Why I always insists on the county urbanization? The upgrading of administrative centres into a full urban ICT city status must be a dream of every residence. People need to know that they will not forever live in rural villages and change is now with county administration. The following centres must be rapidily upgraded to meet the 21 century challeges. 1. Nandi Hills 2. Kabiyet or Salient 3. Mosoriot 4. Lessos 5. Kaptumo International Experience with Urbanization (World Bank) Cities in development 1. Urbanization is an integral element of rapid income growth and industrialization throughout the world, as countries advance from low to higher income levels. Labor moves from under-employment in low-productivity rural activities to full employment in higher-productivity urban manufacturing activities. The transformation is spurred by improved technology, imported and domestic, which raises the productivity and skills of the workers moving to the urban sector, as well as productivity in the rural sector; and the transformation may be spurred by export demand for goods produced in the urban sector. Henderson (2005) has a review of models and empirical evidence and the current WDR (World Bank, 2009) describes many details of the process. Post World War II, countries typically have experienced urban population growth rates of 5–6% a year during the 15–20 year period of their most rapid industrialization, where urbanization transforms societies from 20–25% urbanized to 70–85% urbanized in 3-4 decades. 2. Why are cities and urbanization so critical to the success of modernization? Most manufacturing and service production is more efficient when undertaken in urbanized areas. In high-density locations, firms more easily learn from other firms about new technologies, hire the workers with the exact skills they need, and purchase and transport intermediate inputs (See Duranton and Puga, 2004 and Rosenthal and Strange, 2004 for reviews of theory and empirics). Studies in other countries suggest that a doubling of individual industry scale within a city leads to a 2–10% growth in worker productivity (see Nakamura 1985 on Japan; Henderson, Lee and Lee 2001 on Korea; and Henderson 1988 on Brazil and the USA). Productivity growth is higher in modern technical industries, such as electronics, transport equipment and machinery, and is somewhat lower in textiles and food processing. 3. More generally, cities are the engines of growth. They are places where innovations are incubated and sophisticated skills are developed. Theoretical and empirical research suggests that ‘knowledge accumulation’ in urban environments – that is, an increase in the general level of human capital – leads also to improved worker productivity (Lucas 1988, Black and Henderson 1999, and Moretti, 2004). Cities provide the scale economies for schooling and training systems to develop in interaction with commerce and industry. Evolving urban hierarchies 4. In the early stages of industrialization, the largest cities in a country are the focal points for development and importation of technology, and are the initial centers of industrialization. However, as development proceeds, technologies used in manufacturing production standardize, which permits decentralization of industrial production to small and medium-sized cities with lower labor and land costs, a process akin to the “product cycle1.” For example, in Korea in the decade 1983–93, the share of national manufacturing employment in Seoul, Pusan, and Taegu fell from 44 to 28%, while the share in small hinterland cities and rural areas rose from 26 to 42% (Lee, 1998). 5. Given this pattern of decentralization of manufacturing from the larger cities what emerges in a mature economy is an urban hierarchy, where small and medium size cities are highly specialized in industries such as steel, textiles, apparel, wood products, insurance, health care, and even entertainment. Specialization in a single industry or a set of inter-related industries allows for greater exploitation of within industry localized economies of scale as described earlier, for a given city size. While large cities are more service oriented, they have more diverse economic bases with higher order service, distribution, innovation, and manufacturing functions, where economies of overall agglomeration, as well as within industry economies, are important. The very largest cities in developed countries (e.g., New York, Tokyo and London) have little manufacturing activity, but huge shares of national financial and business services, focused on the innovative products in these sectors. See Fujita et al. (2004) on Japan and Kolko (1999) and Black and Henderson (2003) on the USA
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 20:30:10 +0000
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