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The relationship between urbanization and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or between city size and productivity. The potential of urbanization to promote growth is likely to depend on how conducive the infrastructure and institutional settings are. Removing barriers to rural–urban mobility may enable economic growth, but the benefits will be much larger with supportive policies, markets and infrastructure investments. Cities should use realistic population projections as the basis for investing in public infrastructure and implementing supportive land policies. Governments should seek out ways of enabling forms of urbanization that contribute to growth, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability, rather than encouraging (or discouraging) urbanization per se. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a descriptive analysis approach regarding the influence of some institutional variables on the economic growth in emerging countries. The sample consists of 20 countries covering different zones: European Emerging, Asia Pacific Emerging, Latin America, Middle-East and Africa. We analyze the evolution and the nature of the correlations of economic growth and some of its determinants such as corruption control, government stability and investment profile during 2000-2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates the macroeconomic impact of remittances and some control variables such as openness of the economy, capital/labor ratio, and economic freedom on the economic growth of African, Asian, and Latin American-Caribbean countries using newly developed panel unit-root tests, cointegration tests, and Panel Fully Modified OLS (PFMOLS). We use annual panel data from 1985-2007for 64 countries consisting of 29 from Africa, 14 from Asia, and 21 from Latin America and the Caribbean region, respectively. We find that remittances, openness of the economy, and capital labor ratio have positive and significant effect on economic growth for all regions as a group and in each of the three in study. While the economic freedom index also has a positive and significant effect on growth in Africa and Latin America, however, its effect on the economic growth of Asia is mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago, Lenski and Nolan published a seminal article in which they established empirical links between modern development and traditional technology in developing countries. This analysis is expanded in two ways: by improving the indicators of traditional technologies, and by introducing a second dimension of structural complexity, the sociopolitical differentiation of traditional societies. Though two indices measure functionally related aspects, they have distinct impacts on the socio-economic development of the 65 non-western countries analyzed in this article. Since traditional socio-political differentiation explains modern development better than traditional technology, we suggest significant revisions, and a new interpretation of Lenski and Nolan's results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]