WINDHOEK – A local stock brokerage has warned that while urbanization, which is normally driven by the expansion of urban areas, is positive, the increase in Namibia’s population living in urban areas is driven by the lack of modern amenities in rural areas, and an illusion of job opportunities.
“The sad story is that such a drift puts undue strain on resources and could lead to a higher crime rate. So as not to deny the people who live in the rural areas the amenities that go with modern society, we should rather extend opportunities to them, thereby stemming influx to the cities,” advised Alfred Kamupingene, Director of Research at Namibia Equity Brokers, in a report specially prepared for the 25th independence anniversary.
In an analysis of the size of Namibia’s cities and towns, Kamupingene notes that Namibia’s key focus should be on coming up with a development strategy that avoids lopsided development, and avoids the risk of resource depletion (for example water) by establishing the optimal sizes of towns and allocating resources to achieve or tend towards these sizes.
“We believe that the technical capability to design such a mechanism is not a constraint,” said Kamupingene in the report.
The Population and Housing Census, which was carried out in August 2011 by the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA), provided vital information on the size, distribution, composition and other social and economic characteristics of the population, as well as on household and housing amenities. The data showed that whereas in 2001 only 33 percent of the population lived in urban areas, that percentage had grown to 43 percent by August 2011.
The NSA’s report also shows that 36.1 percent of the urban population is unemployed. “The evolution of some of the indicators over the decade is heartening, while the direction of some of them is a cause for concern,” commented Kamupingene.
Kamupingene warned that amenities which attract workers and firms to a given city or town are not infinite and cannot sustain a population beyond a given size.
“Our definition of optimality will presuppose an element of deliberate effort to uplift the local and regional economies. This line of thinking calls for a dynamic interregional computable general equilibrium model which gauges the population sizes that are compatible with the concept of resources and amenities sustainability. Kamupingene cited previous research, specifically that conducted by Paul Krugman, who in his work entitled ‘Confronting the Mystery of Urban Hierarchies’ argues that the population of a city should be proportional to the city’s natural advantages.
Kamupingene emphasized that the research shows what appears to be an anomaly in distribution of the populations of Namibian towns, but noted that it does not claim to be an exhaustive research work on the topic as it merely calls for more research.
“Exhaustive research will require more and accurate data, more statistical interrogation, the involvement of, or at least interviews with, policymakers, and critical analysis of the current policy on the matter,” he remarked.
For the current Namibian situation, Kamupingene cited Xavier Gabaix’s concluding remarks in his seminal paper titled “Zipf’s Law and Growth of Cities”, which when paraphrased states: “the reason why some Namibian towns are so large in comparison to the others is essentially because of inertia in the creation of jobs”.