Why Charter Cities

Though growth is necessary for development, not all growth benefits the poor. Charter cities concept by Paul Romer includes exploring strategies to ensure that economic growth is “pro-poor” and that donor organizations and government agencies encourage broad-based, pro-poor growth.


What charter cities can offer? OR Advantages of having charter cities?

Since every charter city has a specific purpose, it will help every areas, based on its competitive strengths to develop its niche segments.

Developing charter cities will be of great use for the society because of the following reasons:

1.      Inclusive Growth of all the areas and it will minimize the gap between urban and rural

2.      Pollution control: It will help developing different areas rather than a highly dense populated area without much sanitation.

3.      Easy management for the government bodies: Since charter cities will help in distributing the population uniformly the population hence it will help the government bodies in easy management.

Concept of Charter Cities - as per Paul Romer

Paul Romer, the renowned growth economist, believes that the world can create dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new high-density "charter cities" to encourage faster growth that is greener too. Each charter city could be a place where millions of poor families could become residents, live, and work under better rules and lift themselves out of poverty. Inspired in part by Hong Kong and China's special economic zones, such cities would give millions of desperately poor people their first formal-sector jobs, in many cases starting out in labor-intensive manufacturing (e.g. assembling garments or electronic devices) and services (e.g. call centers, outsourced business processing, or software quality assurance.)

  

Note that "charter cities" to a large extent can be read as "Special Economic Zone" in India and China context.