Publication: Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth: What, Who, and How
Loading...
Date
2015-12
ISSN
Published
2015-12
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
A competitive city is a city that successfully facilitates its firms and industries to create jobs, raise productivity, and increase the incomes of citizens over time. Worldwide, improving the competitiveness of cities is a pathway to eliminating extreme poverty and to promoting shared prosperity. The primary source of job creation has been the growth of private sector firms, which have typically accounted for around 75 percent of job creation. Thus city leaders need to be familiar with the factors that help to attract, to retain, and to expand the private sector. This document aims to analyze what makes a city competitive and how more cities can become competitive.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank Group. 2015. Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth: What, Who, and How. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23227 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication A Users Guide to Implementing City Competitiveness Interventions(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)This paper is framed as a User’s Guide to help city officials and city competitiveness practitioners in implementing interventions. This guide aims to support cities in identifying collaborative configurations of actors from the public and private sector along with the management approaches that can help leadership implement interventions to support the city economy.Publication Grant Financing of Metropolitan Areas : A Review of Principles and Worldwide Practices(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03)In the new information age in the globalized and interconnected world, metropolitan areas hold the key to the future prosperity and growth of nations. This paper takes a closer look at grant-financing regimes faced by metropolitan areas and their role in facilitating or hindering improvements in economic and social outcomes of residents of metropolitan areas. A review of 42 large metropolitan areas worldwide shows that, with a few notable exceptions, metropolitan areas in general are hamstrung from playing their potential role in economic advancement. Metro areas have large economic bases and therefore little a priori needs for grant financing, yet they have strong dependence on central transfers. This is because of the highly constrained fiscal autonomy given to these areas, especially in developing countries, with the singular exception of metro areas in China. Such a strong reliance on transfers undermines local autonomy and local accountability. General purpose transfers are formula based , transparent and predictable yet they discriminate against metropolitan areas as they utilize a one size fit all (common formula) for all local governments -- large or small. Such formula typically incorporate equal per jurisdiction component that discriminates against large metropolitan areas. Compactness is rarely rewarded and the greater needs of metro areas for transportation, education, health, culture and welfare go unrecognized. Overall the emphasis in grant financing of metro areas deals with vertical fiscal gaps or project based specific purpose grants. To ensure that metropolitan areas can play their dual roles in improving economic and social outcomes for residents, it is important to strengthen their fiscal autonomy while at the same time enhancing their accountability to local residents. The paper argues that results based grant financing of social and transportation services and tournament based approaches to encourage inter-jurisdictional competition need to be given serious consideration to ensure metropolitan autonomy while strengthening citizen based accountability.Publication City Development Strategy : Colombo(Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2000-11)The Colombo Municipal Council (CMC), in collaboration with the World Bank, UNDP, UNCHS (HABITAT) and the Western Provincial Council (WPC) in Sri Lanka, launched a project in February 2000 to formulate a comprehensive strategy framework and a perspective plan of action for development of the city. The purpose was to identify key areas and issues that need systemic and planned attention of the Council and other major stakeholders and to develop appropriate strategies to address them. A Senior Consultant was assigned to the CMC by the sponsors to help formulate the strategy through a consultative process. In formulating the strategy framework, the CMC consulted a wide variety of stakeholder groups through a series of formal and informal consultations. They included civil society partners such as NGOs and CBOs, representatives of the poor; senior municipal officials; and leading private sector representatives, i.e., major investors, realtors, developers and Chambers of Commerce & Industry. Their views, ideas and suggestions were reviewed and those compatible with the development vision and thrust identified by the CMC task forces and stakeholder consultations are incorporated in this strategy framework. All stakeholders, particularly the private sector, considered the opportunity as an unprecedented move by the CMC and WPC. They welcomed the offer to join in this unique partnership-building exercise in city management and have assured the city administration of their wholehearted cooperation.Publication Vietnam Urbanization Review : Technical Assistance Report(World Bank, 2011-11-01)As Vietnam enters a crucial period of urbanization corresponding to its present stage of economic development, the Government of Vietnam has placed strong emphasis on developing its system of cities. In accordance with this objective this Urbanization Review is dedicated to understanding the key dimensions and aspects of Vietnam's urbanization process and to identifying trends, opportunities, challenges and core policy priorities that the government will need to address in order to realize its objective. The Vietnam Urbanization Review was prepared following extensive consultations with various stakeholders, including officials from national and local government, private sector groups and international and bilateral organizations active in development assistance in the urban sector in Vietnam. It builds on a strong portfolio of World Bank engagements in investment and policy lending to the Government of Vietnam. It also builds on a number of more in-depth studies that were commissioned specifically for the Vietnam urbanization review.Publication Urbanization in Developing Countries(World Bank, 2002)The rapid urbanization in many developing countries over the past half century seems to have been accompanied by excessively high levels of concentration of the urban population in very large cities. Some degree of urban concentration may be desirable initially to reduce inter- and intraregional infrastructure expenditures. But in a mature system of cities, economic activity is more spread out. Standardized manufacturing production tends to be de-concentrated into smaller and medium-size metropolitan areas, whereas production in large metropolitan areas focuses on services, research and development, and non-standardized manufacturing. The costs of excessive concentration (traffic accidents, health costs from exposure to high levels of air and water pollution, and time lost to long commutes) stem from the large size of megacities and underdeveloped institutions and human resources for urban planning and management. Alleviating excessively high urban concentration requires investments in interregional transport and telecommunications to facilitate de-concentration of industry. It also requires fiscal de-concentration, so that interior cities can raise the fiscal resources and provide the services needed to compete with primate cities for industry and population.