Executive Summary

Chicago rebounded from four decades of population loss in the 1990s, and Census 2000 provides a snapshot of that recovery.

Chicago's rebound derives in large part from significant immigration flows, which have made the city one of the nation's most racially and ethnically diverse. Immigrants from Mexico now account for nearly half the city's foreign-born population, for example, yet Chicago also remains one of the foremost U.S. gateways for workers and families from Eastern Europe. Such inflows have made Chicago more youthful, and they are responsible for the residential and commercial revitalization of many of the city's neighborhoods. However, most new foreign-born residents are settling in the suburbs rather than the city, as they are in a number of other U.S. metropolitan areas.

Chicago made progress on income and poverty during the last decade, and all racial/ethnic groups experienced gains in homeownership. Yet in many respects the city still exemplifies our nation's residential and economic separation by race. Blacks, Hispanics, and whites live in largely segregated neighborhoods. Annual household incomes for blacks trail those for whites by more than $20,000. And families with children face particular challenges—more than a third live below or near the poverty line, and more than one in five Chicago children live in a family with no adult workers. In the time since Census 2000 was conducted, moreover, unemployment in the city has risen, and economic differences by race and class are likely magnified today.

Along these lines and others, then, Chicago in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 concludes that:

• Chicago's population "rebounded" during the 1990s, but the region's outer suburbs are booming. Census 2000 reports the story: For the first decade since the 1950s, the City of Chicago saw its population increase, by 112,000 residents. Neighborhoods on the city's southwest and northwest sides grew rapidly with the addition of immigrant populations. At the same time, though, Chicago's suburbs added roughly seven residents for every net new resident in the city. Most of the growth was in the outer suburbs; wide areas of suburban Cook County and inner DuPage County lost population over the decade. As a result, the economic center of the region is shifting outward. Fewer than half of the region's workers commute to the city for their jobs, and a growing number of Chicago residents drive alone to work in the suburbs.

• The city owes much of its population growth and unrivaled diversity to new arrivals from abroad. While most Midwestern cities are home to a predominantly black/white population, Chicago boasts high racial and ethnic diversity. Whites, blacks, and Hispanics each make up at least a quarter of the city's population. This unique mix reflects Chicago's continued status as one of the nation's important immigrant gateways. The city added 160,000 new residents from abroad in the 1990s. Nearly half came from Mexico, and significant numbers also came from Eastern Europe and Asia. This diversity is not uniformly dispersed, however. Chicago's blacks and Hispanics, and blacks and whites, often live in very separate sections of the city.

• The city's residents are relatively young, but most have lived in Chicago for several years. Baby Boomers aged 35 to 54 are by far the nation's largest age cohorts, but people in their late 20s represent Chicago's largest age group. But Chicago is not a transient place. The city's youth belies the fact that nearly 85 percent of its residents have lived there for more than five years, one of the highest rates among the Living Cities. Despite a slight decline in the number of married couples with children living in the city during the 1990s, Chicago still has a higher share of these "nuclear" families than most other large cities. Whether these families remain in the city will influence Chicago's population trajectory in the current decade.

• Chicago's families made broad economic gains in the 1990s, though some residents—African Americans, in particular—still face hardships. Unlike many other U.S. cities in the 1990s, Chicago managed to retain its middle class, and the ranks of lower-income households declined modestly. Median household income in Chicago grew at a rate twice the national average. Poverty, especially for children, declined. Yet Chicago's black community faces continued economic challenges. Median household income for blacks was just $29,000 in 2000, versus $37,000 for Hispanics and $49,000 for whites. Chicago has the sixth highest black poverty rate among the 23 Living Cities. The ranks of the "working poor"—families with incomes below 150 percent of poverty—are significant. Behind these economic differences lies a racial education gap; only 13 percent of black adults in Chicago hold bachelor's degrees, compared to 42 percent of whites.

• Chicago maintains a unique mix of homeowners and renters. Forty-four percent of households in Chicago own their own homes, a rate lower than that for most large cities. Differences in homeownership between minorities and whites, however, are less stark here than in many other cities. Nearly 40 percent of racial and ethnic minority households are homeowners, and all groups—especially Hispanics—made significant gains in the 1990s. Rents rose during the decade, and median prices are similar to those in growing cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Portland. But because Chicago's households tend to be larger, and more likely to rent, cost burdens remain a significant issue in Chicago. To be precise, roughly 225,000 households in Chicago devote at least 30 percent of their incomes to rent.

By presenting the indicators on the following pages, Chicago in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 seeks to give readers a better sense of where Chicago and its residents stand in relation to their peers, and how the 1990s shaped the city, its neighborhoods, and the entire Chicago region. Living Cities and the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy hope that this information will prompt a fruitful dialogue among city and community leaders about the direction Chicago should take in the coming decade.

Chicago Data Book Series 1
Chicago Data Book Series 2

There's been a lot of talk of Pittsburgh's "new economy" as a key reason for the city's star turn as host of this week's G-20 summit, but little has been said about the region's "next economy" -- what comes after the current slump.

It's beginning to be created under our noses.

Though seemingly abstract, the G-20's big-picture decisions -- on dialing down the extraordinary fiscal and monetary steps taken in the past year, building a new regulatory architecture for global finance, and starting the process towards a more balanced global economy and sustainable future -- have big implications for metropolitan areas.

Pittsburgh's stake in the G-20 deliberations goes beyond filling up local hotels and restaurants or hiring additional police -- and even beyond showcasing the region's resilience to the recession.

The fact is that Pittsburgh already is a global metropolis, with deep and growing ties to many of the G-20 countries because of its position as a supplier to the global steel industry (and still a maker of some types of steel), its burgeoning involvement in clean-energy sectors and its established position as a global center of education and health care.

