Download or read book Better Cities Better World written by Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The planet is becoming increasingly urban. In many ways, the urbanization wave and the unprecedented urban growth of the past 20 years have created a sense of urgency and an impetus for change. Some 54 percent of the world population—3.9 billion people—lives in urban areas today; thus, it has become clear that “business as usual†? is no longer possible. This new configuration places great expectations on local governments. While central governments are subject to instability and political changes, local governments are seen as more inclined to stay the course. Because they are closer to the people, the voice of the people is more clearly heard for a truly democratic debate over the choice of neighborhood investments and city-wide policies and programs, as well as the decision process on the use of public funds and taxpayers’ money. In a context of skewed financial resources and complex urban challenges—which range from the provision of basic traditional municipal services to the “newer†? agenda of social inclusion, economic development, city branding, emergency response, smart technologies, and green investment—more cities are searching for more effective and innovative ways to deal with new and old problems. Better Cities, Better World: A Handbook on Local Governments Self-Assessments is at the heart of this debate. It recognizes the complex past, current, and future challenges that cities face and outlines a bottom-line, no-nonsense framework for data-based policy dialogue and action; a common language that, for the first time, helps connect the dots between public investments programming (Urban Audit/Self-Assessment) and financing (Municipal Finances Self-Assessment). It helps address two key questions, too often bypassed when it comes to municipal infrastructure and services financing: Are we doing the right things? Are we doing things right? Better Cities, Better World: A Handbook on Local Governments Self-Assessments offers a bit of everything for everyone. • Central governments will be attracted by the purposefulness and clarity of these tools, their impact on local government capacity and performance building, and how they improve the implementation of transformative actions for policy change. • City leaders and policy makers will find the sections on objectives and content instructive and informative, with each issue placed in its context, and strong connections between data and municipal action. • Municipal staff in charge of day-to-day management will find that the sections on tasks and the detailed step-by-step walk through the process give them the pragmatic knowhow that they need. • Cities’ partners—such as bilateral and multilateral agencies, banks and funds, utility companies, civil society, and private operators—will find the foundations for more effective collaborative partnerships.

Download or read book Localizing Development written by Ghazala Mansuri and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2013 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the conceptual foundations of the participatory approach to local development, assesses the evidence of its efficacy, and draws key lessons for policy.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Democratic Decentralization written by James Manor and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly all countries worldwide are now experimenting with decentralization. Their motivation are diverse. Many countries are decentralizing because they believe this can help stimulate economic growth or reduce rural poverty, goals central government interventions have failed to achieve. Some countries see it as a way to strengthen civil society and deepen democracy. Some perceive it as a way to off-load expensive responsibilities onto lower level governments. Thus, decentralization is seen as a solution to many different kinds of problems. This report examines the origins and implications decentralization from a political economy perspective, with a focus on its promise and limitations. It explores why countries have often chosen not to decentralize, even when evidence suggests that doing so would be in the interests of the government. It seeks to explain why since the early 1980s many countries have undertaken some form of decentralization. This report also evaluates the evidence to understand where decentralization has considerable promise and where it does not. It identifies conditions needed for decentralization to succeed. It identifies the ways in which decentralization can promote rural development. And it names the goals which decentralization will probably not help achieve.

Download or read book Development and Analysis of Alternatives written by Wisconsin. Division of Aeronautics and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Future of Local Self Government written by Tomas Bergström and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new research results on the challenges of local politics in different European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Switzerland, together with theoretical considerations on the further development and strengthening of local self-government. It focuses on analyses of the most recent developments in local democracy and administration.

Download or read book Job Creation and Local Economic Development 2018 Preparing for the Future of Work written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third edition of Job Creation and Local Economic Development examines the impact of technological progress on regional and local labour markets. It sheds light on widening regional gaps on job creation, workers education and skills, as well as inclusion in local economies.

Download or read book Making Decentralisation Work written by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report offers a comprehensive overview of decentralisation policies and reforms in OECD countries and beyond. Sometimes called a "silent" or "quiet" revolution, decentralisation is among the most important reforms of the past 50 years. The report argues that decentralisation outcomes - in terms of democracy, efficiency, accountability, regional and local development - depend greatly on the way it is designed and implemented. Making the most of decentralisation systems is particularly crucial in the context of a "geography of discontent" and growing divides between places that feel left behind by globalisation and technological change and those that may benefit from the opportunities offered by megatrends. The report identifies 10 guidelines for making decentralisation work and allowing it to be conducive to regional development. Beyond the guidelines, the report proposes concrete tools for policy-makers, including detailed sets of recommendations, checklists, pitfalls to avoid and examples of good practices, both in unitary and federal countries.

