Essays in development and urban economics: markets, mobility and governance

Essais en économie du développement et urbaine: marchés, mobilité et gouvernance

Leonard Le Roux
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Leonard Le Roux: ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Well-functioning cities will become increasingly important for African countries to realise the benefits of the rapid urbanisation currently underway. This thesis studies a set of questions related to the economics and governance of cities and local municipalities, using South Africa as a case study. The first chapter asks how markets function in the absence of well-functioning state institutions. I study the context of the "minibus taxi" sector, where competing private firms have come to use the threat of physical violence to contest for markets. I document how violence in this sector reponds to economic shocks, highlighting the limits of private organizing in the absence of well func-tioning state institutions. The second chapter uses administrative tax data to derive precise estimates of the size of agglomeration gains net of the effects of individual sorting, an under-studied question on the African continent. I find the gains from density are similar in size to those in advanced countries using comparable methods, and lower than existing estimates from middle income countries. The third chapter studies the interactions of customary and modern governance structures in the context of a reform allowing for the participation of traditional leaders on the councils of local municipalities. I find no clear evidence of changes in the quality of service delivery, but docu-ment an increase in uncategorized expenditures and protests, documenting heterogeneity in these results by measures of the social proximity of traditional leaders and local councillors. The final chapter studies the motiva-tions of authoritarian states in restricting rural-urban migration by focusing on the case of the "pass laws" under apartheid South Africa. We digitize twenty years of sectoral data from the mining and agricultural sector and harmonize three rounds of the population census to document dramatic changes in internal mobility in the after-math of the reform. We show that the lifting of these restrictions increased mechanization and wages in la-bour-dependent agricultural districts. Finally, we propose a model to illustrate how authoritarian states may use migration restrictions to compliment broader industrial policy goals.

Keywords: Violence; Agglomération; Informality; African cities; Informalité; Villes africaines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06-03
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Published in Economics and Finance. Institut d'études politiques de Paris - Sciences Po, 2025. English. ⟨NNT : 2025IEPP0046⟩

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