Oliver Harman
Oliver Harman is a Cities Economist for the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) Cities that Work initiative based at Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Associate Staff at London School of Economics. He is also a Clarendon Scholar studying the financing of Sustainable Urban Development in low income and fast growing cities. In these roles he attempts to help bridge the gap between research and policy translating economic literature into clear urban policy guidance for emerging country city governments.
Oliver engages with local government Ministries and Mayoral teams primarily across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America & Caribbean and Europe. Examples include local government reform in Guyana, urban resilience and waste management in Ghana, municipal finance in Malawi, Senegal, Somaliland and sustainable urbanisation in Bangladesh. His three thematic interests include financing sustainable urban development, global value chains for regional upgrading and climate change in cities.
A selection of his IGC work is found below with complete overview here.
Content by Oliver Harman
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Blog post
Learning from Lagos
How a "lite" rapid transit system in the Nigerian city transformed commuting. In many emerging cities, public transit is informal and unregulated. Considerable quality of life, environmental, and health consequences result from this. At an individual level, many people are unable to afford public transit and must walk to work, which reduces their career opportunities,...
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Blog post
Intermediate cites and climate action: Driving change through urban land use and governance
In the first blog of this two-part series, it was argued that especially in low-income settings, intermediate cities, through strong rural-urban linkages, can provide an important social safety net in addition to their potential to alleviate poverty in the long-term. Moreover, and although largely undervalued by the international community and countries, intermediate cities...
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Blog post
Intermediate cities: A missing piece in the climate change puzzle
Research and debate on climate change currently underestimate the importance of a key group of players: intermediate cities. Currently conversation and studies on climate change often centre on large and relatively wealthy capital cities. Their size in population, data availability and comparatively higher energy use per person are factors that draw attention. In...
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Blog post
How the pandemic can be a catalyst for city climate action
Recovering from the socioeconomic shock of COVID-19 will not be easy. Effective decisions on where to put investment will be the key to unlocking greater prosperity for developing cities. We discuss what actions developing cities could focus on to kickstart their economies while helping the global fight against climate change. The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic...
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Publication - Policy Brief
COVID-19 and taxes: Policies for the post-pandemic recovery
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed unprecedented strain on public finances across developing countries. Large fiscal responses and weak economic activity have widened deficits and increased public debt, which for many will be unsustainable over the medium-term. It is important for policymakers to consider policies for mobilising additional revenue. To this end, this...
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Publication - Policy Brief
Urban property taxes in Pakistan’s Punjab
Property tax is a significantly under-utilised tax instrument in Punjab, accounting for only 6% of the total provincial tax. With a population of over 100 million, all of Punjab collects less urban property tax than the city of Chennai in India, home to about 10 million people. Punjab's cities have significant service delivery deficits. For example, only 35% of urban...
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Blog post
The gateway to carbon pricing? Air pollution policy
Buying carbon is too cheap and easy. 'Gateway tax', focussing on air pollution, could be initial step. Outdoor air pollution causes 4 million deaths a year. When it comes to climate policies, of those available, the economist’s preferred tool tends to be the elusive carbon tax’. Despite notable successes, the implementation of carbon...
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Blog post
In defence of density
At their core, cities are absences of space between people. You can call it density, closeness, or proximity; it is the opposite of distance. The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has brought this core feature of cities under question. But this criticism paints with a broad brush: what matters are the type of density and the way it is managed. The type of density Density alone...
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Blog post
Behavioural economics of lockdown compliance: In search of lost time and well-behaved neighbours
There are some crucial insights that behavioural economics and surrounding psychological evidence can bring to bear on public policies of a lockdown. Such insights are particularly pertinent to leveraging humans' 'predictable irrationality' in its design. Applying this evidence suggests that, where lockdowns are implemented, it might be better for policymakers to impose...
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Blog post
Tendering trash: Lessons in urban waste management from Indian cities
South Asian cities are urbanising rapidly. With this, overflowing landfills and trash laden streets are becoming more common. Local governments and municipal corporations, many marred by inadequate financing and low capacity, are the first to be held responsible for this mismanagement, from which further negative spill overs occur. These can include high incidences of...
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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
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
Climate change: won or lost in cities or by cities?
Extinction Rebellion disrupted London and brought many transport routes to a standstill on Easter Weekend in 2019. A key demand for the direct action group was for the government to declare a climate emergency. This demand has since been met - by the UK parliament, as well as the Argentinian senate, the French parliament and the Canadian House of Commons. In fact,...
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Blog post
Treedistribution: Combatting environmental inequality in cities
Inequality is not a recent phenomenon. One root of inequality can be traced back to pre-historic urban civilisations, where grain stores varied in size and the grain-wealthy clustered together in particular locations. But with the increasing importance of inequality across and within countries over time, governments have often first turned their attention to addressing the...
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Blog post
Inclusive growth for cities: Fuzzy, functional or forsaken?
The challenge: Inequality in cities Inequality is one of the pressing issues of our time. China’s growth has reduced inequality globally, yet within countries, disparities have tended to increase. This increase in inequality has been most present in cities. Urban areas can be the most unequal: the benefits of scale and specialisation often failing to find their way...
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Publication - Case study
The BRT and the danfo: A case study of Lagos’ transport reforms from 1999-2019
Over the last 20 years, Lagos has had to make large-scale investments in transport infrastructure to keep up with its growing population. Most notably, in 2008, Lagos opened the first ever Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system on the African continent. Today, the system boasts two different lines which cover over 35.5 km of track and transport over 350,000 commuters on a daily...
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Blog post
Should I stay or should I go? Managing populations with urban to rural migration incentives
Sydney you’ve got to let me know, should they stay or should they go. In 2011, Sydney, the largest city in Australia, asked its residents, should they stay or should they go? Despite regularly rated as one of the world’s top ten liveable cities, the government was offering residents AUD$7,000 (£4,500 or ~one month’s average wage) to move to the country’s rural...
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Blog post
Urban density and the promises of proximity
As an economist, an end of year tradition is to muse over The Royal Society of Statistics, ‘Statistic of the Year’. In 2018, the singled out stat was: 90.5% - the proportion of plastic waste that has never been recycled. An important statistic, but an area in which the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) ‘Cities that Work’ initiative has limited...