Employment-intensive growth for poverty reduction: What can labour-based technology in infrastructure contribute?

4. Conclusion: Employment-Intensive Investment, a Tool to Address Wider Policy Concerns Evidence presented in this paper indicates that a high rate of economic growth is a necessary precondition for a sustained reduction in poverty, but it is not enough. The degree of employment-intensity of the growth process is extremely important for achieving the goal of poverty alleviation. This is amply demonstrated by the contrasting experiences of the countries of South East and East Asia which succeeded in reducing poverty very substantially and those of South Asian countries where success in poverty reduction has been moderate. Limited data presented in this paper on selected African countries also points to the importance of employment. Indeed, employment-intensity of growth is seen to make a significant difference to the impact of economic growth on poverty reduction. Results of case studies presented in section 3 show that investment in labour-based approaches to infrastructure can not only generate much needed employment for the poor, but can also be technically sound and economically efficient. The added advantages of such approaches are their greater reliance on local resources and potential to save scarce foreign exchange. As infrastructure is a key factor in influencing investment, and economic growth, such an approach can engender a process of growth which is also employment-intensive and pro-poor. While the above has been demonstrated with particular reference to the infrastructure and construction sectors, there is also a great potential to apply similar approaches to other sectors, e.g, agriculture and forestry, manufacturing, environment protection, and services. If labour-based approaches could be mainstreamed into overall investment policies, that would enable the simultaneous pursuit of the objectives of economic growth, employment generation, and poverty reduction.     

An Empirical Study on Targeted Poverty Alleviation of Chixi Village and Xiadang Village in Ningde City of Fujian Province

Chixi Village and Xiadang Village in Ningde City of Fujian Province were once famous poverty-stricken villages. Both of the villages are poor villages that General Secretary Xi Jinping has been paying attention to. The two villages have helped the poor get rid of poverty by infrastructure construction, ecological migration, and industrial development according to local conditions. However, the two villages have succeeded in the implementation of targeted poverty alleviation according to their own resource characteristics. The study shows that the poverty alleviation processes, poverty alleviation achievements and established future development trend of these two poor villages basically correspond to the trend of poverty alleviation policy in China in the past 30 years, reflect the process of "targeted poverty alleviation" work carried out in China's rural areas to a certain extent, and has reference significance and theoretical significance for targeted poverty alleviation cases.     

Green Economy: A Strategy to Alleviate Urban Poverty and Safeguard the Environment? KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

The global failure to develop in a sustainable manner has led to attempts to adopt green economy approaches in the context of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Given South Africa’s high carbon footprint and other negative environmental externalities, the government, in partnership with civil society and the private sector, is taking steps to green its economy. The efforts range from large-scale solar installation projects to small-scale grassroots level projects where green jobs are created for the poor, predominantly women, by paying them for environmental services. This paper addresses if and how green economy can be used to alleviate poverty and protect the environment at a grassroots level. In a project under the management of a local environmental non-governmental organisation (ENGO), poor urban women in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, are utilising the concept to generate income, improve their livelihoods and contribute to environmental sustainability. Green economy is in some ways addressing the gendered social and environmental externalities of urbanisation, wherein women are differentially poor and the environment is neglected in economic development. Left with few other options, the urban poor are using an ENGO and its green economy programme as a mechanism to lift themselves out of poverty, while indirectly managing the environment.     

Regulating Land Use at Sale: Public Improvement from Private Investment

Coordinated private investments create many neighborhood public improvements. This paper proposes regulating land use at sale as a way to coordinate private investments that create public improvements. The proposal is illustrated by a requirement that landowners plant street trees before they sell their properties. Census data and the Los Angeles County Assessor's records show that about half of all properties are sold within ten years, so regulation at sale should affect about half of a city per decade. Regulation at sale offers a pragmatic, low-cost method to improve older neighborhoods and stimulate local economic development.     

