Comparative Evaluation in Regional and Urban Development - Term Paper Example

Comparative Evaluation in Regional and Urban Development 07 November Introduction Continued population growth has posed serious challenges to urban planners and local governments alike. Even national governments and regional groupings often find challenges in urban and regional development too much for them to handle alone considering the serious constraints in financial and material resources. As of 2005, the United Nations estimated there are almost a billion people who are urban slum dwellers (UN, 2005:xxxii). The UN agency in charge of this human global issue estimated another 2 billion people live in urban areas today. This only means there is tremendous demand for housing and urban services just to satisfy the needs of this population segment alone, even without considering the increase in households. Along this line, the challenges faced by urban planners in densely congested cities of certain regions are not only in the increases in population over the years but also in the rapidly changing composition of these cities which are undergoing rapid change in terms of the social and demographic characteristics including faster economic transformation during todays new climate of globalisation. Limited resources are almost always not enough to meet the growing demand for infrastructure services in most large cities today. Demand for housing facilities, water, roads, jobs and waste disposal markedly increase when mega-cities come up during the countrys onward rush towards economic development. Capacity of developing countries to meet the needs of their cities depends to a large degree on their ability to sustainably finance future economic growth and development but they usually face serious constraints in doing this. In this brief paper, a region in India (which is located in South Asia or the India sub-continent) will be compared with a region in mainland China which is on the Asian continent. Discussion South Asia is comprised of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. These combined countries represent just a mere 4% of the Earths total land area but their aggregate population is about 1.6 billion inhabitants which represents one-fourth of the worlds total population (Veron, Horko, Kneipp & Rogers, 2008:10). India alone already has about 1.2 billion people and this is a major logistical and a big political challenge as well for its national government. This region has diverse economic development and demographic patterns with the exception of Sri Lanka. India is composed of many diverse states and even the economic growth rate within the country varies by regions. The major implications of this dense population include poverty reduction, raising educational levels, address environmental issues and minimize their “ecological footprints.” India had been under British rule for several centuries and was a prized colony for the English people. The legacy of the British is a vast railroad network, the English language and a professional civil service bureaucracy. But more importantly, the English administrators had left a strong tradition of democracy in the country. However, this democratic space left people with vast disparities in economic incomes. India is a parliamentary democracy patterned after that of the British government and it is composed of 28 states and 7 union territories. India is a part of the newly-formed and newly-coined BRIC bloc composed of Brazil, Russia, India and China. India just a few years ago breached the trillion-dollar mark in its GDP but it still faces enormous problems such as widespread poverty, high levels of illiteracy, corruption, urban slums, hunger and public health issues. It recently became a newly-industrialised nation due to the adoption of market-based reforms but economic development is very uneven. There is however pockets of rapid growth in the country such as the region and cities in southern India which capitalised on their strengths in business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Despite its rapid economic growth after liberalising towards a free-market economy, substantial challenges remain. India to a large extent relies on foreign investment inflows to spur economic growth with the entry of foreign firms doing BPO such as outsourcing work for computer graphics, medical transcription, accounting functions and legal back office operations. Economic growth during the last two decades saw 430 million Indians lifted out of absolute poverty and the rise of the middle class segment to around 600 million but still India has the highest concentration of people living below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day and these poor people live mostly in highly urbanized areas of the country. A notable exception among Indian states is the region around the city of Bangalore. Since the 1990s, significant inter-state economic inequalities existed depending on the state’s economic strategy for development. Bangalore is today the hub of the Indian IT outsourcing industry and the capital of the south-eastern state of Karnataka. It enjoys tremendous incomes from the numerous outsourcing companies located there. The city and provincial governments had embarked on a remarkable economic transformation based on exploiting their advantages in the rapidly globalising economy. They did this within a context of competitive commercial development and that competitiveness and sustainability is the way to go for success in urban change. The local officials did not rely so much on the federal government but on their own belief adopted the same paradigm in Europe that large populations need not be a problematic challenge but viewed positively as economic powerhouses (Berg, Braun & Meer, 2007:120). Bangalore originally utilized its advantage in having many colleges and universities to attract outsourcing companies to put up Indian subsidiaries for software companies, aerospace and engineering firms, telecommunications, consumer care and health care. One of the largest IT outsourced services company is Wipro which is headquartered in Bangalore (Hamm, 2007, p. 25). Another surprising area of high economic development is the nearby Kerala province known for its sustainable model of development and high literacy rate (Parayil, 2000:17). Similar to India, the communist country of mainland China likewise adopted market reforms to accelerate its economy after several fantastic failures in the past decades. It was the charismatic and pragmatic leader Deng Xiao Ping who then introduced China to a free market economy. India is a democracy and so left much of the state development in the hands of