Abstract

Urbanization in Myanmar is still in an early phase with slightly less than one-third of the population living in cities. This presents an enormous opportunity for the country. Cities are engines of growth and prosperity, which facilitate industries to grow jobs, services and innovations. Cities are also fundamental to lifting people out of poverty through increased employment opportunities and incomes to citizens. No country has reached middle income status without urbanizing. That being said, the way that cities urbanize is important to growth, poverty and livability. If adequate investments are not made in basic infrastructure and services, urban planning, and in ensuring a governance and financing structure that can deliver for residents, cities instead can end up with major problems of congestion, pollution, sprawl, and inequality which can create or worsen social divisions, and potentially contribute to crime and violence. The report, Myanmar’s Urbanization: Creating Opportunities for All aims to understand urbanization in Myanmar drawing on the growing literature on the topic in Myanmar, especially for Yangon. It uses an inclusive urbanization lens and proposes a set of priority policy areas for urgent attention that will help to ensure the benefits of urbanization are widely realized given the projected growth of cities. An inclusion lens is particularly important in Myanmar as the country transitions from a complex history that has been characterized by decades of economic and political isolation, conflict, and underdevelopment. Inclusive urbanization is reliant on three keydimensions; economic, social and spatial. Economic inclusion refers to equitable access to employment and income-generating activities in a city, and resilience to shocks. Spatial inclusion refers to equitable and affordable access to land, housing, infrastructure and basic public services. Social inclusion relates to individual and group rights, equity, security and dignity. Such aspects of social inclusion and exclusion are relevant to groups who are often marginalized inday-to-day urban life.

Abstract

Reliable transport infrastructure is one of the backbones of a prosperous economy, providingaccess to markets, jobs and social services. Sustainable Development Goal 9 (SDG9) calls forincreased access to sustainable transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.Collectively, these countries will need to spend between 0.5 percent and 3.3 percent of their GDPannually (157 billion to 1 trillion US Dollars) in new transport infrastructure by 2030 – plus an additional 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP to maintain their network – depending on their ambition and their efficiency in service delivery (Rozenberg and Fay, 2019). Because of the wide spatial distribution of transport infrastructure, many transport assets are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, increasing costs for national transport agencies and operators. During the 2015 floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, the repair of transport assets contributed approximately 60 percent of the total damage cost (GFDRR, 2015). In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, accessibility as measured by the length of open networks directly after the shock dropped by 86 percent for highways and by 71 percent for railways (Kazama and Noda, 2012b). Such transport disruptions necessarily have direct impacts on the local economy. Employees face difficulties commuting, access to firms is disrupted for clients, interruptions in the supply chain inhibit production, and finished products cannot be easily shipped (Kajitani and Tatano, 2014). The paper, prepared as background material for the Lifelines report on infrastructure resilience, summarizes the main findings on the risk faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change, and the main recommendations for building more resilient transport networks. It starts by describing how transport disruptions affect firms and households either directly and through supply chains. It then proposes a range of approaches and solutions for building more resilient transport networks, showing that the additional cost of resilience is not high if resources are well spent. Finally, it provides a set of practical recommendations.