rural-urban dynamics_report.pdf - Khazar University

132 URBANIZATION AND THE MDGS GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2013
BOX 3.1
Bangalore has nurtured skills but must now tackle infrastructure
Bangalore’s economic growth has been rapid and
successful. In 1998, the Indian city’s incomes were
24 percent higher than the national average. In 2005,
they were nearly 70 percent higher.
An analysis shows that the skills of the city’s residents
are the bedrock of that success. These skills
have long been valued in Bangalore, with the maharajas
of the princely state of Mysore instituting compulsory
education and building the University of Mysore
and Bangalore’s engineering college. This was the
starting point for the cluster of educated engineers
that persists to this day. Building on an initial corpus
of engineering expertise, firms such as Infosys were
attracted to Bangalore, jumpstarting a virtuous circle
where smart companies and smart workers came to
Bangalore to be close to one another.
Bangalore’s economic success is creating infrastructure
problems, however, including poor water
quality, traffic congestion, and housing shortages. The
water system is strained—30 percent of city residents
use polluted groundwater; the sewer system does not
reach a large part of the city; and average commute
times are more than 40 minutes because jobs are dispersed
from the city core. If the water problems or
commuting times get worse, skilled people—the city’s
main asset—will leave for cities that offer better amenities.
How Bangalore improves the quality of life for
its residents will have a considerable bearing on how
bright Bangalore continues to shine.
Source: Glaeser 2010.
are adequately provided. While each infrastructure
sector and service can be addressed
by appropriate government policies, addressing
only one or two of them has little payoff
if the others remain unresolved (Collier and
Venables forthcoming). Getting the highest
level of political support to enable cross-sectoral
and intergovernmental coordination is
critical for getting urbanization right.
Framework for urbanization
policy
The policy framework used here draws
heavily on the World Development Report
2009: Reshaping Economic Geography
(WDR 2009) (World Bank 2008) and subsequent
country level diagnostics under the
World Bank’s Urbanization Review Program,
whose lessons are synthesized in Planning,
Connecting, and Financing Cities—Now
(World Bank 2013a). WDR 2009 looked at
urbanization trends and policies worldwide
and proposed a three-part policy framework
for urbanization. First, institutions should
provide the foundations for liberalizing the
movement of people and goods and easing
the exchange and redevelopment of land,
enabling vast economic gains. Second, investments
should respond to the needs of residents
and businesses, especially for basic and
connective infrastructure. Third, targeted
interventions should respond to the needs of
the poor and people in marginal locations or
address individual behaviors that endanger
health, safety, or the environment. Applying
this policy framework, the World Bank’s
Urbanization Reviews offer policy makers
diagnostic tools to identify policy distortions
and analyze investment priorities.
Each review starts by assessing a country
or region’s spatial transformation: how the
urban economy is evolving; how urbanization
is changing the demand for services within
the city; the pace of new arrivals; and where
these new arrivals are finding places to live
and how they are commuting to their jobs.
It then compares the city’s observed patterns
with benchmarks in other cities or with past
conditions. Such comparisons help reveal
how policy distortions constrain urbanization
and how investment shortfalls limit the
benefits from it. Once the review has identified
the possible constraints and shortfalls,
it proposes policy options. It aims to show
how a city can harness economic and social