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Inclusionary housing policy (IHP) encourages developers to provide affordable housing in well-located areas. This can add to their costs and risks, so the process of policy adoption is complicated and contested. This paper provides a synthesis of the literature and then analyzes the efforts to implement IHP of two South African cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. The core proposition is that making residential development more inclusive requires at least three ingredients to ensure meaningful change. First, the case for reform needs popular support and an active civil society to secure the backing of political leaders and officials facing resistance from entrenched real estate interests. Second, the policy needs to be feasible in an economic sense and calibrated in an incremental way that will not jeopardize private investment. Third, a robust legal framework is required to institutionalize the changes and to limit disputes and disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of services embedded in manufactured products in world trade has greatly increased since the 1980s. So too has services as a direct export. South Africa is an interesting case of an emerging economy that has struggled to diversify its export basket beyond basic commodities, despite having a robust domestic service sector. The article assesses the contribution of service exports to international trade in South Africa. Balance of payments data confirm that services trade is modest compared to merchandise trade. Exports in higher-value services show strong growth, although off a low base. Yet certain kinds of international linkages are not counted in official trade statistics. These service firms are also more productive, report higher output and usually pay better wages than those focused on the domestic market – as mirrored in studies of manufacturing exports. We advocate for further research and greater recognition of tradable service exports in trade policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is especially true for post-conflict countries with authoritarian governments and poorly developed property regimes and cadastral systems. Tahir, acknowledging both the bottom-up and top-down characteristics of the state-building process, draws attention in particular to the issues of urban land governance, which he sees as a critical site for statecraft. It is more sensible for governments to focus on the character of urbanization and seek to improve how people and firms gain access to serviced land and property in cities. Tahir discusses its state-building process, going beyond the more common focus on peacebuilding and democratization to explore the crafting of the legal and administrative regimes that shape governance and the lived experience of the residents of Somaliland's cities. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines third sector social housing in early post-apartheid South Africa, hence offering important new insights into how institutions in emerging economies shape the implementation and impacts of this approach. Based on qualitative research methods, the paper finds that under conditions of weak formal governance, nascent industry capacity and disaffected communities, third sector social housing resulted in serious project failures and squandered public resources. The study employs an institutional lens to understand how formal and informal institutions shaped the implementation of projects and how key stakeholders acted upon conflicting incentives. It discusses five major factors – inadequate formal policy and regulatory framework, limited government capability and support, limited sector capacity, private finance reluctance and adverse informal arrangements – that caused serious difficulties both at the program and project level. The paper argues that developing robust third sector social housing comes with substantial financial, administrative and political responsibilities for governments, and its success depends on the alignment between the formal policy framework and informal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade in services has grown more rapidly than trade in manufactured goods in recent decades. Countries from the Global South are chiefly responsible for this shift. The research note draws attention to service investment that originates in Southern economies and is directed at markets of the same (sub)continent. Such dynamics have been neglected by academic debates focussed on global value chains and offshored, largely generic services. The authors argue that direct integration into global markets is often disadvantageous for firms from the South, as they tend to play a subordinate role, face the risk of disinvestment and hardly upgrade. Regional markets offer better opportunities. These ideas are applied to Argentina and South Africa. The fDi Markets database and qualitative information from secondary sources are used to get a better grasp of the expansion of Argentinean and South African providers of advanced services into Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. It is shown that regional markets matter. It appears that they allow companies from Argentina and South Africa to be lead firms, internationalize their business activities and achieve various forms of upgrading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighbourhoods affect people's livelihoods, and therefore drive and mediate intra-urban inequalities and transformations. While the neighbourhood has long been recognized as an important unit of analysis, there is surprisingly little systematic research on different neighbourhood types, especially in the fastgrowing cities of the Global South. In this paper we employ k-means clustering, a common machinelearning algorithm, to develop a neighbourhood typology for South Africa's eight largest cities. Using census data, we identify and describe eight neighbourhood types, each with distinct demographic, socio-economic, structural and infrastructural characteristics. This is followed by a relational comparison of the neighbourhood types along key variables, where we demonstrate the persistent and multidimensional nature of residential inequalities. In addition to shedding new light on the internal structure of South African cities, the paper makes an important contribution by applying an inductive, data-driven approach to developing neighbourhood typologies that advances a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of cities in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic has had devastating effects on urban lives and livelihoods throughout the world. A major concern in the global North has been the hollowing out of central cities caused by remote working. The consequences for cities in the global South extend further and deeper because their economies are weaker, social and spatial inequalities larger, and healthcare systems more fragile. The paper explores the uneven trajectory of COVID-19 for people and places in South African cities, drawing on unique individual panel data. It shows how communities that were already the most vulnerable have been hit hardest by the pandemic, triggering hardship, hunger and social unrest. Local institutions will have to play a stronger role if society is to manage pandemics better in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sources of competition between urban and regional economies and the advantages and disadvantages of this competition for economic development are examined.

