This book is a sequel to the World Bank's World Development Report 2013: Jobs. The central message of that report was that job creation is at the heart of development. Jobs raise living standards and lift people out of poverty, they contribute to gains in aggregate productivity, and they may even foster social cohesion. In doing so, jobs may have spillovers beyond the private returns they offer to those who hold them. Poverty reduction is arguably a public good, making everybody better off; higher productivity spreads across co-workers, clusters, and cities; and social cohesion improves the outcomes of collective decision-making. But which jobs make the greatest contribution to development and what policies can facilitate the creation of more of these jobs? There is no universal answer - it depends on the country's level of development, demography, natural endowments, and institutions. This volume explores the diversity of jobs challenges and solutions through case studies of seven developing countries. These countries, drawn from four continents, represent seven different contexts - a small island nation (St. Lucia), a resource-rich country (Papua New Guinea), agrarian (Mozambique), urbanizing (Bangladesh), and formalizing (Mexico) economies, as well as young (Tunisia) and aging (Ukraine) populations. Using methods drawn from several branches of economics and the social sciences more broadly and analyzing a wide range of data, the authors show the different ways in which jobs have contributed to social and economic development in the countries they have studied and how they can contribute in the future. The policy priorities vary accordingly. They often extend well beyond traditional labor market instruments to include policy areas not typically considered in national growth strategies.

Institutional weaknesses limit the capacity of local governments to support efficient urbanization in developing countries. They also lead to the emergence of large developers with the clout to build entire cities. This paper analyzes the urbanization process when local governments are weak and large developers are powerful. Results from a non-cooperative game setting with minimal assumptions show that multiple equilibria can emerge depending on key institutional parameters of the model and the nature of the game, but all of them are inefficient. In this simple setting, increasing the capacity of the local government may not lead to better outcomes, because it may crowd out urban land development by the more effective private investor. Subsidizing the large investor can ensure efficiency, but it makes the rest of society worse off. Selling the rights to the city can be Pareto efficient, but only provided that the price at which the rights are sold are sufficiently high. However, more analytical and empirical work is needed before these analyses can be deemed relevant in practice. Competition among jurisdictions, time consistency challenges, and the social implications of private cities deserve special attention.

Inequality in South Asia appears to be moderate when looking at standard indicators such as the Gini index, which are based on consumption expenditures per capita. But other pieces of evidence reveal enormous gaps, from extravagant wealth at one end to lack of access to the most basic services at the other. Which prompts the question: How bad is inequality in South Asia? And why would that matter? This book takes a comprehensive look at the extent, nature, and drivers of inequality in this very dynamic region of the world. It discusses how some dimensions of inequality, such as high returns to investments in human capital, contribute to economic growth while others, such as high payoffs to rent-seeking or broken aspirations, undermine it. Drawing upon a variety of data sources, it disentangles the contribution that opportunity in young age, mobility in adult years, and support throughout life make to inequality at any point in time. Equally important, the book sheds light on the prospects of escaping disadvantage over time. The analysis shows that South Asia performs poorly in terms of opportunity. Access to basic services is partial at best, and can be traced to characteristics at birth, including gender, location, and caste. Conversely, the region has had a robust performance in terms of geographical and occupational mobility despite its cluttered urbanization and widespread informality. Migration and jobs have served disadvantaged groups better than the rest, highlighting the importance of the urbanization and private sector development agendas. Support falls somewhere in between. Poverty alleviation programs are pervasive. But the mobilization of public resources is limited and much of it is wasted in regressive subsidies, while inter-government transfers do not do enough to mitigate spatial inequalities.