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This paper reviews the emerging big data literature applied to urban transportation issues from the perspective of economic research. It provides a typology of big data sources relevant to transportation analyses and describes how these data can be used to measure mobility, associated externalities, and welfare impacts. As an application, it showcases the use of daily traffic conditions data in various developed and developing country cities to estimate the causal impact of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic on traffic congestion in Bogota, New Dehli, New York, and Paris. In light of the advances in big data analytics, the paper concludes with a discussion on policy opportunities and challenges.

Using an urban land use model, we study the market failures associated with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry, and analyze households' responses to mitigate tenure insecurity. When buyers and sellers of land plots can pair along trusted kinship lines whereby deception (the nondisclosure of competing claims on a land plot to a buyer) is socially penalized, information asymmetry is attenuated but overall participation in the land market is reduced. Alternatively, when owners can make land plots secure by paying to register them in a cadaster, both information asymmetry and tenure insecurity are reduced, but the registration cost limits land market participation at the periphery of the city. We compare the overall surpluses under these trust and registration models and under a hybrid version of the model that reffects the context of today's West African cities where both registration and trusted relationships are simultaneously available to residents. The analysis highlights the substitutability of trusted relationships to costly registration and predicts the gradual evolution of economies towards the socially preferable registration system if registration costs can be su ciently reduced.

As cities grow and spatially expand, agricultural land is converted into residential land. In many developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, this process is accompanied by a change in land tenure, whereby plots held under traditional customary arrangements are sold to new urban residents, possibly with formal property rights. This paper studies joint land-use and land-tenure conversion in an urban economics model in which intermediaries purchase agricultural land from customary owners and attempt to transform it into residential plots with statutory property rights. The spatial equilibrium includes a mix of land uses and rights where statutory and non-statutory residential plots coexist with customary land that is mainly used for agriculture. Because customary ownership is subject to uncertainty (because of tenure insecurity), the conversion process includes a potential information asymmetry between customary owners and intermediaries. The analysis shows that a market failure may emerge whereby some customary owners prefer to continue farming their land rather than participate in the urban residential land market, which results in a city that is too small. Empirical analysis using Malian data validates the key features of the model captured by land price gradients, as well as the ranking and the variance of land prices, and is suggestive of the presence of information asymmetry.

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of migrants choose to leave their children behind. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows for an explicit discussion of the link between school fees and the decision of migrant parents to bring their children to the city. The analysis instruments the endogenous school fees with unexpected shocks to the city's public education spending, and empirically tests the theoretical predictions. The findings suggest that higher fees deter migrant workers from bringing their children, especially their daughters; reduce the number of children they bring; and increase educational remittances to rural areas for the children left behind. Increases in school fees most affect vulnerable migrant workers, and are likely to have stronger impacts during an economic crisis. These findings hold for different model specifications and robustness checks.

We present evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. We examine the link between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. The tenure security improvement through demarcation induces a 23 to 43 percent shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. We explore gender and parcel location as relevant dimensions of heterogeneity. We find that female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women respond to an exogenous tenure security change by shifting investment away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels.

This paper reviews the recent literature on rural-urban migration in developing countries, focusing on three key questions: What motivates or forces people to migrate? What costs do migrants face? What are the impacts of migration on migrants and the economy? The literature paints a complex picture whereby rural-urban migration is driven by many factors and the returns to migration as well as the costs are very high. The evidence supports the notion that migration barriers hinder labor market adjustment and are likely to be welfare reducing. The review concludes by identifying gaps in current research and data needs.

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of partisan allocation of federally-funded highways to municipalities that voted for the president's party in legislative races, nearly doubling the stock of highways compared to opposition municipalities. The extent of political favoritism in highway provision is stronger under divided government when the president has no majority in the legislature, suggesting political efforts to control the Congress.

This paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmland globalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural land in other countries. A theoretical framework explains the geography of farmland acquisitions as a function of cross-country differences in technology, endowments, trade costs, and land governance. An empirical test of the model using global data on transnational deals shows that international farmland investments are on the aggregate likely motivated by re-exports to investor countries rather than to world markets. This contrasts with traditional foreign direct investment patterns where horizontal as opposed to vertical foreign direct investment dominates.

This paper assesses the relation between access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa. Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant positive association between increased market accessibility and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but significant increase in local gross domestic product. These results are suggestive of agricultural activities that develop at the extensive margin, which are mostly to serve local demand, but are not indicative of commercial agriculture that serves external markets.