There is growing scepticism about global value chains because of their association with an unequal global trading system. Regionally coordinated and integrated production in Asia appears to have served as a better mechanism for promoting economic prosperity than direct integration into global markets. This is founded upon regional cooperation on investment, trade and value chains. This research note distinguishes different forms of these chains, discusses the conditions for their emergence and sheds light on some of their effects – for both individual firms and entire continents. Asia's experience is compared with Africa's and Latin America's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social housing has the potential to contribute to economic inclusion and urban integration if it is well-located. However, this is complicated by economic forces that shape land and property markets and constrain the ability of social housing organisations to afford suitable sites for development on the open market. The paper shows how South Africa's transformative vision for social housing has been diluted by the gradual spatial drift of projects from the accessible urban core towards outlying areas. Poor coordination has meant that social housing organisations have operated in relative isolation without the consistent government support required to obtain surplus public land in well-situated areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poor performance of the South African economy has been widely analysed, yet this disguises considerable internal variation, both between sectors and regions. Most disaggregated analysis focuses on national industry trends and neglects the role of geography. We undertake a shift‐share analysis with multifactor partitioning to decompose the growth performance of provinces into nationwide industry and region‐specific (or 'place‐based') shares between 1995 and 2018. The main finding is that place‐based effects explain as much of the variation in growth as nationwide industry effects in most provinces. This implies that the economic capabilities of each region need careful consideration as part of national growth strategies and reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leo Van Den Berg, Erik Braun and Alexander Otgaar City and Enterprise: Corporate Community Involvement in European and US Cities. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate (EURICUR Series, European Institute for Comparative Urban [...]

COVID-19 has had asymmetrical spatial impacts across South Africa. New evidence from the National Income Dynamics Study: Coronavirus Rapid Mobile (NIDS-CRAM) survey shows that the pandemic and lockdown reflex have magnified pre-existing divisions within cities. Although COVID-19 has severely impacted the whole country, townships and informal settlements have proved more vulnerable than suburbs. As South Africa was already one of the most unevenly developed countries in the world, COVID-19 has widened the gap between places, which face very different levels of risk and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like most governments around the world, the South African government adopted a uniform, place-blind response to the coronavirus pandemic, including a hard lockdown. New evidence from a large household survey reveals that the socioeconomic effects have widened pre-existing inequalities between cities and rural areas. More could be done to complement national relief programmes with targeted efforts to boost jobs and livelihoods in the most vulnerable areas. In addition, the premature withdrawal of relief measures before the economy has recovered would aggravate the hardship in poorer communities that have come to rely on these resources following the jobs slump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Services are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. This presents opportunities for emerging economies to adapt and enter new markets. Many countries in southern Africa have struggled to diversify from a heavy reliance on primary commodities towards manufacturing industries. Tradable services could contribute to economic growth and development by bolstering industrial capabilities, facilitating productivity growth, and contributing directly to exports. We examine evidence on international services trade for the Southern African Development Community between 1995 and 2012. Tradable services appear to have made a limited contribution to total trade for most countries, and there is little evidence of significant regional integration or specialisation in higher value-added activities. The role of tradable services is an important policy and research agenda that warrants much more attention all round. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territorial collaboration offers a novel way of tackling the widening gap between prosperous cities and poorer regions. Place-based organizations working together and sharing their knowledge, expertise and resources can strengthen productive capacities and improve living standards in less-favoured areas. China has gone further than elsewhere through a solidarity programme that twins coastal city administrations with their rural counterparts. Long-term partnerships are upgrading infrastructure, institutions and human capabilities, and spurring private investment in agricultural and industrial projects. Interregional cooperation could assist other emerging economies through sharing, learning and investing in complementary activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drawbacks of crowded informal settlements stand in stark contrast to the theoretical promise that urban density is the key to building more productive, sustainable and resilient cities. African cities cannot be expected to prosper while the majority of residents live in sprawling informal settlements with no prospect of improvement beyond the provision of basic services. There is a strong case for governments to embrace a broader reconstruction agenda in order to harness the potential of density for all-round progress. The core proposition of the paper is that urban population growth would be accommodated more effectively by building upwards and not merely outwards. We consider the circumstances under which this is true and how the state and communities might refashion conditions in informal settlements despite their restricted resources. To expand upwards requires participatory planning, more tenure security, settlement redesign, and in-situ investments in public services and housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Philippines have developed a system of neighbourhood government that other countries could usefully learn from. The barangays give ordinary citizens a voice in decision-making and assist in devolving power from the centre. They also improve the responsiveness of basic public services to local needs. Above all, the institution recognises and legitimises the contribution that communities can make to a robust civil society. The process of participation and engagement helps to harness the agency and resourcefulness of local residents and means that communities are better organised to cope with adversity. Nevertheless, the barangays could be strengthened by advocating physical improvements to their areas and mobilising for additional investment in neighbourhood infrastructure and reconstruction of the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]