Urbanisation

Rapid urbanisation in several EU Member States and the ensuing population shift from rural areas towards urban centres are generally treated in economic literature as a necessity for generating growth and wellbeing. In the last two decades, however, the overly positive assessment of this trend has shifted.

Globalisation has put increasing pressure on agriculture, food processing industries and other local cottage and SME enterprises. This has led to accelerating changes in the balance between rural and urban areas and has deeply impacted the overall socio-economic fabric of regions.
At the same time, declining rural populations make many rural communities unsustainable. Once inhabitants decide to leave areas due to falling living standards, the remaining population suffers from the further deprivation of goods and services, driving even more people to leave. Several studies have been assessing the costs associated with these changes, in particular their impact on the viability of rural communities. However, they generally fall short of the holistic assessment required, as the decline and shift of populations also create further negative spillovers on the rest of the economy, for example on urban areas that are usually at the receiving end of the influx of rural populations.
This report aims to contribute to the debate on EU rural development policy by presenting a methodology to understand the net costs and benefits of investing in rural areas to society as a whole. By doing so, it asks whether rural depopulation is just a rural problem or whether the consequences have a bearing on the whole of society, and in particular urban areas.

The reports are not academic research as such. The authors are academically qualified researchers, however, and they base their findings on academic studies. In this study, six major trends in Africa are defined as megatrends: population growth, climate change, urbanisation, migration, techno­logical development and democratic development.
Megatrends in Africa are deep and long-term transformation processes that are irreversible. They can and should be mitigated, but will inevitably require adaptation as well. The trends also have an element of foresight, in regards to how they are set to develop in the future.
All the megatrends are interlinked and affect each other. Population growth and climate change can be seen as mega-megatrends that have an especially strong effect on the other trends.
The study contains reports on all six megatrends, which are examined through a Pan-African lens. The study also includes a summary of all megatrends and the interaction of their effects.

What lies ahead for cars? The need to improve air quality and the quest for more fluid means of mobility, and sometimes dogmatic viewpoints have led some to want to exclude cars from towns.
Despite the undeniable progress that has been made to mitigate its impact, cars remain a source of undesirable externalities. In France, transport represented 26.9% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2013 and 28% of particulate emissions in the Île-de-France region.
Congestion in city centres leads to increase in both of these emissions and a considerable loss of time (estimated at 38 minutes per day in Paris) and money for those who drive.