This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment and specialization in Mexico for 1986-2014, through changes in access to domestic markets and travel costs to ports and the U.S. border. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in regressions that involve access to markets, the analysis finds significant and positive causal effects of improved domestic accessibility on employment and specialization. It also finds that employment is stimulated by lower transport costs to the U.S. border, but harmed by lower transport costs to ports. Heterogeneous effects are found across sectors and regions.

This survey reviews the current state of the economic literature, assessing the impact of transport policies on growth, inclusion, and sustainability in a developing country context. The findings are summarized and methodologies are critically assessed, especially those dealing with endogeneity issues in empirical studies. The specific implementation challenges of transport policies in developing countries are discussed.

This paper explores the incentives for backyarding, an expanding category of urban land-use in developing countries that has proliferated South Africa. The theoretical model exposes the trade-off faced by the homeowner in deciding how much backyard land to rent out: loss of yard space consumption in return for a gain in rental income. Under common forms for preferences, the homeowner's own-consumption of yard space falls as land rent increases, causing more land to be rented to backyarders. With better job access for backyarders raising land rent by increasing their willingness-to-pay, the analysis then predicts that the extent of backyarding will be higher for parcels with good job access. This hypothesis is tested by combining a satellite- based count of backyard dwellings per parcel with job-access data. The empirical results strongly confirm the prediction that better job access increases the extent of backyarding.

Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than men to own land. They also use less land and have lower tenure security over the land that they use. This gap is costly in terms of lost productive output. The early results showed that improved tenure security through land demarcation increased long-term investments in cash crops and trees and erased the gender gap in land fallowing - a key soil fertility investment. It is important that interventions cover as much of a household’s landholdings as possible: the authors found that some women shifted their agricultural production to plots of land that did not benefit from demarcation so that they can guard these less secure and less productive plots. The rural land use plans (plans fonciers ruraux (PFR)) in Benin represent a more decentralized, low-cost approach to land rights formalization. The PFR program is innovative in its focus on the formalization of existing customary rights of individual landholders. The objectives of the program are to improve tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in rural areas. The World Bank’s Africa gender innovation lab, in collaboration with researchers from the development research group and the Paris school of economics, set out to evaluate the PFR program’s impact through a randomized controlled trial. This study provides the first set of experimental evidence on the causal impact of a large-scale land formalization program.

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of migrants choose to leave their children behind. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows for an explicit discussion of the link between school fees and the decision of migrant parents to bring their children to the city. The analysis instruments the endogenous school fees with unexpected shocks to the city’s public education spending, and empirically tests the theoretical predictions. The findings suggest that higher fees deter migrant workers from bringing their children, especially their daughters; reduce the number of children they bring; and increase educational remittances to rural areas for the children left behind. Increases in school fees most affect vulnerable migrant workers, and are likely to have stronger impacts during an economic crisis. These findings hold for different model specifications and robustness checks.

National audience; Depuis la flambée des prix agricoles de 2007-2008, les médias se sont fait l'écho d'une " course aux terres " à l'échelle planétaire selon laquelle des pays importateurs de denrées alimentaires chercheraient à sécuriser leurs approvisionnements en acquérant de larges quantités de terres cultivables dans des pays en développement. Au-delà des comportements spéculatifs répondant à la fluctuation des prix mondiaux les analystes voient dans ce phénomène une réponse à la pression démographique et à l'anticipation d'une hausse de la demande mondiale de produits agricoles amplifiée par l'évolution des revenus et modes de vie. Les enjeux pour le développement sont majeurs. Opportunité de développement d'un secteur agricole d'exportation ? Ou bien risque de pillage des terres au détriment des utilisateurs actuels, détruisant la petite agriculture familiale et exacerbant les risques environnementaux ? Ce travail s'inscrit en amont de la problématique en cherchant à identifier les déterminants des investissements transnationaux qui s'accompagnent d'acquisitions de terres à grande échelle. En l'absence de base de données internationale et compte tenu de la difficulté de consolider les informations nationales, notre étude se base sur des informations publiées dans la presse internationale et la construction d'indicateurs adéquats de potentiel agro-écologique et de gouvernance foncière. L'estimation de modèles gravitaires utilisant ces variables montrerait une spécificité des investissements agricoles fonciers contrastant avec la littérature sur les investissements en général : alors que le rôle central du potentiel agro-écologique comme facteur d'attraction serait confirmé, les variables usuelles de gouvernance n'auraient aucun effet. Paradoxalement les pays où les populations ne jouissent que d'une faible sécurité foncière apparaitraient comme les plus attractifs, ce qui irait dans le sens des inquiétudes relayées par la presse et les organisations non gouvernementales.

