The cost of service provision tends to increase from cities to towns and semi-dense areas and then to rural areas. Because the definition relies on the spatial concentration of the population, it captures the logic of agglomeration economies. Because the Degree of Urbanization does not include services or infrastructure, it can monitor these services in an unbiased manner. For example, the definitions used by Bangladesh, Cuba, and Panama all include access to drinking water. All urban areas have water because by definition they can only be urban if they have access to water. This makes it impossible to monitor these services in urban areas because it becomes a circular argument. Some definitions of urban areas, however, include access to water and electricity. ![]() The SDGs include a multitude of indicators that should be collected for cities, urban, and rural areas, including access to electricity, water, the Internet, and all-weather roads. ![]() It helps monitor progress on the SDGs.The thresholds used in the Degree of Urbanization were also tested to ensure that they produce a valid and robust classification and a balanced population distribution across the three classes. Out of the 100 countries that use population size threshold, 85 use the 5,000 threshold or a lower threshold. For towns and semi-dense areas, it uses 5,000. For cities, it uses 50,000 inhabitants as Japan does. The thresholds used in the Degree of Urbanization take inspiration from these national definitions. However, it uses two thresholds instead of one. Population size is used by more than half of the national definitions of urban and rural areas. Driven by population size and density.The estimated Degree of Urbanization for each country in the world using GHS-POP can be found here. Several global population grids have been estimated and are available for free, including the Global Human Settlement Layer Population Grid (GHS-POP). An increasing number of countries have their own population grid. It relies on the simple combination of population size and density applied to the population grid, instead of a multitude of criteria or complex and lengthy calculations. This new approach offers several advantages: Rural areas, which consist mostly of low-density grid cells (2).Towns and semi-dense areas, which have a population of at least 5,000 inhabitants in contiguous grid cells with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km 2 and.Cities, which have a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per km 2).The Degree of Urbanization identifies three types of settlements: We decided to take a wide-angle view to facilitate comparability across countries. By introducing an objective and data-driven approach to measuring poverty and applying this approach globally, the Degree of Urbanization seeks to do for the definition of urban what the $1/day poverty line did for poverty measurement in the 1990s. ![]() Some of this resistance may come from the allocation of fiscal transfers – consider India, where getting reclassified as urban may cause places to lose government transfers, or Egypt, where getting reclassified as urban would trigger additional public investment for higher-level service delivery requirements, including police stations and courthouses.Ī wide-angle view to measure urbanization In other countries, the sectoral employment or provision of infrastructure and services is used to determine whether settlements should be classified as urban or rural.įinally, once categorized as urban or rural, places are rarely recategorized. Some countries don’t use a statistical definition but designate urban areas by administrative decision. Many countries use a minimum population size to define an urban area, but that size can be 200 (as in Denmark), 2,000 (Argentina), 5,000 (India) or 50,000 (Japan) or even 100,000 (China). On March 5th, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed the Degree of Urbanization as a recommended method for international comparisons. To facilitate international comparisons, a coalition of six international organizations developed a new global definition of cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas. It also means we cannot meaningfully compare the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) indicators for urban and rural areas across countries. ![]() If we can’t compare the performance of urban or rural areas across national borders, then we can’t learn from policies used in other countries. Because national definitions of urban and rural areas differ significantly from one country to another, it is difficult to compare these areas across national borders.
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