Person:
Roberts, Mark
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Urban economics,
Urban development,
Spatial economics,
Regional development
Degrees
Departments
Urban, Resilience and Land Global Practice, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Mark Roberts is a senior urban economist with the Urban, Resilience and Land Global Practice of the World Bank, where his work currently focuses on the East Asia and Pacific region. Prior to joining the World Bank, Mark was a lecturer in spatial economics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow in economics at Murray Edwards College, a member college of the University of Cambridge. Mark has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals on the topic of spatial economic development and is a former coeditor of the journal Spatial Economic Analysis. He is coauthor of the World Bank’s South Asia Region Flagship Report, Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia, and its Latin America and Caribbean Flagship Report, Raising the Bar for Productive Cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has also worked on both the Europe and Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa regions, and acts as an advisor to Bank teams working on the analysis of processes of urban and spatial development. A native of the United Kingdom, Mark holds a PhD in land economy and an MA in economics from the University of Cambridge as well as an MS in economics from Warwick University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 12
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Publication
Cities of Workers, Children, or Seniors? Age Structure and Economic Growth in a Global Cross-Section of Cities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more working-age adults are likely to grow faster than cities with more children or seniors. The paper sets out the potential channels through which such differential growth may occur. Using data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, it shows that there exists marked variation in the age structure of the world's largest cities, across cities and over time. It then studies how age structure affects economic growth for a global cross-section of mega-cities. Using various identification strategies, the analysis finds that mega-cities with higher dependency ratios, that is, with more children and/or seniors per working-age adult, grow significantly slower. Such effects are particularly pronounced for cities with high shares of children. This result appears to be driven mainly by the direct, negative effects of a higher dependency ratio on the size of the working-age population and the indirect effects on work hours and productivity for working-age adults within a city. -
Publication
Hukou and Highways: The Impact of China’s Spatial Development Policies on Urbanization and Regional Inequality
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural new economic geography model to examine the impacts of these policies. Fitting the model to available data allows simulating counterfactual scenarios comparing each policy’s respective impact on regional economic development and urbanization patterns across China. The results suggest large overall economic benefits from constructing the national expressway network and abolishing the Hukou system. Yet, the spatial impacts of the two policies are very different. The construction of the national expressway network reinforced existing urbanization patterns. The initially lagging regions not connected to the network have not benefitted much from its construction. By contrast, removal of the Hukou restrictions, which Chinese policy makers are considering, would result in much more widespread welfare gains, allowing everyone to gain by moving to where he or she is most productive. Removal of the Hukou restrictions would also promote urbanization in currently lagging (inland) regions, mostly by stimulating rural to urban migration. -
Publication
Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia: Managing Spatial Transformation for Prosperity and Livability
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016)The number of people in South Asia's cities rose by 130 million between 2000 and 2011--more than the entire population of Japan. This was linked to an improvement in productivity and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But the region's cities have struggled to cope with the pressure of population growth on land, housing, infrastructure, basic services, and the environment. As a result, urbanization in South Asia remains underleveraged in its ability to deliver widespread improvements in both prosperity and livability. Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia is about the state of South Asia's urbanization and the market and policy failures that have taken the region’s urban areas to where they are today--and the hard policy actions needed if the region’s cities are to leverage urbanization better. This publication provides original empirical and diagnostic analysis of urbanization and related economic trends in the region. It also discusses in detail the key policy areas, the most fundamental being urban governance and finance, where actions must be taken to make cities more prosperous and livable. -
Publication
A Free, Open-Source Tool for Identifying Urban Agglomerations Using Point Data
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-10-29)This paper describes a software tool for identifying urban agglomerations in low-information settings. The framework outlined in this paper is designed to work using point data. Our tool and all required data are provided free and in open-source format. This paper describes the advantages and disadvantages of using point-based geographies in regional analysis, discusses the practical and ethical challenges of distinguishing urban from rural regions, details the function of our software, and directs the interested reader to the source code. The paper also examines the tool's outputs for Sri Lanka and compares them with published United Nations urbanization figures. Our outputs indicate that Sri Lanka's urban population is significantly undercounted in official statistics. -
Publication
Identifying the Economic Potential of Indian Districts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04)Despite its rapid growth in recent decades, GDP per capita in India remains at a relatively low level by international standards, and the country continues to be marked by large subnational disparities in levels of well-being. These large disparities naturally lead to interest in India’s spatial landscape of potential for economic development. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the results of an analysis of underlying variations in economic potential across Indian districts, where economic potential is defined as the extent to which a district possesses factors that are important determinants of the ability to experience a high level of productivity. The analysis is based on a simple composite Economic Potential Index, which is constructed from variables for which robust evidence exists of their importance as determinants of local productivity. From the analysis, a picture emerges of a heterogeneous landscape of economic potential characterized by strong geographic clustering of districts. The paper also reveals particularly high levels of underperformance, relative to potential, for districts in Uttar Pradesh. -