Bayer, the German pharmaceutical conglomerate, has its U.S. headquarters in Pittsburgh, employing some 2,700 workers, including 1,200 at local medical-device manufacturer Medrad. Gamesa, the Spanish wind-energy giant, opened its first North American plant in Ebensburg, about 75 miles east of Pittsburgh. All told, more than 300 international firms from 26 different countries operate in the region, employing tens of thousands of people.

Pittsburgh's goods and services exports make up more than 14 percent of the region's gross metropolitan product, with the lion's share of goods headed to Canada, China, Japan and major economies in Europe -- all G-20 partners.

Given Pittsburgh's global status, the G-20 discussions have substantial implications for the future of the region's $100 billion economy.

The big question, at this summit and others in the future, is how to rebalance the global economy. The Great Recession followed a period of excessive consumption in the United States as Americans spent more on homes and consumer goods than they produced.

The fix is easy to state, but difficult to engineer. As Larry Summers, the head of the White House National Economic Council, said recently, "The rebuilt American economy must be more export-oriented and less consumption-oriented."

This rebalancing will require major and sustained action on currency values and trade policy in the United States as well as in large export economies like China, Germany and Japan (which will need to consume more). As this occurs, U.S. metro areas like Pittsburgh could benefit substantially given their unique assets and special niches.

While this won't quite be a 21st-century version of the equation "what Pittsburgh makes, the world takes," the combination of a more export-oriented trade policy and higher costs for carbon emissions (also to be discussed at the G-20 summit) present the region's economy with both opportunities and threats.

On the plus side, Pittsburgh could export more to the rest of the world and its steel-industry suppliers could benefit from increased exports by U.S. steelmakers. Higher prices for gasoline and jet fuel could mean that manufacturers and retailers in the United States would move away from far-flung networks of global suppliers and rely more on U.S. companies.

There is a potential downside for Pittsburgh, as well: for instance, as steelmakers in Germany and other countries export less and face higher costs of using U.S.-based suppliers, they might rely less on machinery and repair services from Pittsburgh.

To help ensure that the benefits of a rebalanced U.S. economy and a new climate regime outweigh the costs to the Pittsburgh area, local corporate, labor, political, university and civic leaders need a sharp regional business plan to guide the economic policies and innovation investments that they and the federal and state governments make in the Pittsburgh area.

Pittsburgh will have to continue to reclaim polluted industrial "brown fields" for post-industrial use -- an example for cities around the country and world.

Pittsburgh also will need to figure out how to draw more international traffic to its metropolitan airport, which currently offers only one direct flight to Europe.

The upshot: It is time for U.S. metropolitan regions to become more globally fluent and for national leaders to connect their big-picture policies to the fortunes of the urban areas that drive their economies. Only in this way can the United States, and Pittsburgh, move to the next stage of their economic evolution.

Executive Summary

Census 2000 underscores the many social, demographic, and economic challenges facing the City of Cleveland and its residents.

Between 1980 and 2000, Cleveland lost fully one-sixth of its population. Like other older cities in the nation's "Rust Belt," Cleveland's metropolitan area also lost residents over this period, although it managed to grow modestly in the 1990s.

What little growth there was in the region occurred far from the core. The city's downtown area grew, but nearly every other neighborhood in the city and its close-in suburbs lost residents. To be sure, Cleveland actually gained modest numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian residents in the last decade. But at the same time it lost almost three times as many white residents. As a result, the number of married couples living in Cleveland dwindled, while households not traditionally associated with the suburbs—single persons and single parents—proliferated there. A similar evacuation of jobs has occurred, and today fewer than one-third of the region's workers are employed in the City of Cleveland.

The demographic and economic impacts of decentralization in the Cleveland metro area are striking. Segregation levels between blacks and whites, and blacks and Hispanics, remain among the highest in the U.S. Cleveland ranks 96th out of the 100 largest cities in the share of adults who have a bachelor's degree, and the educational attainment of each racial/ethnic group in Cleveland significantly lags that in other cities. Not coincidentally, the city's unemployment rate is the second-highest among large U.S. cities, and median household income is the third-lowest. In the 1990s, income among Cleveland households did rise, but nearly half of all families with children still lived below or near the poverty line in 2000. With such low incomes, many of Cleveland's families fail to benefit from the city's relatively affordable rental and ownership opportunities. In many city neighborhoods today, a lack of market demand leaves senior citizens as the largest group of homeowners.

Along these lines and others, then, Cleveland in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 concludes that:

• The Cleveland metro area continued to decentralize in the 1990s amid slow growth region-wide. Between 1980 and 2000, the City of Cleveland lost 17 percent of its population, although the pace of decline slowed in the last decade. Meanwhile, the region's suburbs grew modestly, but the locus of that growth occurred far from the core. In the 1990s, a few neighborhoods in downtown Cleveland gained residents, but population loss was widespread throughout the remainder of the city and most inner suburbs. The city lost households of all types: The number of married couples living in the city dropped by 16,000, and for every additional single-person household the city gained, the suburbs added more than 40. Today, only one in five residents of the Cleveland region lives in the central city, and less than one-third of the region's workers are employed there.

• Cleveland remains highly segregated and profits from little international immigration. The number of whites living in Cleveland plummeted in the 1990s, and modest gains in black, Hispanic, and Asian populations were not enough to compensate for these losses. The city's foreign-born population grew by a mere 400 persons over the decade, signaling that while modest numbers of immigrants continued to arrive in Cleveland (9,300 in the 1990s), an equivalent number of earlier arrivals left the city for the suburbs or beyond. In addition, the metro area remains highly stratified along racial and ethnic lines, with blacks confined to the city's east side and eastern suburbs, Hispanics clustered on the west side, and whites located in the downtown and southern/western suburbs.

