Publication: Cities, Jobs, and Local Economic Development: A Guidance Note for Task Teams
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2023-05-07
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2023-05-07
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Cities offer enormous opportunities for economic growth and job creation. When local businesses succeed, they create demand for workers, inputs, materials, and additional services, increase productivity, and ultimately contribute to increased incomes and improved living conditions for citizens over time. Local economic development (LED) policies are at the heart of making local economies robust and resilient, and if well designed and implemented, can build future opportunities for growth, job creation, and poverty reduction. Investing in LED includes a range of priorities that enable markets to work and create more demand for labor. The aim of this note is to help mainstream the LED and jobs agenda in the World Bank’s urban portfolio by providing teams with a framework, tools, and good practice examples for designing urban projects with an LED and jobs focus, and a set of narratives for the project interventions as they relate to the Jobs and Economic Transformation (JET) agenda. The note is divided in following sections intended to be used as a toolkit. Section 1 provides context on how urbanization links to LED and job creation. Section 2 summarizes the findings of a recent portfolio review of GPURL projects carried out through the lens of jobs and LED perspectives. Section 3 provides guidance as well as practical tools to teams particularly on framing interventions and project design for impact, outlining specific narratives for urban projects and jobs, and measuring job creation in the projects. Section 4 presents conclusions and future directions.
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“Baker, Judy; Choi, Narae; Gonzalez-Schuler, Manuel; Sivaev, Dmitry. 2023. Cities, Jobs, and Local Economic Development: A Guidance Note for Task Teams. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41519 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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