Urbanization in Africa

Sean Fox, a cities expert at the LSE has a great new post up at the Africa@LSE Blog discussing how incorrect analysis has been leading to poor policy for years.

The popular mental model is that there is massive rural-urban migration in search of jobs.

"Since the mid-1970s, African governments have increasingly adopted policies designed to inhibit or discourage people from moving into urban areas. Today, approximately 80% of African countries have policies in place to prevent rural-urban migration. At the same time, international development organisations increasingly withdrew support for urban development initiatives in favour of rural development projects, often justified by the argument (among others) that improving standards of living in rural areas will help to mitigate the growth of urban poverty."

The trouble is, most urban population growth is actually just natural growth. And the rural-urban migration that does exist is driven by a range of factors, not just jobs, such as a "desire to escape age or gender discrimination in their communities, to find a wife or husband, to seek adventure in the “bright lights” of the big city, or to escape rural serfdom."

Which is actually pretty clear when you just look at the data. This is rural and urban population growth in Africa since the 1960s, based on the World Development Indicators (chart stolen from Ian MacAuslan). Cities are growing fast, but so are rural populations. 

And the last word from Sean;

"Simply put, the rapid growth of Africa’s urban population is being driven primarily by rapid population growth in urban areas, not rural-urban migration ... For those interested in easing demographic pressure in urban areas, the only humane policy option is to try to reduce population growth by promoting fertility decline through voluntary family planning initiatives. And for those interested in promoting economic development in the region, investment in urban areas should be top of the policy agenda." 

Read the whole thing here. 

The Political Economy of Fertility

I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.

I'm skeptical of the cross-national empirics without having looked at them, because ... they are cross-national empirics (see here for further explanation). But the theory is interesting and sounds plausible.

(And here's the link for the paper by Thorsten Janus, forthcoming in Public Choice)

Crowded Planet?

World population is expected to hit 7 billion people this month. So are we running out of space? Not if we all move to cities. This chart from Paul Romer's TED talk represents the space that the world's 3 billion city dwellers take up of all the arable land on the planet. It's 3%.

This rocks my world

From Ryan Briggs: here and here

If you think that population density is important for political and economic outcomes (I do), this development could be pretty revolutionary. I'd be interested though to know how much of this density is due to Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the East African Community, and how the other 40 or so countries fare.