Gregory Randolph

In recent decades, megacities in India and Indonesia– the world's largest developing country democracies' have grown increasingly inaccessible to rural-urban migrants. For anyone who hasn't obtained higher levels of education, the potential wage boost in moving from a rural area to a big city has been eroded by increasing skill demands in the labor market and higher costs of living. Small cities, meanwhile, pose fewer barriers for rural-urban migrants.

Lately, policy makers and commentators have questioned whether the "demographic dividend" could turn into a "disaster" as countries struggle to create enough productive jobs for their ballooning youth populations. So far, research has focused less on the geography of the demographic dividend. Where are these young people who seek productive work? Where can their economic potential be fulfilled?

Despite the impressive, sustained rates of economic growth that Zambia has achieved since the start of the 21st century, and its relatively swift recovery from an economic downturn in 2015, the country’s ongoing structural transformation and urbanization processes are yielding highly uneven results.

To what extent do young people aspire to life-long industrial jobs, independent of pay or working conditions? And what work do they do once they've left the factory?

Following the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the challenges of reconstruction and high out-migration must be leveraged as opportunities to create just jobs.

This research project explores how good city governance can leverage urban economies to create more and better jobs.

The relationship between urbanization and economic growth may actually be tenuous, and the relationship with formal economy job creation even more so. This is particularly true of newly urban and rapidly urbanizing regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

With most of India's job-hungry youth residing in rural areas, and most of its job creation happening in cities, the country must design its cities to cope with "and welcome" internal migrants.

The 10-chapter volume examines a rich diversity of wage-related policy issues from around the world: wage inequality in Brazil; minimum wage setting in decentralized Indonesia; the gender dimensions of agricultural wages in India; and the impact of state-level minimum wages in the United States, among other topics.

In the world's fourth-largest country, Indonesia, the number of annual regular migrants has increased from less than 100,000 in 1990 to about 500,000 in 2013. But is the pursuit of migration as a development strategy supporting economic, social, and political empowerment in communities of origin?