Access to Land for the Urban Poor—Policy Proposals for South African Cities

The issue of land is a critical one in post-Apartheid South Africa. Growing informality and poverty in urban areas, driven to a large extent by urbanisation, necessitates greater concerted action around land use management in urban areas to ensure more equitable, environmentally and socially sustainable use of finite land resources. The operation of the urban land market has been identified as a significant obstacle preventing the urban poor from accessing affordable land. A new approach, advocated by the UK Department for International Development and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation entitled “Making Markets Work for the Poor—M4P” emerged in the 1990s. The M4P approach recognises that even successful market development will not distribute land to the poor and intervention in the land market is therefore required to promote more equitable land distribution patterns. The M4P perspective however has been accused of an obsession with economic solutions to the problem of landlessness and informality to the exclusion of other socio-political and legal remedies. The Brazilian case provides an example of a more progressive approach as it combines social policy and legal reform to regulate the use of urban land to ensure that land fulfils its “social function”. The presence of large tracts of vacant and unused land in cities is an important issue in the context of growing informality and competition for land and therefore requires urgent policy attention. The paper discusses the Brazilian case and the instruments used in that country to deal with vacant/unused land in cities. It argues that the progressive taxation of vacant land in cities could be a potentially valuable policy instrument in South African cities. Land-based fiscal instruments can be utilised by local government to manage the use of land and to access additional revenue which can be redistributed to the poor for the provision of infrastructure and services. Although these tools are not a panacea for challenges of informality and poverty in the developing world, they do have the potential to augment municipal income and to facilitate urban renewal, infill development and a more compact city. The paper argues though that these tools should be applied on a city-wide scale; part and parcel of an overall urban land reform strategy and plan for the city.     

LAW AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR A JUST URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

ABSTRACT: Distributive justice in cities has suffered from the inability of local governments to control productive resources, especially land. Contrary to Paul Peterson's argument, cities are not acting on their “corporate interests” when they favor development because, historically, the legal status of cities has diminished their corporate powers in favor of private property rights. Recent court cases reflect judicial ambivalence about local control of land. While the Supreme Court has criticized far-reaching land regulations, many innovative policies aimed at increasing commercial landowners' obligations to the community have gained doctrinal approval. Local governments may be able to exploit these legal openings to challenge the immutable unitary conception of property that makes cities dependent on private investment decisions. In short, local officials need to argue in court for public property rights. Ultimately, the political process within cities will determine whether localities govern land innovatively and justly, but more just urban political economies are not possible without judicial support.     

Growing Out of Poverty: Does Urban Agriculture Contribute to Household Food Security in Southern African Cities?

The literature on urban agriculture (UA) as a food security and poverty alleviation strategy is bifurcating into two distinct positions. The first is that UA is a viable and effective pro-poor development strategy, and the second is that UA has demonstrated limited positive outcomes on either food security or poverty. These two positions are tested against data generated by the African Urban Food Security Network’s (AFSUN) baseline food security survey undertaken in 11 Southern African cities. At the aggregate level, the analysis shows that (1) urban context is an important predictor of rates of household engagement in UA—the economic, political, and historical circumstances and conditions of a city are key factors that either promote or hinder UA activity and scale; (2) UA is not an effective household food security strategy for poor urban households—the analysis found few significant relationships between UA participation and food security; and (3) household levels of earnings and land holdings may mediate UA impacts on food security—wealthier households derive greater net food security benefits from UA than poor households do. These findings call into question the potential benefits of UA as a broad urban development strategy and lend support to the position that UA has limited poverty alleviation benefits under current modes of practice and regulation.     

Completing Post-Earthquake Replacement Housing in Rural Armenia: Did it Induce Further Investment?

The housing of families in rural areas of Southeastern European and CIS countries often lacks water and sewerage services and is frequently in poor physical condition. This paper explores the private investment made as a result of a donor program in rural Armenia that in 2003 completed dwellings that were replacements for those destroyed in the 1988 earthquake. The questions addressed are: did the donor-funded investment induce beneficiaries to invest their own funds additionally, and, did beneficiaries invest more than their neighbors who did not participate in the program? Data used in the analysis are from household surveys conducted in three villages where the program operated; beneficiaries were interviewed at the time the construction was finished and again six months later; non-beneficiaries (controls) were interviewed six months after the program construction was completed. The study finds that direct program beneficiaries supplemented the publicly financed improvements and that the program may have induced non-beneficiaries to invest as well. For both groups, available household economic resources were the primary determinant of investments, although non-beneficiaries living in temporary housing were discouraged from undertaking improvements.     

Making urban real estate markets work for the poor: Theory, policy and practice

This paper explores the relationship between theory, policy and practice, linking urban real estate markets and poverty alleviation. The paper argues that the contribution of urban real estate markets to poverty alleviation has not been optimised due, in part, to inadequate or inappropriate policy. The article attributes this to conceptual and methodological problems arising from the traditional neoclassical analysis of urban real estate markets, ambivalence to the idea that freer markets in real estate are a good thing for the urban poor and insufficient regard to lessons of experience from years of implementing urban anti-poverty land projects. Based on new analytical perspectives provided by institutional economics, this paper proposes specific policy interventions more likely to facilitate pro-poor outcomes in urban real estate markets.     

