans, 89 percent of Angolans, 69 percent of South Africans and 68 percent of Zambians say there are “too many” Chinese in their countries.

Africans’ perceptions that Americans are too numerous are far less widespread. It’s highest in Djibouti as 51 percent of residents said there are “too many” Americans in their country and lowest in Benin (7 percent) and Zimbabwe (3 percent). However, relatively significant proportions of Angolans (37 percent), Sierra Leonans (30 percent) and Liberians (29 percent), among others, told Gallup there are “too many” Americans in their countries.

In praise of slums

"As the fastest urbanising continent in the world, Africa is not only confronted with the challenge of improving the lives of slum dwellers but also the challenge of preventing the formation of new slums," said Joan Clos, executive director of UN-Habitat.

Really Joan? What's your counterfactual? An imaginary nice clean yuppie living in a nice clean neighbourhood? An imaginary happy-clappy rural farmer?

Slums are created when people leave their rural village to go in search of a better life/more money in the city. Slums aren't some kind of alien cancerous growth, they are the result of natural economic forces (*cough* WDR 2009 *cough*), of people becoming more productive when they are closer together, and can more easily exchange their ideas, their labour and their services. Africa may be the fastest urbanising continent in the world but that's probably because it was the least urbanised to begin with. Urbanisation is a good thing.

The breakneck transformation of a rural population into a predominantly urban one is neither good nor bad on its own, says UN-Habitat. 

But

They are already inundated with slums and a tripling of urban populations could spell disaster, unless urgent action is initiated today. This situation threatens stability and also entire nations," it said.

Enough with the alarmist nonsense please. For a look at some of the life and vitality and optimism of urban Africa, check out the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos.

When I was censored

If there is a common thread running through our understanding of effective aid, it is the need to experiment, learn, and adapt. This means admitting to - rather than hiding - things that don't work, so that we can learn from them. The anonymous bloggers I was referring to talk about the reality of aid work, warts and all. They have a following because their readers know that they are speaking the truth. But their employers could not tolerate the truth, so these bloggers have to remain in the closet.

One day, aid agencies will brag about the bloggers they have on staff. This will happen when they realize the best aid agencies are platforms for conversations and learning rather than infallible oracles of aid wisdom. Until then, many bloggers will have to remain anonymous.

That is Dennis Whittle of Global Giving, and I agree entirely.

I started out putting my first name on my posts.

Then I got into a bit of hot water, when I somewhat rashly called an employee of a certain aid agency an idiot for being against immigration (even a little bit racist, or at least xenophobic, which is a pretty weird thing for an aid worker to be, and actually also reflected the general absence of any kind of positive official position by the aid agency on migration).

This aid agency, not being my direct employer (but indirectly funding my position), had the message to remove this post relayed to me by someone else who also wasn't my direct employer, along with a list of 31 other posts to be amended or removed. Some of the requests were reasonable, and I did also take my name off the posts. Some of it I thought pretty unnecessary. Slandering specific agencies is a little reckless (even when they deserve it). But engaging in public debate on the merits of aid and other actions with impact on poverty and development is something that aid agencies and governments should be encouraging. It is essential. I suppose I'm pretty bad at playing politics.

In any case, on leaving Sudan I thought I would stick my name back up. It's a bit of a gamble, but I feel like time is on my side, and I'm putting my faith in a certain cheesy adage, that "those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." I also have the privilege of some fairly enlightened employers at present.

What are your thoughts on blogging, censorship, self-censorship....?