Governance Lessons from Urban Informality

Informality and Protection from Health Shocks: Lessons from Yemen

The informal sector is generally believed to be vulnerable to various risks including health shocks due to limited access to social insurance. This paper examines the relationship between informality and protection from health risks in Yemen. The formal sector includes the pension covered wage employed and largely overlaps with public employment in Yemen, while the informal sector includes the ...

Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning

Many of the significant urban transformations of the new century are taking place in the developing world. In particular, informality, once associated with poor squatter settlements, is now seen as a generalized mode of metropolitan urbanization. This article focuses on urban informality to highlight the challenges of dealing with the "unplannable" —exceptions to the order of formal urbanizatio...

Urban Informality as a Commons Dilemma

Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics

strong sentiment against the phenomenon known as “urban sprawl” has emerged in the United States over the past few years. Critics of sprawl argue that urban expansion encroaches excessively on agricultural land, leading to a loss of amenity benefits from open space as well as the depletion of scarce farmland resources. The critics also argue that the long commutes generated by urban expansion c...

Perceptions on Governance Effectiveness and Informality: A Self-fulfilling Equilibrium

Motivated by empirical evidence suggesting a close link between weak institutional quality and informality, this paper proposes a game-theoretical model that explores how perceived governance effectiveness in public service provision determines a firm’s decision to be formal or informal under incomplete information with regard to other firms’ perceptions. By deploying a “global games” approach,...