Planning Land Reform on a Regional Scale: A Case Study from Brazil

This article makes a case for using regional planning to improve the social and economic regional impact of land reform policy in developing countries. We focus on rural settlements in the Brazilian north-east, where land reallocation has been approached in a variety of ways over many decades. The study identifies problems deriving from the lack of a plan-led strategy, leading to failures in identifying sustainable areas and designing appropriate policy interventions on a regional scale. Based on the planning literature and our empirical results, it is proposed that different views on land reform should be combined into a broader regional strategy. This involves strategic targeting of specific areas to define a portfolio of investment and spending priorities, combined with intergovernmental and intersectoral co-ordination, running from the early stages of a project's formulation until the final stages of its implementation. Additionally, this paper shows that combining top-down and bottom-up approaches to land reform, and supplementing policy-making at the national level with programme/project design and implementation at the subnational level, allows an effective government response to rural poverty and landlessness.     

MICROENTERPRISE AS AN EXIT ROUTE FROM POVERTY: Recommendations for Programs and Policy Makers

ABSTRACT: The objective of this study is to shed light on whether and how microenterprise programs can be used as an economic development strategy to enable low-income people to achieve self-sufficiency through self-employment. Our findings provide little support for the notion that hard work and a small loan are sufficient ingredients for business success. Viable small firms are usually headed by well-educated owners and/or those possessing specific skills that serve as a basis for successful business creation and operation. Potential entrepreneurs lacking assets, skills, and support networks are unlikely to support themselves through self-employment earnings alone. As a poverty alleviation strategy, microenterprise is not a panacea. Nevertheless, programs targeting the poor who do have skills, resources, and support networks can be useful vehicles for helping some to escape poverty.     

Minority Rural Tourism Development Planning Based on Targeted Poverty Alleviation: A Case Study of Chaikeng She Village in Jiaocheng District of Ningde City,Fujian Province,China

Developing tourism to help ethnic minorities' rural areas get rid of poverty and achieve prosperity is one path for targeted poverty alleviation in the ethnic rural regions with economic backwardness. Ethnic minorities' rural areas have benefited from the national poverty alleviation policies and subsidies, the economy has made certain progress and the ethic minorities' living standard has been improved to a certain extent. However, the economic and social development still lags behind overall. Research and practice have proved that the ethnic minorities' rural tourism development planning is a forward-looking option for minority villages to implement poverty alleviation, get rid of poverty and become better off and achieve sustainable development.     

Club Goods and Local Government

Problem: Private approaches to urban service provision are becoming more popular. Some argue these approaches are more efficient and more democratic than government provision because they are voluntary. While these club approaches can shift the burden of infrastructure finance to direct groups of users, they can also fragment urban service delivery and justify unevenness in service quality across the city.

Purpose: This article explores examples of club goods, that is, common interest developments (CIDS) for housing, business improvement districts (BIDs) for commercial areas, and economic development zones (EDZs) for commercial and industrial areas, and assesses their implications for local government. Emphasis is given to how clubs internalize benefits to members of the club but shed externalities onto the broader local government system. A critical governance concern is the impact on the long-term ability of local government to coordinate across disparate elements and interests in the community.

Methods: I discuss three types of clubs ranging from totally private common interest developments (home owners associations), to partially private business improvement districts, to totally public economic development zones. These club types are analyzed in terms of economic benefits, externalities, governance structure, and broader concerns with equity and sustainability.

Results and conclusions: Club good approaches to urban infrastructure delivery enhance private investment and reduce costs to cities, but they also shed externalities onto the broader city. Although these clubs are often private associations, this article shows how they are critically supported by government, beyond the property rights requirement assumed by most theorists. A further concern is that club approaches may undermine support for equity and redistribution at the broader city level.

Takeaway for practice: Local governments are under pressure to provide public goods efficiently and engage private voluntary approaches whenever possible. The efficiency and popularity of club approaches derives in part from their ability to capture the benefits of increased investment for internal benefit. However, local government managers also must manage diversity and build public support for investment to ensure equity across the urban territory. Balancing the benefits of club goods with the need for broader urban integration is a key challenge for planners and urban managers.

Research support: None.     

Planning,competitiveness and sprawl in the Mediterranean city: The case of Athens

Competitiveness appears as a new element in the specific dynamics of the Mediterranean city. This paper explores the process of competitiveness at the local level, and the implications of the re-orientation of spatial planning priorities through case-study research. It looks at Athens, an example of a so-called ’winner’ city, which hosted successfully the 2004 Olympic Games. It examines by means of satellite imagery and GIS the changing patterns of land development in the metropolitan area. Olympics-related infrastructural investments, such as the new ring road and international airport, facilitated the efficient execution of the Games. Olympic development priorities, however, sidestepped stated planning directions on metropolitan growth. Evidence presented in this paper point to a land-use change trend in the urban periphery that takes the form of unordered expansion. Competitiveness agendas exacerbate unsustainable development tendencies, compromising future growth prospects.     

