This is a short essay on open questions in urban economic theory.

This chapter offers a primer on poverty, inequality, and vulnerability analysis and a guide to resources on this topic. It is written for decision makers who want to define the type of information they need to monitor poverty reduction and make appropriate policy decisions and for the technical...

Guinea-Bissau endured a major conflict in 1998 and has suffered from persistent political instability since independence. After a brief review of indicators of governance in Guinea-Bissau and recent political developments, the objective of this Chapter is to provide results from a recent survey...

We criticize the theories used to explain the size distribution of cities. They take an empirical fact and work backward to obtain assumptions on primitives. The induced theoretical assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity...

The tomahawk bifurcation is used by Fujita et al. (1999) in a model with two regions to explain the formation of a core-periphery urban pattern from an initial uniform distribution. Baldwin et al. (2003) show that the tomahawk bifurcation disappears when the two regions have an uneven population...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in...

Given the poor economic performance of Guinea-Bissau over the last few years, including a severe recession toward the end of 2002, poverty is likely to be high and to have risen in recent years even compared to its high postconflict level. The first objective of this chapter is to estimate the...

The modern literature on city formation and development, for example the New Economic Geography literature, has studied the agglomeration of agents in size or mass. We investigate agglomeration in sorting or by type of worker, that implies agglomeration in size when worker populations differ by...

This chapter offers a primer on poverty, inequality, and vulnerability analysis and a guide to resources on this topic. It is written for decision makers who want to define the type of information they need to monitor poverty reduction and make appropriate policy decisions and for the technical...

This paper shows that in Belgium, programs to prevent electricity cuts among the poor often do not reach the poorest. This is less because the poorest cannot benefit from the programs (if they apply, they almost always are granted benefits) than because they often fail to apply for the programs....