environmental sustainability - as economic development occurs environmental
problems are increasingly overcome (Grossman and Krueger, 1995). An important
disincentive against the excessive use of resources could be the realistic pricing of
resources and services. Of particular interest in this model is how the cost of
externalities could be built into the marketing mechanism, making polluters pay for
their actions, especially in cases where wealth expands the locus of environmental
challenges from local to regional and eventually to global proportions, as has been
found in Asia (Marcotullio, 2001). One of the latest developments in this field is the
generation of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index system (DJSI World), the first
attempt at benchmarking the financial performance of sustainability of corporations
on a global basis (Holiday, et al., 2002).
Fair shares city policy contains elements of all three previous categories. The
difference lies in how it targets problems of spatial political, environmental, social
and economic disequilibrium, i.e. what are the needs of people and how to balance the
benefits of some against the needs of others. The unequal distribution of resources
and ways in which to manage the exporting of externalities are important issues in this
category.
CONCLUSION
Since the 1970s the industrialized world have experienced significant economic
changes which changed the production conditions of entrepreneurs. The economic
restructuring that followed impacted significantly on the urban environment of both
the developed and developing world. The populations of large urban agglomerations
in the developed world started to stagnate and even decline (Fielding, 1989; Geyer
and Kontuly, 1996; Geyer, 1996) while new mega cities started to develop in the
developing world. In the newly industrializing countries global shifts in
industrialization have contributed greatly to urban growth there, while rural poverty
remained an important factor in urban growth in the lagging corners of the world. In
the process, global block formation continues to favour developing countries that are
geographically closer to core regions in the North while the global outer periphery
remains relatively isolated.
In the early 1990s a European Commission (EC) identified six factors that are
expected to have a major impact on the economic potential of cities in the future.
They are: (i) a diverse economic base, especially in the high value-added sectors, (ii)
human capital that enables the exploitation of high technology sectors, (iii)
educational institutions that would provide a steady flow of skilled workers, (iv) a
high quality of life to attract and retain a highly skilled workforce, (v) good transport
and communication networks, and (vi) the institutional capacity to exploit potential
(Alden, 1997). A key issue that is highlighted in the EC report is the ability of the
central, regional and local government sectors to form partnerships with the private
sector and local communities. These features are rarely seen in the urban South.
Countries that have attracted industries first during the post-Fordist era often followed
a develop-first-clean-later approach, while cities in the global outer periphery, such as
in Africa, simply fall short in all the departments. It could be said that while
informationalization occurs in the economies of the urban North and industrializing
South (Hall, 1996), informalization has been occurring in the economies of the
lagging urban South.
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