• Cleveland lacks a young, highly-educated population. During the 1990s, the number of 25-to-34 year-olds nationwide declined by 8 percent, due to the aging of the Baby Boom generation. In Cleveland, this age group shrank nearly three times as fast. Consequently, the share of adults with a college degree grew more slowly than elsewhere in the 1990s, and Cleveland now ranks 96th out of the 100 largest cities in college degree attainment. Efforts to retain students attending its own universities may help accelerate growth in educational attainment, but since Cleveland's college-student population is one of the smallest among the Living Cities, strategies to increase educational access for existing residents may be needed. Unlike in many other cities, low educational attainment is not confined to Cleveland's minority groups—whites, blacks, and Hispanics all have below-average rates of college completion.

• Incomes grew in Cleveland during the 1990s, although the city remains home to a primarily low-wage workforce. As in other Midwestern cities, median household income grew at an above-average rate in Cleveland during the 1990s. However, the city's median income still ranks 98th out of the 100 largest cities. Middle-income households declined over the decade, while the ranks of moderate-income "working poor" families grew. In fact, some 62 percent of the city's households made do with incomes below $34,000 in 2000. Families with children were especially likely to earn low wages; nearly half had incomes below or near the federal poverty line.

• Homeownership increased for some groups in Cleveland, but many families face difficulties paying for housing and moving toward homeownership. About half of Cleveland's households own their own homes. That share is typical among the 23 Living Cities, but it remains low for a city with such a large stock of single-family homes. Homeownership rose for the city's Hispanic households, 41 percent of whom now own. But black households in Cleveland did not share in these homeownership gains, and were likely impeded by their low incomes, which trail those for other racial/ethnic groups. Rents in Cleveland increased by almost 10 percent in the 1990s, but remain the lowest among the Living Cities—the median unit rents for only $465. Yet even so, 40,000 Cleveland renters still pay more than 30 percent of income on rent, suggesting that most earn too little to afford even a modestly-priced unit.

By presenting indicators like these on the following pages, Cleveland in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 seeks to give readers a better sense of where Cleveland and its residents stand in relation to their peers, and how the 1990s shaped the cities, their neighborhoods, and the entire Cleveland region. Living Cities and the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy hope that this information will prompt a fruitful dialogue among city and community leaders about the direction Cleveland should take in the coming decade.

Cleveland Data Book Series 1
Cleveland Data Book Series 2

Executive Summary

Census 2000 confirms that despite scant population growth in the 1990s, Kansas City remains at the core of a robust regional economy.

Population in Kansas City has changed little over the last two decades, and the city has dropped from 27th largest in the U.S. to 36th largest. Most neighborhoods in the city and its close-in suburbs failed to grow or actually lost population in the 1990s. Meanwhile, population boomed in the rest of the metro area, growing by a third since 1980. Today, only a quarter of the region's residents resides in Kansas City. Only a doubling of the city's immigrant population in the last decade forestalled greater population decline.

And yet, despite the stagnation of their city's population, residents' economic condition remained healthy. A high proportion of adults in Kansas City work, and employment is diversified among several industries. The city has a strong middle class, with gains in both moderate-income and high-income households in the 1990s. Real median income grew during the decade. Compared to other Living Cities, Kansas City's poverty rates remain low, its homeownership rates remain high, and its rental housing remains affordable. Still, significant income and educational attainment gaps by race and ethnicity point to opportunities to build a stronger minority middle class in Kansas City in the coming decade.

Along these lines and others, then, Kansas City in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 concludes that:

• Kansas City lies at the heart of a rapidly decentralizing region. Kansas City's population grew nominally (1.5 percent) in the 1990s, after declining in the 1980s. The city itself was divided, however, with most neighborhoods in the southern half stagnating or losing population, and most in the northern reaches of the city gaining. Elsewhere in the metro area, population boomed by 16 percent in the 1990s. Outer parts of Johnson County (KS) and Jackson County (MO) grew rapidly, as did population in all suburban counties. Only one in four metropolitan residents lives in Kansas City today.

• The city's population is growing more diverse. Like most Midwestern cities, Kansas City's population remains predominantly white and black. The city lost white population in the 1990s, but gained residents of other races and ethnicities. International immigrants have contributed to the changing profile of the city and region. The number of foreign-born living in Kansas City more than doubled in the 1990s, and more than twice as many settled in the suburbs over the same period. What is more, the city's immigrant population itself is quite diverse; Mexico is the most common country of birth, but half come from countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa.

• Some parts of the urban core are attracting new residents, but others contain aging populations. With a little over 37,000 members, the 25- to 29-year-old population represents Kansas City's largest age group. These younger residents help account for the city's relatively small household size, and the significant degree of household turnover in neighborhoods around the downtown and northern parts of the city. Many neighborhoods in the city and inner suburbs, meanwhile, house significant shares of elderly residents. The growing representation of seniors is also reflected in the city's two largest household categories, childless couples and people living alone. Reversing a decline in the number of younger married-couple families in the city could be critical to maintaining neighborhood vitality and fiscal stability.

• Increasing educational attainment and high levels of work contribute to the economic success of most Kansas City residents. Unlike the trend in many other U.S. cities, Kansas City's income distribution actually "evened out" in the 1990s. Median household income in Kansas City grew at about the national average, and the poverty rate declined. The healthy economic profile of city residents owes to several factors. While unemployment has risen since Census 2000 was conducted, Kansas City's rate remains below the average for large cities. Likewise, high school and college degree attainment among city workers rank above national averages. Workers are also employed in a diverse set of industries throughout the region. Yet racial differences cut against these trends. As elsewhere, blacks and Hispanics in Kansas City significantly lag whites on educational attainment, and those gaps contribute to large disparities in household incomes by race and ethnicity.

