Publication: Where to Create Jobs: Cities or Towns?
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2017-04-21
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2017-06-29
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Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question the authors extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, secondary town and big city. The authors first derive labor income, migration cost and poverty line conditions under which a poverty gradient from rural to town to city will exist as an equilibrium phenomenon. The authors then develop sufficient statistics for the policy decisions based on these income parameters. The empirical remit of the model is illustrated with long running panel data from Kagera, Tanzania. Further, we show that the structure of the sufficient statistics is maintained in the case where the model is generalized to introduce heterogeneous workers and jobs.
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“De Weerdt, Joachim; Christiaensen, Luc; Kanbur, Ravi. 2017. Where to Create Jobs: Cities or Towns?. Jobs Working Paper;No. 2. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27478 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Using an 18-year panel of individuals from this region and information on the possible destinations from the census, this study documents, through dyadic regressions and controlling for individual heterogeneity, how the deterrence of further distance to cities (compared to towns) largely trumps the attraction from their promise of greater wealth, making towns more appealing destinations. Education mitigates these effects (lesser deterrence from distance, greater attraction from wealth), while poverty reduces the attraction of wealth, consistent with the notion of urban sorting. With about two-thirds of the rural population in low-income countries living within two hours from a town, these findings underscore the importance of vibrant towns for inclusive development.Publication Migrants, Towns, Poverty and Jobs(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02)For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty reduction. This paper reviews the latter question within the context of Tanzania. It starts from the observation that migration to towns contributed much more to poverty reduction than migration to cities because many more (poor) rural migrants ended up in Tanzania's towns than its cities, despite larger welfare gains from moving to the city. Drawing on the findings from a series of studies, looking at this from different angles (theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative), the paper shows how towns are better at enabling the rural poor to access off-farm employment and exit poverty because they are more nearby. It concludes with a call for greater consideration of the role of towns in accelerating Africa's poverty reduction.
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