Publication
Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09)A variety of approaches to delineate metropolitan areas have been developed. Systematic comparisons of these approaches in terms of the urban landscape that they generate are however few. Our paper aims to fill this gap. We focus on Indonesia and make use of the availability of data on commuting flows, remotely-sensed nighttime lights, and spatially fine-grained population, to construct metropolitan areas using the different approaches that have been developed in the literature. We find that the maps and characteristics of Indonesia’s urban landscape vary substantially depending on the approach used. Moreover, combining information on the metro areas generated by the different approaches with detailed micro-data from Indonesia’s national labor force survey, we show that the estimated size of the agglomeration wage premium depends nontrivially on the approach used to define metropolitan areas. -
Publication
Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11)A variety of approaches to delineate metropolitan areas have been developed. Systematic comparisons of these approaches in terms of the urban landscape that they generate are however few. This paper aims to fill this gap. The paper focuses on Indonesia and makes use of the availability of data on commuting flows, remotely-sensed nighttime lights, and spatially fine-grained population, to construct metropolitan areas using the different approaches that have been developed in the literature. The analysis finds that the maps and characteristics of Indonesia’s urban landscape vary substantially, depending on the approach used. Moreover, combining information on the metro areas generated by the different approaches with detailed micro-data from Indonesia's national labor force survey, the paper shows that the estimated size of the agglomeration wage premium depends nontrivially on the approach used to define metropolitan areas. -
Publication
Female Business Leaders, Business and Cultural Environment, and Productivity around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Studies of female business leaders and economic performance are rarely conducted with worldwide observational data, and with considerations on the underlying cultural, institutional, and business environment. This paper uses worldwide, firm-level data from more than 100 countries to study how female-headed firms differ from male-headed firms in productivity level and growth, and whether the female leader performance disparity hinges on the underlying environment. Female-headed firms account for about 11 percent of firms and are more prevalent in countries with better rule of law, gender equality, and stronger individualistic culture. On average, female-headed firms have 9 to 16 percent lower productivity and 1.6 percentage points lower labor productivity growth, compared with male-headed firms. The disadvantage is mainly in manufacturing firms, largely nonexistent in service firms, and present in relatively small firms. Although the female leader performance disadvantage is surprisingly not related to gender equality, it is smaller where there is less emphasis on personal networks (better rule of law, lower trade credit linkages, lower usage of bank credit, and more equalizing internet), less competition, and the culture is more collective. The study does not find that the female leader disadvantage is amplified in corrupt environments. Africa differs significantly in that it features lower female disadvantage, stronger female advantage in services relative to manufacturing, and stronger sensitivity of female business leaders to electricity provision and bank credit access. -
Publication
The Heterogeneous Growth Effects of the Business Environment: Firm-Level Evidence for a Global Sample of Cities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06)Using firm-level data covering 709 cities in 128 countries, this paper examines the role of a comprehensive list of business environment variables at the subnational level in explaining firm employment and productivity growth. The analysis finds basic protection, access to finance and infrastructure, and the existence of a strong agglomeration environment to be critically important. By contrast, human capital and a list of refined business environment variables related to labor regulations, tax, and land access are found to be relatively unimportant. The analysis also finds that the effects of the business environment vary according to firm size, age, sector affiliation, and the host country's level of development. The research suggests that it pays to be comprehensive about the business environment and that attention to heterogeneity is important. -
Publication
Urbanization and Development: Is Latin America and the Caribbean Different from the Rest of the World?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03-03)Two long-established stylized facts in the urban and development economics literatures are that: (a) a country's level of economic development is strongly positively correlated with its level of urbanization; and (b) a country's level of urbanization is strongly negatively correlated with the size of its agricultural sector. However, countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region appear to depart significantly from the rest of the world in these two basic relationships. Although Latin American countries appear to be significantly more urbanized than predicted based on these global relationships, Caribbean countries appear significantly less urbanized. However, analyses involving cross-country comparisons of urbanization levels are undermined by systematic measurement errors arising from differences in how countries define their urban areas. This paper reexamines whether Latin America and Caribbean countries differ from the rest of the world in the basic stylized facts of urbanization, development, and structural transformation. The analysis makes use of two alternative methodologies for the consistent definition of urban areas across countries: the Agglomeration Index methodology and a methodology based on the identification of dense spatially contiguous clusters of population. Both methodologies rely on globally gridded population data sets as input. There exist several such data sets, and so the paper also assesses the robustness of the findings to the choice of input population layer.