Decision support tool on investments in life safety based on sampling theory

For decisions related to investments in societal safety and health, it is often difficult to balance the discretionary competence of decision-makers with theoretical optimum levels of investment. While removing day-to-day decisions about risk from the political arena would arguably result in better decisions, a full depoliticisation is not desirable since public and private risk preferences cannot simply be neglected without negatively affecting the perception of risk and inducing a democratic deficit. Therefore, a decision-making tool has been developed which allows for narrowing the scope of possible decisions for the decision-maker, based on predetermined maximum acceptable deviations from the theoretic optimum investment level. These maximum acceptable deviations should be established upfront on a general basis and may subsequently be applied on a case-by-case basis. In this paper, the basic calculation concepts are explained and a detailed example study is presented in which limits for the target safety level of concrete slabs are determined under some specific considerations.     

Alternative operational modes for Chinese PV poverty alleviation power stations: Economic impacts on stakeholders

This paper measures and compares the economic benefits of different stakeholders under different operational modes in photovoltaic poverty alleviation power stations (PPAPSs) with the actual data in China. After establishing a PPAPSs entire lifetime cost-benefit model, sensitivity analysis is done to determine how much uncertainty variables influence risk. The results show that:1) PPAPSs have positive economic benefits; 2) outsourced operation and maintenance (O&M) is an optimal method; and 3) initial investment and power generation factors are likely to have a volatile impact on financial returns. Based on the results, this paper makes policy recommendations.     

Low-Income Access to Urban Land and Housing in Botswana

Like most developing countries, Botswana—a middle-income country—has experienced rapid urban growth, which has brought in its wake many social and economic problems. One of the key challenges has been the lack of access to land and housing for the poor who have moved into the urban centres in large numbers in search of employment and economic survival. Many programmes and strategies have been introduced by both central and local governments to address this problem. These include: squatter settlement upgrading; public housing through site, service and self-help housing; subsidised plot allocation; financial incentives for housing construction, etc. Many challenges have hampered the implementation of these strategies and programmes including fast urbanisation, which outstrips supply of land and housing for most urbanites; unaffordability of many of these schemes; poor targeting; high defaulting rates and poor management of these schemes. This paper calls upon the government, the private sector and local communities to devise holistic solutions to enable low-income households to procure decent accommodation in urban areas.     

Capturing Land Value Increment to Finance Infrastructure Investment—Possibilities for South Africa

In the globalisation age, cities are the drivers of economic growth. However, sustainable economic growth demands considerable investment in infrastructure. South African cities face a triple challenge of eradicating historical infrastructure backlogs inherited from the Apartheid era, servicing and maintaining existing infrastructure and providing new infrastructure to stimulate economic growth. In the South African context, the provision of municipal infrastructure plays a critical role in eradicating sociospatial inequalities as part of an overall poverty reduction strategy. This places a huge burden on local governments in South Africa in particular as they face capacity constraints and challenges in terms of raising sufficient own revenue in order to finance infrastructure projects. This paper argues that in light of the South African government’s current infrastructure drive and the significant amount of public resources being spent on transport infrastructure upgrades, it is an opportune time to consider the impact of transport infrastructure investment in particular on land value and how this value can be captured to finance the provision of infrastructure at local level. The paper cautions though that any programme aimed at capturing betterment needs to be based on sound research and needs to take cognisance of the legislative, policy and economic context in South Africa.     

Poverty Decentralization or Reconcentration: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Collected Public Rental Housing in Changzhou,Jiangsu Province

Based on the supply-side reform objective, it is a great transformation of housing welfare measures in China to collect private unoccupied houses as public rental housing instead of building new ones. Through an empirical study of the Collecting Houses as Public Rental Housing Program in Changzhou, this paper finds that the collected houses is relatively scattered in the city, which is beneficial to avoiding over-centralization and marginalization of the poor families. However, it has resulted in poverty reconcentration in some old communities, probably further leading to spatial solidification of the poor as well as a further decline of old communities. Therefore it may not effectively solve the housing problems of the poor population by providing this alternative public rental housing, which is collected according to economic efficiency. Accordingly, the paper argues that it is necessary to reinforce community development and to renovate the declined communities in time, as an important supplement to housing welfare improvement.     

浅谈少数民族地区的生态移民——以荔波县瑶山扶贫生态移民规划为例

少数民族地区的生态移民,是对居住在生态环境脆弱地区的少数民族搬迁至生态环境较好地区的一项工程。其中,生态性、民族性是不得不考虑的主要问题。《荔波县瑶山扶贫生态移民规划》很好地解决了这些问题,贵州省人民政府对其也赞不绝口,它是少数民族扶贫生态移民规划的典范。