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Blog post
Towards sustainable water provision in Mandalay
The Mandalay City Development Committee (MCDC) is currently making a major loss in running its water system, with a deficit exceeding 50% of their operation and maintenance costs. This is without accounting for the need to expand and upgrade the system, much of which still stems from colonial times. How can policymakers ensure a sustainable future for piped-water supply in...
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Blog post
The effect of financial literacy on the financial policies of firms
Can education play a role in economic development through improved corporate practices? Several studies conducted with micro and small firms in developing countries point to this direction. But what about large firms? As large firms contribute to a sizeable share of the value created in a country, the potential effect of managers’ education on large firms’ performance...
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Blog post
Worker turnover and job flows in the formal private sector of Ethiopia
Creating a sufficient number of stable and well-paying jobs remains a major challenge for African economies. Urban labour markets in the region are marked by high informality and unemployment rates, and most jobs offer minimum job security and typically very low wages. Indeed in Ethiopia, the informal economy is estimated to account for over 38% of GDP with data from the...
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Blog post
Urbanisation in fragile societies: Thinking about Kabul
As part of the Blavatnik School of Government’s “Challenges of Government” Conference, the International Growth Centre’s Cities that Work team put together a panel on identity and legitimacy in Kabul. The discussion highlighted the importance of building legitimacy in fragile contexts, particularly given the emergence of fragmented identities and new networks of...
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Blog post
Transforming secondary cities in Uganda for job creation
Across developing countries, the combined forces of rapid population growth, a burgeoning youth workforce, and urbanisation have created a policy imperative to generate jobs at an enormous scale. While primary cities must play a role in this job creation, it is unrealistic to imagine that all the necessary jobs, or even the majority, can be created in a single metropolitan...
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Blog post
Navigating the urban age
Whatever we might say is right or wrong with cities of the 21st century, they are indisputably a defining feature of our age. As much as we are post-modern, post-gender or post-colonial, we are also post-rural. Our existence, for an increasing majority, is urban. Even more than that, our aspirations are urban. This is visible almost everywhere. In the US, people with...
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Blog post
Urban data innovations: Three cities showing their smarts
Last year the International Growth Centre (IGC) co-hosted a policy workshop in Washington DC in the United States (US) with the World Bank, George Washington University, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) as part of the 6th Urbanisation and Poverty Reduction Conference. The theme was ‘Leveraging new data for better urban management and policies’. This year,...
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Blog post
The value of electricity reliability in India
India’s electricity distribution utilities face a debt trap that is common to electricity supply systems across the developing world. Highly subsidised residential electricity prices mean that utilities lose money on most kilowatt-hours they sell to households. These pricing policies leave utilities with neither the incentives nor the capital to improve reliability,...
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Blog post
Improving labour standards: Enforcement interventions by multinationals in Bangladesh
When MNCs enforce garment factory Safety Committee law on external suppliers, compliance and safety indicators improve. Importantly, the degree to which they improve depends on the supplier’s organisational capacity. In developing countries, governments often lack the capacity or the political will to update and enforce regulations (Dal Bó and Finan, 2016), including...
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Blog post
Improving teacher accountability in Pakistan’s rural schools
Pakistan has extremely low learning levels and poor education service delivery is a driving factor. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government has expressed a strong desire for evidence on how to design evaluation and oversight systems for the education sector, with the goal of improving learning. Accordingly, we conducted an International Growth Centre (IGC) supported study...
Blog post
The effect of financial literacy on the financial policies of firms
Can education play a role in economic development through improved corporate practices? Several studies conducted with micro and small firms in developing countries point to this direction. But what about large firms? As large firms contribute to a sizeable share of the value created in a country, the potential effect of managers’ education on large firms’ performance...