local leaders. However, despite the introduction of a hybrid socialist and capitalist economy, China continues to maintain strict political control over all regions in China and thus directed how a state or region will pursue economic development based on loose centralized planning. Deng had formulated and combined several theories to form what is known as the socialist market economy which encouraged foreign investment into China, allowed limited private ownership and lessened state controls on economic development somewhat but provided the direction. Like India, communist China’s leaders tried to find a way to leapfrog its economy so it will not remain a low-income country forever. China is faced with a vast population like India and although mass famines are no longer happening, there is still widespread poverty within. The policy and philosophical shifts contemplated by Deng Xiao Ping entailed twin principles of reforms and openness in the Chinese social, economic and political spheres of life. The two main principles are integrated into the four modernizations in the area of agriculture, industry, military and in science & technology. The key thread connecting all these reforms is adoption of his so-called socialist market economy based on political flexibility regarding ideologies. Under Mao, the country set in motion a system that wove political ideology, economic production and social control under a party apparatus while Deng’s reforms aimed to unravel this interdependent system through gradual liberalisation by ceding government control over the economy and society but not its control over state politics (Guthrie, 2009:23). Deng tried to experiment his reforms in the southern region of China in the coastal southeastern province of Guangdong that includes the cities of Shenzhen, Xiamen and Shantou. In this crucial area were put up the first special economic zones in China to attract foreign investors like MNCs. Another region in China that saw rapid economic development during Deng’s reform era is the area known as the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) which is the triangular-shaped area comprising Shanghai, the southern part of Jiangsu province and the northern part of Zhejiang province. This area alone produces some $2 trillion of the gross domestic product of China and is about 40% of its total economic output. These adjacent metropolitan areas are home to about 80 million of which 50 million are urban dwellers. This is an example of China’s great success in instituting economic reforms which were often unorthodox (Zhang, Fan & Hann, 2010:4). Although the Yangtze Delta has been one of the most densely populated areas in the East Asia region since the ninth century, China’s leaders turned its vast population into one truly economic powerhouse this century has seen by viewing it as a positive in its favour. The similarity between the prosperous Indian regions and Chinese regions or cities is their outward and forward-looking economic strategies. India used its native facility with the English language as an attraction for the business process outsourcing industry looking for a way to cut costs at the home country and combined it with a young but talented population. China utilized the concept of export-processing zones (EPZs) to promote an export economy to become a global economic powerhouse based on low labour manufacturing costs to price its products very competitively on world markets. The difference is that growth among Indian states is not evenly spread and growth is due more to a state’s own strategic economic initiatives while that of China relies more on a central directive coming from the top party leadership but has a grassroots appeal to it. A new shining area in Shanghai called Pudong is now the centre of personal entrepreneurship and the Chinese economy is expected to equal the US economy by the year 2020 in terms of the GNP as computed using PPP or purchasing power parity (Chow, 2002:102). China has so far relied on exporting to the world but it had avoided an economic slowdown from the financial crisis largely by stimulating its domestic economy and developing its local markets. Conclusion The two examples cited in India (Karnataka and Kerala) and in China (the Guangdong province and the Yangtze River Delta region) show that large population concentrations are not a barrier to economic development. The key to such success is finding the necessary skills and vision to transform a big population from being a liability to it becoming a main asset in the age of globalisation today. India used its facility of English language to become a major hub of outsourced services in the world while China transformed its economy based on using coastal areas as special economic zones to encourage investments as they are nearer to seas. In a sense, today’s urban challenges had come full circle from the early concerns on sanitation in the early industrial cities of Britain (Marcotullio & McGranahan, 2007:35) to attaining the desired sustainability despite limited environmental, material and financial resources. The key to successful urban development is to make cities the main areas for generating the wealth and affluence which will hopefully filter to the poorer regions of a country. Urban challenges can be successfully tackled if the right mindset is used by utilizing the new social paradigm. References Berg, L., Braun, L. and Meer, J. (2007) National Policy Responses to Urban Challenges in Europe. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing, Limited. Chow, G. C. (2002) China’s Economic Transformation. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Guthrie, D. (2009) China and Globalisation: The Social, Economic and Political Transformation of Chinese Society. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Hamm, S. (2007) Bangalore Tiger: How Indian Tech Upstart Wipro is Rewriting the Rules of Global Competition. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Companies. Marcotullio, P. and McGranahan, G. (2007) Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back. London, UK: Earthscan. Parayil, G. (2000) Kerala: The Development Experience – Reflections on Sustainability. London, UK: Zed Books. UN-Habitat (2005) Financing Urban Shelter: Global Report on Human Settlements in 2005. London, UK: Earthscan. Véron, J., Horko, K., Kneipp, R. and Rogers, G. (2008) The Demography of South Asia from the 1950s to the 2000s: A Summary of Changes and a Statistical Assessment. Population, 63(1), pp.9-89. Zhang, X., Fan, S. and Haan, A. (2010) Narratives of Chinese Economic Reforms: How Does China Cross the River? Hackensack, NJ, USA: World Scientific Publishing Company. Read More