Download or read book How to Achieve Inclusive Growth written by Valerie Cerra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 901 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These issues are intertwined. They therefore require a holistic framework to examine their interplay and bring the various strands together. Leading academic economists have partnered with experts from several international institutions to explain the sources and scale of these challenges. They gather a wide array of empirical evidence and country experiences to lay out practical policy solutions and to devise a comprehensive and unified plan of action for combatting these economic and social disparities. This authoritative book is accessible to policy makers, students, and the general public interested in how to craft a brighter future by building a sustainable, green, and inclusive society in the years ahead.

Download or read book OECD Multi level Governance Studies Towards Balanced Regional Development in Croatia From Strategy Design to Implementation written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report assesses the extent to which Croatia’s multi-level governance system is supporting its regional development objectives. In particular, it provides an overview of the country’s regional development performance on several demographic, economic and well-being indicators. From there, it considers how the regional development reforms adopted since 2014 affect the ability of national and subnational governments to design, implement, fund, monitor and evaluate place-based regional development plans.

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book OECD Multi level Governance Studies Rethinking Regional Development Policy making written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report takes stock of discussions between academics and country practitioners on opportunities to improve the design and delivery of regional development policies in a series of seminars organised during 2017 by the OECD and the European Commission. What can governments do to enhance ...

Download or read book Disaster Resilience written by National Academies and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

Download or read book Decentralisation and Regional Development written by Eva Dick and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes decentralisation, regional development paths and success factors in different governance sectors in Ghana, the Philippines, Tanzania and Chile, and discuss overarching aspects of relevance. Decentralisation, which refers to the delegation of administrative responsibilities, political decision-making and fiscal powers to lower levels of government, is now considered one of the most efficient engines of development. In Sub-Saharan Africa decentralised states have made more progress in reducing poverty than those states with lower decentralisation scores. But in many countries, decentralisation is still considered a ‘work in progress’ with unsatisfactory results. From a spatial point of view, the link between decentralisation and regional and district development is particularly interesting. Both in the North and in the South, regional or district development is seen as holding the potential for advancing social and economic development, and even more so in decentralised political settings. Space-based networks at the regional or district level are considered instrumental for responding to locally specific challenges, e.g. in areas lagging behind economically.

Download or read book Urban China written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last 30 years, China’s record economic growth lifted half a billion people out of poverty, with rapid urbanization providing abundant labor, cheap land, and good infrastructure. While China has avoided some of the common ills of urbanization, strains are showing as inefficient land development leads to urban sprawl and ghost towns, pollution threatens people’s health, and farmland and water resources are becoming scarce. With China’s urban population projected to rise to about one billion – or close to 70 percent of the country’s population – by 2030, China’s leaders are seeking a more coordinated urbanization process. Urban China is a joint research report by a team from the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China’s State Council which was established to address the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in China and to help China forge a new model of urbanization. The report takes as its point of departure the conviction that China's urbanization can become more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable. However, it stresses that achieving this vision will require strong support from both government and the markets for policy reforms in a number of area. The report proposes six main areas for reform: first, amending land management institutions to foster more efficient land use, denser cities, modernized agriculture, and more equitable wealth distribution; second, adjusting the hukou household registration system to increase labor mobility and provide urban migrant workers equal access to a common standard of public services; third, placing urban finances on a more sustainable footing while fostering financial discipline among local governments; fourth, improving urban planning to enhance connectivity and encourage scale and agglomeration economies; fifth, reducing environmental pressures through more efficient resource management; and sixth, improving governance at the local level.

Download or read book Forgotten Places written by Thomas A. Lyson and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Creating Collaborative Advantage written by Professor Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen and published by Gower Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the emerging new collaborative economic order, innovation is achieved by an integrated process of collaboration between policymakers, business and society. Often, the focus for this collaboration is at a regional level. Creating Collaborative Advantage examines the trends in innovation policy that reflect this new thinking and regional focus. This book develops the view that collaboration is one of many ways of organising a competitive economy. It asks how, when and where collaboration is a meaningful way of organisation. It explores collaboration at business level, business networks between companies, and a wider collaborative coalition between business and public authorities. It is not a manual, a 'how to do it', because there is no single straightforward universal model to replace current orthodoxy on economic development, but it will enable people to learn. The contributors to this unique book have been involved with the implementation of some of the most outstanding examples of collaborative approaches, it therefore gives an outstanding picture of diversity, inbuilt comparisons and contrast, and debate between the cases. The co-authors give their understanding of these issues, but the book tries to establish some common understandings and bring the concept of collaboration to a larger audience, and to increase interest in a field which requires further exploration. Policy makers, advisers and administrators at all levels of government, those involved in research and development, and business leaders and educators, will find this book invaluable, together with readers having an academic interest in the subject of innovation.

Download or read book Improving Software Organizations written by Lars Mathiassen and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 2002 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another stupendously gripping thriller from the author of Gideon