Urbanization & Demographics: The Coordination Problem

The lecture is based on the realization that little attention is being paid to the inexorable increase in urban populations, particularly in very low income countries. Almost all of the world’s next 2 billion people will live in these already slum-invested cities, with likely adverse effects on economic development as well as increased social exclusion. Instead of focusing on the issues involved with coordinating a coherent policy response to this demographic trend, the development agenda has focused on how coordination problems in supporting industry can be overcome. Robert Buckley argues that these industrial coordination problems are no doubt important, but so too is the avoidance of increasingly dysfunctional cities.Robert Buckley is the Studley Fellow at the New School in New York City. Prior to that he was a lead economist and advisor at the World Bank and Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation. He contributed to the Growth Commission work on developing a new development perspective in Urbanization and Economic Growth, a book he co-edited with Michael Spence and Patricia Annez. He has written widely on urbanization and housing policy in both the academic and popular press. During the past few years has focused on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa.