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Book Chapter
Cities in Amazonia: People and Nature in Harmony, 165-167.
This book explores the complex and rapidly evolving urbanization of Amazonia, a vast, diverse, and ecologically critical region undergoing a profound transformation. Amazonia is now home to nearly 41 million urban residents across 895 settlements — and yet its urbanization remains poorly understood, underestimated in scale, fragmented in form, and frequently overlooked in policy.
Through multidisciplinary perspectives and contributions from more than 50 experts, this book examines how urban growth intersects with environmental degradation, social inequality, and gaps in governance. Despite these challenges, cities in Amazonia are also places of promising innovations, from tailored healthcare services and environmental monitoring to community-led planning and cross-border cooperation.
Rooted in both local insight and regional coordination frameworks, including the Amazonia Forever program, this work offers a holistic and evidence-based understanding of urbanization in Amazonia. It argues for urgent, coordinated action to guide sustainable, inclusive development — before current urbanization trajectories lead to irreversible ecological and social consequences. The book invites researchers, policymakers and practitioners to recognize Amazonia’s cities not only as sites of vulnerability but as key agents in shaping the region’s — and the planet’s — future.
Chapter four highlights successful practices and innovative approaches that address this region’s urban challenges. Some focus on people, improving healthcare, and mapping needs for riverine communities. Others emphasize environmental care, with cities leading sustainability efforts, nature-based solutions, partnerships and ecosystem restoration to boost resilience. It also stresses the importance of increasing prosperity by finding opportunities even under difficult, cross-border conditions
Keywords: urbanization, cities, urban areas, sustainability, climate, productivity, well-being, infrastructure, Amazonia, urban development
JEL Codes: R11; R12; O18; R58; J24; R42; Q54; Z13
Working Papers
Saudi Arabia has witnessed a paradox where high demand for labor did not translate into high labor force participation for Saudi women. Despite possessing higher educational attainment than men, Saudi women historically faced lower participation rates, higher unemployment, and concentration in lower-paying sectors. This paper examines the paradoxical surge in Saudi women’s employment during a period of economic weakness following the 2014 oil price shock and 2020 pandemic. The study documents unprecedented employment gains driven primarily by new labor market entrants, particularly women with high school education or less, who diversified beyond traditional education and health sectors into retail, construction, manufacturing, and food services. Through empirical analysis of policy reforms implemented between 2016-2022, the paper identifies three key drivers of Saudi women’s employment gains: the removal of legal and social barriers (including workspace requirements and driving restrictions), wage subsidies during COVID-19, and increases in the Nitaqat de facto minimum wage for Saudi workers. While these gains represent historic progress, the analysis reveals concerning trends, including a widening gender wage gap and questions regarding the sustainability of subsidy-dependent employment growth. The paper highlights the need to balance short-term policy interventions to increase women’s entry into the workforce with long-term diversification efforts that align women’s skills and wage expectations with market demands to ensure sustainable and equitable employment outcomes.
Web Articles
Despite an abundance of valuable raw materials and breathtaking natural beauty, the western US state of Wyoming lags its neighbours in terms of economic performance. This is largely due to a lack of substantial urban centres, driven in part by excessively restrictive regulations on housing.
Past Event
March 27 — 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
The Growth Lab’s “Development Talks” is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics working on economic growth and development in countries, regions, states and cities in the US and […]
Working Papers
Technological advances have increased the general tradability of services, leading international trade in services to outpace trade in goods, especially after the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Services once considered less tradable due to the necessity of physical proximity between consumer and provider are now increasingly digitized and delivered remotely. Cross-border services now represent 79% of all internationally traded services, and digitally deliverable activities like engineering, accounting, database and other information services are experiencing yearly U.S. imports growth rates over 15%. This report analyzes how Mexico has been capitalizing on some of these trends over the past five years using the most granular data available. Then, we analyze opportunities from the perspective of Hermosillo.
Hermosillo is poised to benefit from this global expansion due to its comparative advantages and existing productive capabilities in potentially tradeable services. We estimate the revealed comparative advantage of Hermosillo in each tradeable service category and find that the city is better positioned than similarly rich and complex cities in Mexico to take advantage of several of these opportunities. This is because Hermosillo is currently intensive in these opportunities, and also because Hermosillo has other industries that are similar to the opportunities in terms of their occupational structure (which could potentially supply additional labor in case tradeable service industries were to expand rapidly). Moreover, Hermosillo’s wage differentials compared to the U.S. are significant for most industries and occupations, including all tradable service industries and teleworkable occupations. This provides a cost advantage for foreign firms seeking to outsource part of their operations. Hermosillo also boasts a well-educated workforce with high levels of schooling and a strong emphasis on STEM fields, positioning it well to meet a potential expansion in educated labor demand.
Some tradable services represent bigger opportunities for Hermosillo, but the city will need to develop new capabilities in cross-border service provision in order to take advantage of them. In particular, engineering services, database and other information services, business and management consulting, research and development, education, and accounting services require attention and further research to inform effective strategies. To realize these opportunities, local firms may need to overcome sector-specific challenges related to internationalization. Policymakers can play a pivotal role by fostering strategic partnerships, attracting multinational service providers to bring in knowhow, and creating supportive enabling environments for teleworking and digital service provision.
Working Papers
Hermosillo se está quedando atrás en materia de crecimiento económico y diversificación productiva. Históricamente la ciudad se ha beneficiado de una fuerte presencia manufacturera, liderada por Ford, y un capital humano de alta calidad; sin embargo, se quedó rezagada con respecto a ciudades comparativas en términos de creación de empleo y diversificación económica entre 2010-2020. Este bajo desempeño se deriva principalmente de un menor crecimiento y diversificación de la industria manufacturera en comparación con ciudades mexicanas más dinámicas. Es importante destacar que Hermosillo mantiene importantes ventajas competitivas, sobre todo en infraestructura logística, costos de y acceso a electricidad, y calidad del capital humano. Pero también enfrenta retos en materia de sustentabilidad del agua, de asequibilidad y de oferta de vivienda, así como de movilidad urbana. Hermosillo debe encontrar una combinación de políticas públicas que le permitan capitalizar en sus ventajas, así como solucionar las potenciales restricciones al crecimiento que va a enfrentar.
Hermosillo tiene claras oportunidades para acelerar su crecimiento económico. Hay tres cambios importantes en el contexto global que Hermosillo puede aprovechar: la transición energética, la relocalización de las cadenas de suministro y el boom del comercio internacional de servicios digitales. Estas tres tendencias se alinean particularmente con algunas de las ventajas competitivas existentes de Hermosillo. La ubicación estratégica de la ciudad cerca del mercado estadounidense, la mano de obra calificada, sus instituciones educativas y los abundantes recursos solares la ponen en buena posición para capitalizar estos cambios a través de acciones de política pública.
Las oportunidades económicas de Hermosillo podrían desbloquearse si la ciudad resuelve estratégicamente sus principales limitaciones. La gestión sostenible del agua y la mejora de su planificación urbana, particularmente en vivienda y transporte público, son las restricciones más urgentes que, una vez atendidas, permitirían a la ciudad crecer a un ritmo más cercano a su potencial. El incremento de la oferta vivienda y el desarrollo de un sistema de transporte público eficiente reduciría los costos de vida y los costos laborales para las empresas, haciendo a Hermosillo más atractiva para trabajadores e inversionistas. A su vez, es necesario establecer un modelo sostenible de gestión del agua que permita garantizar el crecimiento futuro de la ciudad. La resolución de estas limitaciones es esencial para posicionar a Hermosillo como un centro importante para las cadenas de suministro de manufactura avanzada, de la industria verde y de servicios digitales en el norte de México. La ciudad tiene muchos elementos a su favor para prosperar, pero requiere abordar estas limitaciones de manera coordinada para desbloquear su próxima fase de crecimiento económico.
Working Papers
This is one of four Growth Lab reports that aim to identify promising growth opportunities for Hermosillo. The focus of this report is nearshoring. Nearshoring is not a new phenomenon in Mexico, but recent changes in U.S. policy aimed to incentivize nearshoring of critical industries. This report first explores current realities of nearshoring and friendshoring in recent years, based on global trade and the distance which U.S. imports are traveling, and Mexico’s dynamics in global trade and investment in comparison to other countries. The report then evaluates the economic growth opportunities that nearshoring could incentivize in Hermosillo. We analyze the nearshoring opportunity set for Hermosillo across products and industries and if they are based on the city’s productive capabilities.
This report confirms that nearshoring and friendshoring have been taking place in global trade and investment in response to U.S. policy between 2017 and 2023. Mexico has made gains in its exports to the U.S. market in recent years as exports from China have lost ground, but it is not the only country doing so. A few countries like Vietnam benefited even more, despite being geographically far from the U.S. market. Mexico is seeing growth in products it has traditionally exported, but it is not seeing much diversification into products that the U.S. has deemed critical. Nor is Mexico seeing promising investment trends that would signal an acceleration of growth in these opportunities. Given Hermosillo’s position as a large city that is near the U.S. market, and to a growing market in Arizona in particular, the process of nearshoring represents a potentially transformational chance to jumpstart growth in attractive industries to better position the local economy for the future.
This report provides analysis to begin to identify the most promising nearshoring opportunities for Hermosillo, but local action is needed to build on these initial observations. We identify products and industries that are attractive opportunities for nearshoring in Hermosillo and we evaluate which industries are most consistent with Hermosillo’s existing industry structure and underlying productive capabilities. Promising opportunities stand out in industries related to medical equipment, electronics, machinery, and plastics and the latter sections of this report explore these opportunities in some detail, both quantitatively and more qualitatively. Local strategies to capitalize on these opportunities will vary in design and local actors should weigh the criteria provided and other considerations when deciding which industries are the highest priority for targeted investment promotion and other action steps. One exception, however, is in the value chain for semiconductors, where the emerging opportunity to supply and complement the value chain that is forming in Arizona is too large to pass up. Semiconductors represent an essential area that policymakers and the business community in Hermosillo should embrace, along with a set of additional promising nearshoring opportunities.
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Europe