Secondary Towns and Poverty Reduction: Refocusing the Urbanization Agenda

Ravi Kanbur and Luc Christiaensen

No 12072, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This review is framed around the exploration of a central hypothesis: A shift in public investment towards secondary towns from big cities will improve poverty reduction performance. Of course the hypothesis raises many questions. What exactly is the dichotomy of secondary towns versus big cities? What is the evidence for the contribution of secondary towns versus cities to poverty reduction? What are the economic mechanisms for such a differential contribution and how does policy interact with them? We find preliminary evidence and arguments in support of our hypothesis, but the impacts of policy on poverty are quite complex even in simple settings, and the question of secondary towns and poverty reduction is an open area for research and policy analysis.

Keywords: Secondary towns; Poverty reduction; Mega cities; Urbanization; Rural-urban migration; Zipf’s law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12072 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Secondary Towns and Poverty Reduction: Refocusing the Urbanization Agenda (2017)
Working Paper: Secondary Towns and Poverty Reduction: Refocusing the Urbanization Agenda (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12072

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12072

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().