• Kansas City is a "homeowner city," but some groups are not sharing in the benefits. Among the 23 Living Cities, Kansas City ranks fifth on its homeownership rate, which rose to 58 percent in 2000. The homeownership gap between whites and minority groups widened in the 1990s, however. The black homeownership rate in Kansas City did not increase at all over the decade, and the rate for Hispanics fell. Rents remain relatively affordable, however, and Kansas City ranks last among the 23 Living Cities in the share of renters who face housing cost burdens. While affordability may dissuade some renters from moving into homeownership, it may also present a chance for the city's families to save for ownership opportunities.

By presenting the indicators on the following pages, Kansas City in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000 is intended to give readers a better sense of where Kansas City and its residents stand in relation to their peers, and how the 1990s shaped the city, its neighborhoods, and the entire Kansas City region. Living Cities and the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy hope that this information will prompt a fruitful dialogue among city and community leaders about the direction Kansas City should take in the coming decade.

Kansas City Data Book Series 1
Kansas City Data Book Series 2

*A slightly modified version of this commentary appeared in The Springfield News-Leader on October 24, 2004.

The Missouri gubernatorial race is going down to the wire, and guess what? Contentious social and moral issues are predominating.

Last week Republican Matt Blunt questioned McCaskill's values, saying his stand against gay marriage matched the values of mainstream Missourians.

For her part, McCaskill, the Democratic state auditor, has parried Blunt on gays, guns, and abortion by insisting that Republicans don't have a lock on values just because Democrats like her don't wear religion on their sleeves.

Look for more sniping on gays, guns, and abortion as the campaigns careen toward election day.

Which would be too bad.

Missouri—and particularly the Springfield region—needs to talk about some other things this fall.

In a major statewide report, "Growth in the Heartland: Challenges and Opportunities for Missouri," after all, we argued that Missouri today faces an outright land-use, environmental, and competitive crisis that has little to do with gay marriage or concealed-carry gun rules.

The crisis is not new—we described it two years ago—but the fact remains that Missouri's chaotic style of low-density development is gobbling up the state's rural heritage, gutting towns and cities, and exacting a heavy toll on Missourians' pocketbooks and quality of life just when the state needs to compete at a higher level on exactly those factors.

Just look around the Springfield area:

Forty-five percent of the region's growth in the 1990s took place in the unincorporated "open country," the exurban places often least equipped to manage it.

Strip malls and home sites are chewing up the region's beautiful Ozarks scenery.

And all the while newcomers are flocking to small outlying towns like Willard, Republic, Clever, Niza, and Ozark—all of which hit "hypergrowth" in the 1990s and struggle to keep up.

As to the results, they have been predictably mixed: New jobs and vitality have been accompanied by the water-quality problems that have fouled Lake Taneycomo and Table Rock Lake. Taxes are increasing as local governments strain to provide the necessary roads, services, or sewer hook-ups. And with more sprawl coming, more traffic and mini-malls could soon undercut the region's reputation as the quaint heartland of rural America.

Why do these trends matter? For some the concern is cultural. They fear the state is losing its rural heritage. For others the threat is environmental. They are disturbed by the degradation of the Ozark lakes and other nearby natural areas.

However, for us the concern is mostly economic: By remaining virtually laissez faire on growth and development issues, we fear the Show Me State is undercutting its ability to parlay its very real assets into a broader prosperity.

Spread-out development patterns, for example, raise costs in the state for businesses and individual taxpayers. That's because highly dispersed development often increases the capital and operations costs of roads, sewer lines, schools, and police or fire services.

Similarly, Missouri's dispersed development adds to the size of the state's enormous—and crumbling—highway system. Missouri taxpayers consequently struggle with a maintenance backlog that will require half a billion dollars a year over the next 10 years—some $200 million more than current finding will provide.

And likewise, we suspect that the state's spread-out, low-quality development diminishes Missouri's appeal to highly educated workers—that critical factor if the state is going to appeal to entrepreneurs, well-educated retirees, and leading-edge techies and scientists.

This is especially important in the Springfield region, where the recent boom has clearly been built on the appeal of the region's improving downtown and cultural facilities, high quality of life, and stunning natural beauty.

And so we say it again—Missouri and the gubernatorial candidates need to face up to some tough realities this fall:

• Missouri can't afford to keep sprawling, even with tax revenues stronger this year. So Blunt and McCaskill need to tell Missourians how they will foster more efficient, less chaotic growth that doesn't break the bank

Missouri, in sum, stands at a crossroads.

Other heartland states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, now recognize the links between educated workers, strong urban and rural centers, and economic competitiveness—and are taking action. Missouri needs to face up to the challenge.

Similarly, other states are moving to reap the fiscal benefits of nudging development into more sensible patterns, so Missouri should think about that too.

As to the agitations of wedge issues like abortion and concealed weapons or gay marriage, Missourians should take them in stride. "Values" are important, sure, but at the same time, there's a land-use and competitive crisis underway in Missouri that both the candidates and voters ignore at their peril this election.

On Monday, July 18, 2016, the world celebrated Nelson Mandela International Day, a day recognizing the former president of South Africa’s commitment to fostering peace and freedom. Every year the Nelson Mandela Foundation hosts a lecture, inviting prominent individuals to discuss significant social issues affecting the African continent. For this year’s lecture, Bill Gates was selected to speak on the theme of “Living Together” in front of a packed stadium in Pretoria. Gates focused on a topic Mandela returned to repeatedly throughout his life—the power of the youth. In the words of Gates, “…young people are better than old at driving innovation because they are not locked in by the limits of the past… we must clear away the obstacles standing in young people’s way so that they can seize all of their potential.”

Unfortunately, South Africa, the second-largest economy on the continent, has the highest youth unemployment rate at 54 percent, as seen in the figure below. Surprisingly, according to the figure the highest rates of youth unemployment lie in the upper-middle-income countries as classified by GNI per capita. Additionally, these unemployment rates might be depressed due to the fact that unemployment refers to people looking for jobs, and many of Africa’s youth are forced into the informal sector after giving up on their search for employment.

Although youth unemployment in Africa is often seen as a growing challenge, a number of experts interpret the large youth population as an opportunity, as long as the youth have access to the economic opportunities through which they can channel their energy into progress. As Africa’s youth is predicted to grow exponentially, achieving broad-based economic growth and development will rely on breaking down the barriers to economic opportunity, by investing in human capital (through education) and in improving business environments. 

Figure 2.3. Youth unemployment will continue to be a growing challenge in 2016

Interestingly, GDP and income classification have little correlation with youth unemployment rates. For example, South Africa, which has the second-largest economy on the continent and is considered an upper-middle-income country based on its GNI per capita, has the highest youth unemployment rate at nearly 54 percent. Meanwhile, the Liberian economy, which is nearly 200 times smaller than South Africa’s, has a youth unemployment rate 10 times smaller. Youth unemployment is measured as the share of the labor force (ages 15-24) without work but available for and seeking employment. Estimates may be low in some low-income countries like Liberia because many young people cannot afford not to work to seek employment and as a result, end up in low-paying jobs.

Source: Youth unemployment figures from World Development Indicators and GDP data from the World Bank databank.

See the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s Foresight Africa 2016 report, from which the figure below comes, for more highlights on the growing challenge of youth unemployment in Africa. In addition, earlier this month the Brookings Institution hosted an Africa Policy Dialogue on the Hill on jobs in Africa, alluding to the shortcomings of the educational systems and the importance of infrastructure and electricity to support business and attract investment. For a summary of the conversation, see here.

Tor Syvrud contributed to this post.

On Tuesday, May 24, Nigerian Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele announced that the country will adopt a more flexible foreign exchange rate system in the near future. This move signals a major policy shift by Emefiele and President Muhammadu Buhari, who had until this point opposed calls to let the naira weaken. Many international oil-related currencies have depreciated against the dollar as oil prices began their decline in 2014. Nigeria, however, has held the naira at a peg of 197-199 per U.S. dollar since March 2015, depleting foreign reserves and deterring investors, who remain concerned about the repercussions of a potential naira devaluation. Following the announcement, Nigerian stocks jumped to a five-month high and bond prices rose in anticipation that a new flexible exchange rate regime would increase the supply of dollars and help attract foreign investors.

For now it remains unclear exactly what a more flexible system will entail for Nigeria, however, some experts suggest that the Central Bank may introduce a dual-rate system, which allows select importers in strategic industries to access foreign currency at the current fixed rate, while more generally foreign currency will be available at a weaker, market-related level. This new regime raises a number of questions, including how it will be governed and who will have access to foreign currency (and at what rate). On Wednesday, Nigeria’s parliament requested a briefing soon from Emefiele and Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun to provide additional clarity on the new system, although the date for such a meeting has not yet been set.

Earlier this month, Kenya announced plans to close the Dadaab refugee camp, located in northeast Kenya, amid security concerns. The move to close the camp has been widely criticized by international actors. United States State Department Press Relations Director Elizabeth Trudeau urged Kenya to “uphold its international obligations and not forcibly repatriate refugees.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that the closure of the refugee camp would have “devastating consequences.” Despite these concerns, this week, at the World Humanitarian Summit, Kenya stated that it will not go back on its decision and confirmed the closure of the refugee camps within a six-month period.

The camp houses 330,000 refugees, a majority of whom fled from conflict in their home country of Somalia. Kenya insists that the camp poses a threat to its national security, as it believes the camp is used to host and train extremists from Somalia’s Islamist group al-Shabab. Kenya also argued that the developed world, notably the United Kingdom, should host its fair share of African refugees. This is not the first time Kenya has threatened to close the refugee camp. After the Garissa University attacks last April, Kenya voiced its decision to close the refugee camps, although it did not follow through with the plan.

From May 23-27, Lusaka, Zambia hosted 5,000 delegates and participants for the 2016 Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB), with the theme, “Energy and Climate Change.” Held in the wake of December’s COP21 climate agreement and in line with Sustainable Development Goals 7 (ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all) and 13 (take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts), the theme was timely and, as many speakers emphasized, urgent. Around 645 million people in Africa have no access to electricity, and only 16 percent are connected to an energy source. To that end, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina outlined the bank’s ambitious aim: “Our goal is clear: universal access to energy for Africa within 10 years; Expand grid power by 160 gigawatts; Connect 130 million persons to grid power; Connect 75 million persons to off grid systems; And provide access to 150 million households to clean cooking energy."

As part of a push to transform Africa’s energy needs and uses, Rwandan President Paul Kagame joined Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on a panel to support the AfDB’s “New Deal on Energy” that aims to deliver electricity to all Africans by 2025. Kenyatta specifically touted the potential of geothermal energy sources. Now, 40 percent of Kenya's power needs come from geothermal energy sources, he said, but there is still room for improvement—private businesses, which make up 30 percent of Kenya’s on-grid energy needs, have not made the switch yet.

As part of the meetings, the AfDB, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) also launched their annual African Economic Outlook, with the theme “Sustainable Cities and Structural Transformation.” In general, the report’s authors predict that the continent will maintain an average growth of 3.7 percent in 2016 before increasing to 4.5 percent in 2017, assuming commodity prices recover and the global economy improves.  However, the focus was on this year’s theme: urbanization. The authors provide an overview of urbanization trends and highlight that successful urban planning can discourage pollution and waste, slow climate change, support better social safety nets, enhance service delivery, and attract investment, among other benefits.

For more on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, see Chapter 4 of Foresight Africa 2016: Capitalizing on Urbanization: The Importance of Planning, Infrastructure, and Finance for Africa’s Growing Cities.

The consequences of the global financial crisis still ripple through the international system after the initial surge in global economic cooperation and governance immediately following the crisis. The ultimate effects have been that, while some elements of the international system of institutions have gotten stronger, the system as a whole is now seen as weaker, fractured, and driven more by geopolitical conflict than by institutional norms and frameworks.

The issue is how to move the global policy agenda forward in such a way that substantive progress induces institutional strengthening. The next two years offer new opportunities for creating a positive symbiosis between policy advance and systemic improvements.

I. The U.N. global agenda

The United Nations global agenda has three tracks that relate to each other and provide opportunities to pull the world together around an integrated, comprehensive strategic vision for the world’s people and strengthen the international system in the process.

The first track is the elaboration of a sustainable development agenda for each and all countries, not just developing countries, but advanced industrial economies and emerging market countries too. This effort is already well underway and will result in a summit of global leaders in September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. This process entails a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 to be developed and affirmed by and for all countries, and which succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate in 2015 and applied only to developing countries. This post-2015 goal-setting process will provide the substantive, cross-cutting, multidimensional agenda for the next 15 years. It is simultaneously a social, economic, and environmental agenda that relates goals to each other in functional terms requiring coordination among public and private sectors, ministries, civil society groups, and international institutions.

The second track is the financing for development (FFD) track, which goes well beyond reliance conceptually and practically on foreign aid or official development assistance as in the past. FFD for the SDGs includes a focus, first and foremost, on domestic sources of finance beyond government revenues. FFD is engaged in searches for innovative sources of finance, private sector mobilization of resources, creative market incentives and mechanisms, initiatives by civil society organizations, and development of entrepreneurial and small- and medium-size business opportunities that address global issues. This effort resulted in a global leaders meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July of 2015 that reached agreement on the major thrusts for mobilizing resources for the post-2015 agenda (Kharas and MacArthur (2014)).

The third track is the global climate change negotiations currently under way to achieve a global agreement on the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), which will result in a global summit in Paris in December of 2015. While these detailed negotiations on climate are a separate track, it is clear that the sustainable human development trajectories being put forward in the post-2015 agenda impact and are crucially affected by the efficacy of the climate change arrangements worked out in the UNFCCC agreements in 2015.

Whereas these three tracks operationally are going forward separately, the substantive aspects of each track affect and are affected by the content of the other two. The ultimate convergence of these three streams of activities and actions will have to occur in the beginning of 2016 at the global, regional, and national levels if the implementation phase is to be successful. A business-as-usual approach will not be satisfactory if at the global level, for example, the international institutions are unable to coordinate their work, or if at the national level ministries remain within their “silos” of sectoral expertise and responsibility.

Synergies exist between goal areas that cannot be realized without coordination across sectors and institutions, impacting goal achievement (see OECD 2014 PCD). A systemic approach is necessary at all levels to address the global challenges identified in the post-2015 agenda.

II. The G-20 summits for 2015 and 2016

A major opportunity presents itself in terms of providing impetus, momentum, and leadership for these large work streams and their convergence by linking the G-20 presidency of Turkey for 2015 with the G-20 leadership of China in 2016. Turkey and China working together in tandem within the G-20 Troika over the next two years to explain, support, and sustain the mobilization effort toward the post-2015 agenda could be a major contribution to it but also strengthen the global system of international institutions in the process. For the Turkish G-20 summit, scheduled to take place in November 2015 in Antalya, between UNGA in New York in September and the UNFCCC in Paris in December, Turkey could use part of its G-20 summit to have the leaders of the world’s largest advanced and emerging market economies explain to the world the nature, importance, and relevance of the SDGs to domestic concerns and priorities of ordinary people.

A weakness of G-20 summits thus far has been that G-20 leaders have become trapped by finance ministers’ issues and discourse and have failed to connect with their publics on larger issues of direct concern to people everywhere. The post-2015 agenda provides an opportunity for G-20 leaders to lead their people in understanding how global efforts relate to domestic conditions and why dealing only domestically with issues will not suffice to advance the human agenda where the global interface is extremely palpable. G-20 leaders, under Turkey’s leadership, could step out beyond the technical jargon of finance ministries and central banks, as important as those issues continue to be, and directly address the longer-term, fundamental conditions that affect the lives and livelihoods of all people. They would thereby strengthen their own leadership profile internally by explaining the global dimensions of domestic issues as means of creating public support for the sustainability issues in the post-2015 agenda.

Past experience with the International Development Goals (IDGs) of the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals since the early 2000s  demonstrates that linking the goal-setting effort to the implementation phase yields powerful results by capturing the political momentum of the goal setting phase and carrying that energy forward directly into implementation efforts. If Turkey and China were to work together in 2015 and 2016, thereby bridging the goal-setting year in 2015 to the beginning of the implementation phase in 2016, they could provide the catalytic leadership and continuity that would maximize the staying power of the momentum from one phase to the next.

China, for its G-20 summit preparations in 2016, could focus on developing a road map, in concert with the other countries and international organizations and especially with the United Nations, that would explicitly keep alive the activities, groups, and initiatives manifested in the goal-setting phase into the next phase of implementation beginning in 2016. These combined efforts by Turkey and China could jump-start societies focusing on accelerating efforts to transform their societies by mobilizing policies and resources for highly related goal areas of direct benefit to their people.

The immediate effects of coordinated sequential efforts by Turkey and China in their respective G-20 years to advance the post-2015 agenda would be to strengthen the relationship between the G-20 and the United Nations on the agenda itself and to strengthen the G-20 summits by having leaders lead on issues of central concern to their people, strengthening the G-20 as a leadership forum in the process. For these results to occur, Turkey and China would need to begin to work together now to develop concordance in their individual efforts and initiate activities that would benefit greatly by beginning now and running through 2016 and beyond.

Accelerating implementation: Several initiatives could be undertaken now that would set up the dynamics for accelerated implementation in 2016 and beyond.

• National strategies for achieving the SDGs: Encourage countries to adapt and adopt the SDGs to their respective priorities and social, political, and cultural contexts through deliberate decision processes and wide societal engagement.
• The role of parliaments: Bring parliamentarians and parliaments into the goal-setting process so that they are aware of the legislative, regulatory, and budgetary implications of the post-2015 agenda.
• The role of domestic ministries: Bring finance ministers and other domestic ministries and agencies together with foreign ministers in the goal-setting year to set in motion mutually involved functional relationships and operational guidelines to enhance implementation across sectors.
• The G-20 as broker and mobilizer: The G-20 could act as a broker between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and regional development banks and the U.N. and its agencies to assure not just coordination but more intensive interactions that would be designed to accelerate the mobilization of resources and as well as policies and private sector activities that would enhance implementation.
• The policy role of the OECD: The strong, substantive role of the OECD in G-20 summits on issues high on the G-20 agenda—such as structural reform, tax base erosion, development, environment, energy, employment, and social issues—position the OECD to continue to provide important substantive inputs to the G-20 in 2015 and 2016. The OECD would enhance the relationship of its 34 members with G-20 emerging market economies by OECD involvement in both the G-20 and the U.N. post-2015 agenda.
• Financial stability and the SDGs: Encouraged by the G-20 summits, the IMF, the Financial Stability Board, and the OECD could work together to integrate the financial regulatory reform agenda into the post-2015 U.N. process by clarifying the linkages between financial stability, regulatory reform, and incentives for long-term private investment in infrastructure (crucial to all the SDGs) and in productive activities which generate greater employment and growth.
• Multi-stakeholder participation in implementation: G-20 summits can facilitate multi-stakeholder processes for engaging civil society, labor, private sector, religious, academic, and expert communities not only in the G-20 summits, as is the current practice, but also in the post-2015 agenda and its implementation, connecting societal leaders with the SDG agenda.

III. The overarching importance of a single global agenda

If these efforts to bring together a wide cross-section of domestic and international agencies, public and private sector leaders, stakeholders, and civil society actors are to translate into actions that are meaningful to the lives and livelihoods of people, a single set of goals is essential. The lesson learned from the IDG-MDG experience was that the tendency to differentiate roles by identifying different institutions with different sets of goals was real. The United Nations had inadvertently put forward the Millennium Declaration at the September 2000 U.N. General Assembly that had “millennium targets” which were similar but not identical to the International Development Goals (IDGs). The IDGs had been developed in the mid-1990s by OECD development ministers and subsequently were endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF, the U.N. and the OECD. In fact, in 2000, for the first time ever, the heads of those four institutions signed, and the institutions themselves published, a joint report, A Better World For All: Progress towards the International Development Goals.

Despite the appearance of unity and in part because there was a lack of concordance between the Millennium Declaration Targets (MDTs) and the IDGs, there was a moment in March 2001 when it looked like there might be a decisive divergence between the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions, with the U.N. taking the lead on the MDTs and the World Bank and IMF taking the lead on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process (PRSPs), leaving the IDGs marginalized altogether. This potential division of labor was thwarted by a decision to reconcile the differences between the MDTs and the IDGs by forging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which embodied the principal elements of both. The MDGs surfaced and were endorsed by the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development in March of 2002, keeping the major global institutions on the same page with bilateral donors and the same path moving toward achieving the MDGs in 2015.

Most people who know about the MDGs think their origins began at the U.N. in the year 2000. It is an often overlooked fact that the MDGs only came forward in 2002 to bridge the potential divide between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. If that divide had occurred, it would have been disastrous from a goal setting-goal implementation point-of-view. This history is quite important to bring forward into public light now because it illustrates divisive dangers that currently lurk under the surface threatening unity if not squarely addressed.

From the perspective of prioritizing implementation, the truth is that multiple sets of goals blur the strategic vision, fail to communicate direction, weaken effective leadership, and encourage special pleading for differentiated interests instead focusing on the common, public interest. The U.N. has the lead role in global goal setting and has strengthened its own role in the global system in recent years. However, looking forward now to the SDG implementation phase, a danger might be that the Post-2015 agenda could be seen as the creature and captive of the United Nations, whereas it must be fully endorsed and internalized within the global system of international institutions as a whole. For that to happen, it would be necessary to move now, during the goal-setting year, to include all the relevant international and domestic actors that are crucial to the implementation phase of the post-2015 agenda.

The implications of including the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summits in 2015 and 2016:

• It would make clear to relevant publics and actors that this set of global goals is universal, applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries; it is not a “development agenda” but a “sustainability agenda,” which is broader, more strategic, and higher on the policy agenda of most countries.
• It would make clear the inextricable dynamics between domestic priorities and global goals; the SDGs are not foreign policy objectives or aid targets for development; they are domestic priorities affected by global impacts and generating global spillovers that need to be managed, not neglected.
• It would make the incorporation of finance ministers and domestic ministers with foreign ministers, along with international institutions, an imperative, rather than a utopian, ideal.
• It would make obvious the need to have a wide range of international institutions dealing with health, labor, education, women, climate, and the environment on the same page with the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions working together toward the SDGs.
• It would link the need for multi-stakeholder participation in goal setting to the goal implementation phase to mobilize support, policies, and resources but also to reveal and work on the interconnectedness of the goals themselves taken as a whole. 

Hence, the critical imperative is that there be a single narrative, a single set of goals, for all the domestic and global players to relate to, affirm, and implement. Otherwise, a fractured global order will produce lower-yield outcomes, and competition among priorities, sectors, and actors will result in poorer goal performance than would be possible with an integrated, concerted approach where all actors are working toward the same ends.

IV. Possible G-20 Actions by Turkey and China

Turkey has developed a process for the G-20 summit scheduled for November 14-15, 2015 in Antalya. Implementation, inclusion, and investment—the three “I’s”—are the overarching themes already established. The three “I’s” ties are tightly tied to the Australian G-20 outcomes—implementing action plans to achieve the incremental growth target of an additional 2 percentage points of GDP by 2018; including lower-income people in growth and lower-income countries in the global economy; and investing in infrastructure.

Each of these priorities is supportive of and compatible with the post-2015 agenda, even though they are not yet directly addressed to it. A decision by Turkey to include the post-2015 agenda in the 2015 G-20 would be easily achieved by cross-walking the SDGs over to and into the three “I’s” and vice versa. The central priority of the post-2015 agenda is, after all, “implementation.” The overarching meaning of the six elements of the post-2015 agenda (dignity, prosperity, justice, partnership, planet, and people (U.N. SG Synthesis Report December 2014)) is their impact on “inclusion.” And “investment” in infrastructure is crucial to all of the 17 SDGs.

The three pillars for Turkey’s 2015 agenda are: (i) strengthening the global recovery and lifting potential growth (the 2 percent target); (ii) enhancing resilience (financial regulatory reform]; and (iii) buttressing sustainability. Clearly, the third pillar on sustainability opens the door for the incorporation of the post-2015 agenda into the Turkey G-20, if Turkey wishes to do so. And the other two pillars fully support the sustainability agenda and are linked to it, or need to be.

For China, the post-2015 agenda presents a unique opportunity for the Chinese government to seize on a global agenda that has specific, strong, and visible links to the domestic concerns of the Chinese people. China could use the 2016 G-20 summit both to provide international leadership for global cooperation and to demonstrate the connection of global issues to domestic conditions through their impact and spillover effects. Because the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda, by prioritizing it in its G-20 summit, China would be embracing the multiplicity of its own identity as a developing country but also as a dynamic emerging market economy that is destined to eventually play a global leadership role equivalent to advanced countries.

Furthermore, China seems intent on being a competitive nation in various spheres while at the same time being cooperative in others. The G-20 summit presidency for China in 2016 provides China with an opportunity to strengthen its role in international cooperation by being ambitious in the reach of its agenda for the G-20 in 2016, by its conduct as a member of the G-20 Troika for the next three years, and as the host government for the G-20 in 2016. By choosing to support Turkey in its consideration of incorporating the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summit in 2015 and by China itself addressing the implementation issues in 2016, China would be reaping the demonstrably higher-yield gains generated by linking the SDG goal-setting phase in 2015 to the implementation phase in 2016.

Integrating the three tracks of SDG goal setting, financing for development, and progress on climate change actions is complementary but complex. While challenging, China has sufficiently high stakes in the outcomes of all three of these tracks to have a national interest in leading a global effort over the next three years to energize the convergence of agendas and institutional mandates necessary to generate bigger outcomes for people everywhere, including in China.

V. Results: Strengthening global governance and leadership

What follows from the analysis here is that the decision to include the post-2015 agenda in the Turkey and China G-20 summits would be a choice about the substance but also about the process of global economic governance, in which the G-20 has a leadership role. To do so in the way outlined here, would:

• Strengthen the global system of international institutions by bringing them together around a single comprehensive, integrated sustainability agenda;
• Create synergies between the United Nations and the other international institutions rather than identifying the post-2015 agenda with the U.N. alone and relying unnecessarily on the U.N. for its implementation;
• Connect G-20 leaders with a broader human and planetary agenda beyond economics and finance, which in turn would connect G-20 leaders with their publics as they visibly address the domestic concerns of their people in their global context; and
• Strengthen the role of the G-20 in global economic governance by putting the G-20 out in front as a broker among stakeholders, a catalytic coordinator of relevant domestic and international actors, and a leader on behalf of the concerns, lives, and livelihoods of people.

Selected References

Colin I. Bradford (2002), “Toward 2015: From Consensus Formation to Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. Issues for the Future: The Implementation Phase”, Development Economics Department (DEC), The World Bank, December 2002.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “The Changing World Economy and Global Economic Governance”, power point presentation at the Korean Delegation seminar “The OECD and Global Governance”, OECD, Paris, December 11, 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “Global Economic Governance and the Role of International Institutions”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2015), “Governance Innovations for Implementing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: Conference Report”,  Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2015.  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Events/2015/03/30-post-2015-sustainable-development-agenda/330-PostReportFinal.pdf?la=en   

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogang (2014), “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---with a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014. Authors are from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies.

Homi Kharas and John McArthur (2014), “Nine Priority Commitments to be Made at the UN’s July 2015 Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” October 2014. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/02/united-nations-financing-for-development-kharas-mcarthur

OECD (2014), “Policy Coherence for Development and the Sustainable Development Goals”, Paris: OECD, 10 December 2014, prepared for the 8^th Meeting of the National Focal Points for Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) held at the OECD on 17-18 December 2014.