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Doing Business 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)Doing Business 2020 is the 17th in a series of annual studies investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. It provides quantitative indicators covering 12 areas of the business environment in 190 economies. The goal of the Doing Business series is to provide objective data for use by governments in designing sound business regulatory policies and to encourage research on the important dimensions of the regulatory environment for firms.Publication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-10-17)The World Bank Group has two overarching goals: End extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity by boosting the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each economy. As this year’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report documents, the world continues to make progress toward these goals. In 2015, approximately one-tenth of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and the incomes of the bottom 40 percent rose in 77 percent of economies studied. But success cannot be taken for granted. Poverty remains high in Sub- Saharan Africa, as well as in fragile and conflict-affected states. At the same time, most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, which tend to have higher national poverty lines. This year’s report tracks poverty comparisons at two higher poverty thresholds—$3.20 and $5.50 per day—which are typical of standards in lower- and upper-middle-income countries. In addition, the report introduces a societal poverty line based on each economy’s median income or consumption. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle also recognizes that poverty is not only about income and consumption—and it introduces a multidimensional poverty measure that adds other factors, such as access to education, electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. It also explores how inequality within households could affect the global profile of the poor. All these additional pieces enrich our understanding of the poverty puzzle, bringing us closer to solving it. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/PSPPublication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-10-07)Previous Poverty and Shared Prosperity Reports have conveyed the difficult message that the world is not on track to meet the global goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. This edition brings the unwelcome news that COVID-19, along with conflict and climate change, has not merely slowed global poverty reduction but reversed it for first time in over twenty years. With COVID-19 predicted to push up to 100 million additional people into extreme poverty in 2020, trends in global poverty rates will be set back at least three years over the next decade. Today, 40 percent of the global poor live in fragile or conflict-affected situations, a share that could reach two-thirds by 2030. Multiple effects of climate change could drive an estimated 65 to 129 million people into poverty in the same period. “Reversing the reversal” will require responding effectively to COVID-19, conflict, and climate change while not losing focus on the challenges that most poor people continue to face most of the time. Though these are distinctive types of challenges, there is much to be learned from the initial response to COVID-19 that has broader implications for development policy and practice, just as decades of addressing more familiar development challenges yield insights that can inform responses to today’s unfamiliar but daunting ones. Solving novel problems requires rapid learning, open cooperation, and strategic coordination by everyone: from political leaders and scientists to practitioners and citizens.Publication The African Continental Free Trade Area(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-27)The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement will create the largest free trade area in the world, measured by the number of countries participating. The pact will connect 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined GDP valued at $3.4 trillion. It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. But achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures. The scope of the agreement is considerable. It will reduce tariffs among member countries and cover policy areas, such as trade facilitation and services, as well as regulatory measures, such as sanitary standards and technical barriers to trade. It will complement existing subregional economic communities and trade agreements by offering a continent-wide regulatory framework and by regulating policy areas—such as investment and intellectual property rights protection—that have not been covered in most subregional agreements. The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects quantifies the long-term implications of the agreement for growth, trade, poverty reduction, and employment. Its analysis goes beyond that in previous studies that have largely focused on tariff and nontariff barriers in goods—by including the effects of services and trade facilitation measures, as well as the distributional impacts on poverty, employment, and wages of female and male workers. It is designed to guide policy makers as they develop and implement the extensive range of reforms needed to realize the substantial rewards that the agreement offers. The analysis shows that full implementation of AfCFTA could boost income by 7 percent, or nearly $450 billion, in 2014 prices and market exchange rates. The agreement would also significantly expand African trade—particularly intraregional trade in manufacturing. In addition, it would increase employment opportunities and wages for unskilled workers and help close the wage gap between men and women.Publication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-10-02)Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring.