The Costs of Urbanization: A Four-Country Comparison

Abstract

The author reports on attempts to measure the investment costs of urbanization in Egypt Pakistan Bangladesh and Indonesia. The Egyptian and Pakistani studies were national-scale studies carried out in 1980-1982 and 1982-1984 respectively; the Bangladesh and Indonesian projects were smaller and were conducted by the author in mid-1984 and early 1985 respectively. Investment resource pools and population growth parameters to the year 2000 are projected and urbanization costs for approximately the same period are estimated including direct investment costs housing and intra-urban infrastructure costs interurban infrastructure costs and growth-management costs. The projected urbanization costs among the four countries are then compared When urban absorption costs are defined broadly to include job-creation costs and interurban infrastructure as well as the more obvious housing and urban service costs it is shown that these costs would eat up huge chunks of the aggregate investment-resource pool....Recurrent elements are the needs to reduce infrastructure and service standards to stimulate domestic savings to augment the resource pool to shift to labor-intensive employment strategies to economize on the capital costs of job creation and to reduce urban population pressures (e.g. fertility control programs and improving off-farm rural labor absorption). (EXCERPT)