Since the industrial revolution, the economic development of Western Europe and North America was characterized by continuous urbanization accompanied by a gradual phasing-in of urban land property rights over time. Today, however, the evidence in many fast urbanizing low-income countries points towards a different trend of “urbanization without formalization”, with potentially adverse effects on long-term economic growth. This paper aims to understand the causes and the consequences of this phenomenon, and whether informal city growth could be a transitory or a persistent feature of developing economies. A dynamic stochastic equilibrium model of a representative city is developed, which explicitly accounts for the joint dynamics of land property rights and urbanization. The calibrated baseline model describes a city that first grows informally, with the growth of individual incomes leading to a phased-in purchase of property rights in subsequent periods. The model demonstrates that land tenure informality does not necessarily vanish in the long term, and the social optimum does not necessarily imply a fully formal city, neither in the transition, nor in the long run. The welfare effects of policies, such as reducing the cost of land tenure formalization, or protecting informal dwellers against evictions are subsequently investigated, throughout the short-term transition and in the long-term stationary state.

This paper presents early evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. The study examines the links between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with the model, improved tenure security under demarcation induces a shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. This investment does not yet coincide with gains in agricultural productivity. The analysis also identifies significant gender-specific effects. Female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women further respond to an exogenous tenure security change by moving production away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels.

Urban and peri-urban land markets in rapidly expanding West African cities operate within and across different coexisting tenure regimes and involve complex procedures to obtain or make land available for housing. Because a structured framework lacks for the analysis of such systems, this book proposes a systemic approach and applies it to Bamako and its surrounding areas. The framework revolves around the description of land delivery channels: starting from the status of tenure when the land is first placed in circulation for residential use, it identifies the processes whereby tenure can be improved, the types of transactions that take place along the way, and interactions between land delivery channels. The analysis of the system shows that land is initially provided through a customary land delivery channel, which predominates in peri-urban areas where land is being transformed from agricultural to residential use, and through a public and para-public channel, which involves the administrative allocation of residential plots to inhabitants and the transfer of land to developers. These two channels feed into the formal private channel which delivers serviced plots with ownership title at much higher prices. Plots in the various channels may be traded successively, with a degree of informality varying according to tenure, legality and registration of transactions. Whereas the development of the formal market is hindered by structural factors, the informal land market provides little tenure security. Targeted towards low and middle-incomes, it also attracts wealthy and well-connected buyers who have access to information and administrative and political power and can more easily formalize tenure. The sustained increase in land prices, numerous conflicts over land, high transaction costs and time-consuming formalization procedures, together with the involvement of a large number of stakeholders, combine to reduce affordability significantly and make access to secure land very difficult for the urban poor.

Urban and peri-urban land markets in rapidly expanding West African cities operate within and across different coexisting tenure regimes and involve complex procedures to obtain or make land available for housing. Because a structured framework lacks for the analysis of such systems, this book proposes a systemic approach and applies it to Bamako and its surrounding areas. The framework revolves around the description of land delivery channels: starting from the status of tenure when the land is first placed in circulation for residential use, it identifies the processes whereby tenure can be improved, the types of transactions that take place along the way, and interactions between land delivery channels.

La note évalue la contribution de la recherche menée en France à l'économie du développement. Elle propose également quelques réflexions concernant les atouts et les faiblesses de ce champ d'étude en s'appuyant sur des critères objectifs (la publication d'articles de recherche et les citations de travaux).

Resume Comment expliquer l’existence de poches de chomage eleve au sein des villes ? La theorie economique identifie deux explications concurrentes : les effets nefastes sur le marche du travail associes a la segregation residentielle, et l’eloignement de ces zones aux lieux d’emplois. Notre travail statistique portant sur l’agglomeration bruxelloise confirme l’hypothese d’un chomage urbain exacerbe par la segregation residentielle mais ne permet pas de conclure quant au role de la distance aux emplois.

Spatial mismatch relates the unemployment and poverty of vulnerable population groups to their remoteness from job opportunities. Although the intuition initially applied to African Americans in US inner cities, spatial mismatch has a broader validity beyond the sole US context. In light of a detailed presentation of the mechanisms at work, we present the main results from various empirical tests of the spatial mismatch theory. Since key aspects of that theory remain to be tested, we also discuss methodological approaches and provide guidance for further research. We derive lessons for policy implications and comment on the appropriateness of related urban policies.