Abstract
The mystery of the lack of a positive relationship between growth and urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa has been raised in a number of studies. A recent paper by Barrios et al. (Journal of Urban Economics 60:357–371, 2006) provides a compelling explanation for why this occurs. Exploiting a new data source, they show how climate change, specifically the reduction in rainfall, has driven people from the increasingly impoverished countryside to the city. They also show that while this is an important factor explaining urbanization in sub-Saharan African countries it does not affect urbanization elsewhere. Their explanation for this important difference is differences in the patterns of rainfall, as well as the composition of soil in most sub-Saharan countries. In a word, geographical factors have dominated the unusual pattern observed in the world’s most rapidly urbanizing continent. In this paper, we extend the work done by Barrios et al. to include more observations and more detailed geographic variables. We first replicate their results and extend the number of observations to more recent periods. Then we consider the effects of a range of specific country geographical characteristics, relying on data developed by other researchers. After discussing our results, we focus on the implications of our findings for policy formulation, particularly for sub-Saharan African countries. The results indicate that geographical circumstances place significantly more important constraints on maximization processes. In other words, urbanization in these countries takes place in a profoundly “second-best” world. We consider what this kind of context implies for the sequencing and implementation of economic reforms which would allow for an urbanization process that would be more conducive to economic growth.
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Notes
Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth rate of urbanization, defined as the share of urban to total population, has been extraordinary by international standards, averaging ten times the rate of OECD countries and more than twice that of the rest of the developing world.
The paper is also available on Paul Collier’s website, at http://users.ox.ac.uk/∼econpco/research/africa.htm.
See Barrios et al. (2006) and the references therein for the exact definitions and data-generating process. The most important of these are the data for the rainfall variable. This measurement involved assimilating data on rainfall from meteorological stations across the world into grids covering the land surface of the world. This was done under the auspices of a new UN survey.
These countries are: Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Sudan, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.
These countries are: Burundi, Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Somalia, and South Africa.
See Nunn (2009) for a discussion of the evolution of such analyses.
As Banerjee et al. (2007) document, a significant number of African economies have not been expanding basic infrastructure services fast enough to keep up with urban growth. The result is decline in the coverage of many services, such as water and toilets, from the levels achieved in the early 1990s, and Becker et al. (1994) document that the 1990 levels of service were well below those observed in the early 1980s.
Their results imply rates of return of over 40%.
The World Bank (1980: 12–15) reference study Shelter lays out the centrality of the Bank’s concern with cost recovery in shelter projects. Four reasons are given: (1) subsidies reduce the incentive to produce lower-standard units and control costs; (2) given the scale of the housing problem, even modest subsidies would imply unsustainable fiscal transfers; (3) there is a need to avoid encouraging migration from rural areas by subsidizing urban settlement; and (4) the needs of the small number, perhaps 5–10% of the population in the lowest-income countries, who would not be able to afford housing are only peripherally related to the provision of shelter as opposed to infrastructure. It also notes that “[a]s recently as 1975 there were few countries willing to contemplate the types of projects that the Bank was sponsoring. Now [i.e. 1980], the Bank has helped to finance more than 32 projects in 26 countries…” (1980: 16).
These data are from various tables in the 2009 WDR (World Bank 2009).
All data are from the WDR of 2009 (World Bank 2009).
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Acknowledgments
This paper was written while the authors were at the World Bank. The views expressed do not represent those of the Bank, the Foundation, the State Department, or the Institution. We would like to thank Paul Collier, Bill Easterly, and Stephen O’Connell for sharing data with us and participants in UNU Wider Conferences in London and Cape Town for comments on earlier versions.
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Annez, P., Buckley, R. & Kalarickal, J. African Urbanization as Flight? Some Policy Implications of Geography. Urban Forum 21, 221–234 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-010-9085-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-010-9085-6