Successful, safe and sustainable cities: towards a New Urban Agenda

There is a growing interest among national governments and international agencies in the contribution of urban centres to sustainable development. The paper outlines the new global agendas to guide this: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the New Urban Agenda. It then sets out the key challenges and opportunities facing urban governments across the Commonwealth in implementing these agendas and achieving inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities. This is hampered by significant infrastructure deficits (especially in provision for water and sanitation) and a lack of funding. After outlining the commitments agreed by national governments in these global agendas, the paper discusses the vital role in meeting these of city leadership, financing and investment, urban planning and local economic development. Whilst it is good to see recognition of the importance of cities to national economies, economic success in any city does not automatically contribute to a healthier city, a more inclusive city or a sustainable city. This needs capable and accountable urban governments working closely with local civil society, and the redirection of public funds and development assistance to support them

The role of cities in sustainable development

This repository item contains a single issue of Sustainable Development Insights, a series of short policy essays that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The series seeks to promote a broad interdisciplinary dialogue on how to accelerate sustainable development at all levels.This brief will argue that with the right innovation and incentives in place, cities can allow high living standards to be combined with resource consumption that is much lower than the norm in most cities today. This is achieved not with an over-extended optimism on what new technologies can bring but through a wider-application of what already has been shown to work by the more innovative and accountable city and municipal governments and their partnerships with civil society groups

Appropriate Sanitation Technologies for Addressing Deficiencies in Provision in Low- and Middle-Income Nations

human development, water, sanitation

Urban Myths and the Mis-use of Data that Underpin them

This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons – for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the lack of attention to data limitations has led to many myths and misconceptions in regard to growth rates for city populations and for nations’ levels of urbanization. It ends with some comments on how data limitations distort urban policies.urbanization, city populations, censuses

Urbanisation as a Threat or Opportunity in the Promotion of Human Wellbeing

It is possible to present a credible picture of urbanisation as one of the greatest threats to human health, wellbeing and development, although this paper will argue that to do so requires focusing on a limited set of cities. There is a stronger evidence base on cities and urbanisation underpinning good health, fulfilment of civil rights, democracy and freedom from deprivation, although with important exceptions. It is possible to present urbanisation as the most serious driver of human-induced climate change (and of most other kinds of ecological damage). But cities also have the potential to be places where high living standards can be delinked from unsustainable ecological footprints and high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (and there are some cities that demonstrate this). Of course, a very different set of urban centres get highlighted, depending on which of these points one wants to substantiate. What this paper seeks to do is to highlight both the threats and the opportunities posed by urbanisation

Foundations of Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics. Existence, Purification, and Multiplicity

In this paper we show that existence of a Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) in the Ericson & Pakes (1995) model of dynamic competition in an oligopolistic industry with investment, entry, and exit requires admissibility of mixed entry/exit strategies, con- trary to Ericson & Pakes's (1995) assertion. This is problematic because the existing algorithms cannot cope with mixed strategies. To establish a firm basis for computing dynamic industry equilibria, we introduce ¯rm heterogeneity in the form of randomly drawn, privately known scrap values and setup costs into the model. We show that the resulting game of incomplete information always has a MPE in cuto® entry/exit strate- gies and is computationally no more demanding than the original game of complete information. Building on our basic existence result, we first show that a symmetric and anonymous MPE exists under appropriate assumptions on the model's primitives. Sec- ond, we show that, as the distribution of the random scrap values/setup costs becomes degenerate, MPEs in cuto® entry/exit strategies converge to MPEs in mixed entry/exit strategies of the game of complete information. Next, we provide a condition on the model's primitives that ensures the existence of a MPE in pure investment strategies. Finally, we provide the first example of multiple symmetric and anonymous MPEs in this literature.

Convergence of a Dynamic Matching and Bargaining Market with Two-sided Incomplete Information to Perfect Competition

Consider a decentralized, dynamic market with an infinite horizon in which both buyers and sellers have private information concerning their values for the indivisible traded good. Time is discrete, each period has length ?, and each unit of time a large number of new buyers and sellers enter the market to trade. Within a period each buyer is matched with a seller and each seller is matched with zero, one, or more buyers. Every seller runs a first price auction with a reservation price and, if trade occurs, both the seller and winning buyer exit the market with their realized utility. Traders who fail to trade either continue in the market to be rematched or become discouraged with probability ?? (? is the discouragement rate) and exit with zero utility. We characterize the steady-state, perfect Bayesian equilibria as ? becomes small and the market–in effect– becomes large. We show that, as ? converges to zero, equilibrium prices at which trades occur converge to the Walrasian price and the realized allocations converge to the competitive allocation.

Convergence of a Dynamic Matching and Bargaining Market with Two-sided Incomplete Information to Perfect Competition

Consider a decentralized, dynamic market with an infinite horizon in which both buyers and sellers have private information concerning their values for the indivisible traded good. Time is discrete, each period has length ä, and each unit of time a large number of new buyers and sellers enter the market to trade. Within a period each buyer is matched with a seller and each seller is matched with zero, one, or more buyers. Every seller runs a first price auction with a reservation price and, if trade occurs, both the seller and winning buyer exit the market with their realized utility. Traders who fail to trade either continue in the market to be rematched or become discouraged with probability äµ (µ is the discouragement rate) and exit with zero utility. We characterize the steady-state, perfect Bayesian equilibria as ä becomes small and the market–in effect– becomes large. We show that, as ä converges to zero, equilibrium prices at which trades occur converge to the Walrasian price and the realized allocations converge to the competitive allocation.

The Role of Physicians in the Production of Hospital Output

The purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production functions for hospitals in which a measure of the level of physician input is utilized. Since no data on the total number of hours worked by non-salaried physicians is available for a large sample of U.S. hospitals, alternative measures of physician input had to be constructed. As these measures are somewhat imperfect, the results I obtain should be considered tentative and preliminary.

Overview of the Global Sanitation Problem

human development, water, sanitation