Diagnose to Prescribe: Uncovering the Truth about Spatial Disparities
Despite the popular view that there is a headlong rush of migrants to the capital cities and main metropolitan areas, official data show that in Algeria, Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Morocco, and Syria the main city’s share of total population has stayed more or less constant. Only Tripoli in Libya and Sana’a in the Republic of Yemen have significantly increased their shares of the national population, while Amman and Beirut have lost population share. Most main cities have also seen their share of the urban population fall. Therefore, urbanization is spread across entire territories, and is not, as is popularly believed, taking the form of a unipolar concentration of population in each country’s biggest city or cities. MENA’s observation is consistent with the worldwide observation (Henderson, Shalizi, and Venables 2001) that the relative size of cities changes little as economic growth occurs. In North Africa in 1960, 25 percent of the urban population was living in cities of more than 1 million inhabitants, a figure that had risen to only 33 percent by 2005. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the share rose from 26 percent to 33 percent over the same period; and in Iraq, from 32 percent to 35 percent. Meanwhile, Amman’s share of the urban population fell from 48 percent to 24 percent, Beirut’s from 70 percent to 51 percent, and Damascus’s from 34 percent to 23 percent. Sana’a was the exception, with its share of the urban population doubling to 30 percent (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2007). MENA’s urbanization is on a par with that of other developing country economies and not, as is sometimes feared, a phenomenon of uniquely overgrown megacities. Henderson (2000) estimated the relationship between growth and the size of the “prime” (main) city for a sample of countries using 1965–95 panel data. Of the 70 prime cities for which results were available, 24 appeared so large as to be restricting economic growth. Only one of these was from the MENA region: Cairo. The other MENA cities in the study, Algiers, Tehran, Amman, Damascus, and Tunis, were among the 30 prime cities that came out as being appropriately sized. Table 3.11, therefore, summarizes the trend of the past three decades with respect to the urban-rural continuum: urbanization, but without an emptying of rural areas and without a concentration of the urban population within prime cities. Very Little Lateral Redistribution toward Leading Provinces The redistribution of MENA’s population tends to be a gradual shift from rural to urban areas within provinces rather than a lateral agglomeration from lagging provinces to leading provinces. This shift is very different from what happened in the United States in the late nineteenth century or in China since the 1990s, where there were massive lateral redistributions of the population across long distances. To visualize MENA’s case,
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