The world is facing a new nexus between urbanization, development, environment, and inequality

Summary: Urbanization is associated with economic growth, but it’s a fine balance before rural poverty simply shifts to the cities and the cities become too big to sustain development, sucking growth out of gross domestic product. Economic growth and development, urbanization, and energy and electricity consumption are all closely linked, but economic progress does not equal economic development if the poor simply move from one state of poverty to another. Increases in GDP per capita lower poverty and narrow rural–urban gaps. Initially, increases in urbanization lead to improvements, but at higher levels of urbanization, increases worsen poverty and rural–urban gaps. The United Nations reported that global urbanization broke the 50 percent mark in 2009, and will absorb almost all the projected 2.5 billion additional people over the next 40 years. Most of the people expected to move to urban areas will come from less developed regions. Read the transcript http://bit.ly/2AvMIpa Read the working paper https://www.adb.org/publications/urbanization-development-environment-and-inequality-nexus About the author Brantley Liddle is a senior research fellow at the Energy Studies Institute, National University, Singapore. Know more about ADBI’s research on inequality http://bit.ly/2k91onD