More competitive cities can help boost growth

March 14, 2016 - More than 7 million more jobs can be created each year in East Asia if the cities improved their competitiveness, says the World Bank’s report Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth: What, Who, and How. An analysis of 750 cities around the world, the report outlines the factors that make cities competitive and prosper, providing a catalog of best practices and data that city leaders can use to benchmark their performance. With urbanization in East Asia expected to accelerate in coming decades, these tools can help the region’s cities potentially stimulate economic growth in the region if their growth is accompanied by increasing competitiveness, which would include boosting infrastructure, skills sets, and regulatory reforms that would strengthen the investment climate. “The cities of East Asia have grown faster than anywhere else in the world. The foundation for boosting the competitiveness of those urban centers – integrated planning for denser land use, and improvements in the investment climate – can propel cities as the engines of sustainable growth and job creation,” said Jordan Schwartz, Director of the World Bank’s Singapore Infrastructure and Urban Development Hub, a center of the World Bank Group’s operations and knowledge activities in the areas of infrastructure finance and sustainable urban development. The report finds that competitive cities did not always overhaul their existing economies in order to advance. Often they simply became better at what they already did, leveraging their comparative advantage, especially when exporting tradable goods and services to other cities and countries. “The private sector accounts for almost 75 percent of jobs created worldwide. To spur growth and become successful, cities must focus on expanding existing firms, creating new ones, and attracting investors in order to create more jobs, increase incomes of citizens, and grow,” said Anabel Gonzalez, Senior Director of the World Bank Group’s Trade & Competitiveness Global Practice. The report looks at global and regional trends, comparing different types of cities – by income, sector, region, and industrial mix. It found that competitive cities include more than capital cities, or global centers of commerce. They are often secondary cities that are experiencing rapid industrialization, such as Changsha in China.