Jobs in the City: Explaining Urban Spatial Structure in Kampala

This paper examines the spatial organisation of jobs in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda

Abstract

This paper examines the spatial organization of jobs in Kampala, , and applies the Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) model to explain the observed patterns in terms of the agglomeration forces and the commuting costs of workers.

The paper suggests that:

  • Economic activities are concentrated in the downtown - beyond which employment is spatially dispersed.

  • Geographically weighted regressions identify 5 potential subcenters in 2011; however, none of these contribute significantly to employment.

When explaining the variation in employment density across localities in Kampala, the research highlights that:

  1. density falls by 23.5 percent per kilometer increase in distance from the nearest potential subcenter;
  2. an increase in local production externalities of 10 percent increases density by 3.7 percent;
  3. production externalities in Kampala’s potential subcenters are extremely weak to have any significant impact even on nearby tracts

Citation

Goswami, Arti Grover; Lall, Somik V. 2016. Jobs in the City : Explaining Urban Spatial Structure in Kampala. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7655. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/24230 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.

Jobs in the City: Explaining Urban Spatial Structure in Kampala

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Published 1 April 2016