南非支离破碎的城市：劳动力市场摩擦的不平等负担

South Africa’s Fragmented Cities The Unequal Burden of Labor Market FrictionsPublic Disclosure Authorized Javier E. BaezVarun Kshirsagar Poverty and Equity Global DepartmentJanuary 2026 A verified reproducibility package for this paper isavailable athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org,clickherefor direct access. Policy Research Working Paper11285 Abstract wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In CapeTown, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively.Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile thanthe richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in CapeTown. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatialorganization of people and economic activity constrainsagglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodologyprovides a scalable and standardized data-driven frameworkto analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictionsin complex, data-constrained urban systems. Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellitedata, this paper shows that South African cities are char-acterized by spatial mismatches between where people liveand where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areaswithin 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewerresidents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoodsare most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increasein distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household This paper is a product of the Poverty and Equity Global Department. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank toprovide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. PolicyResearch Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contactedat jbaez@worldbank.org and varun.kshirsagar@gmail.com. A verified reproducibility package for this paper is available athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org, clickherefor direct access. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. South Africa’s Fragmented Cities:The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions Javier E. Baez*World BankVarun KshirsagarWorld Bank KEY WORDS: Poverty, Spatial Inequality, Local Labor Markets, The Economics of CitiesJEL Classification: R12, R14, R23, R41, R52, O18, J61 1Introduction The success of South Africa’s democracy depends on our ability to change the material condi-tions of our people’s lives so that they not only have the right to vote but also bread and work.— Nelson Mandela (1994) Thirty years after apartheid, steady work remains out of reach for many of SouthAfrica’s urban poor.The country has made notable gains in education and health, butunemployment remains persistently high.1Thriving cities serve as labor markets by effi-ciently matching people to jobs (Moretti (2010), Bertaud (2018)). Why do South Africa’slargest cities struggle to create jobs? Are these constraints more severe than in other ma-jor African cities? This paper focuses on spatial frictions within cities that act as a tax onlabor exchange. These distortions raise search costs, inhibit job matching, and blunt theagglomeration economies that underpin urban productivity.2 We show that South Africa’s cities exhibit unusually fragmented urban structures. Agreater share of residents live far from business districts compared to other major Africancities.This pattern, often termed spatial mismatch (Kain (1968)), refers to the physicalseparation of low-income populations from employment hubs.3In most cities, populationdensity declines with distance from employment centers.South African cities divergesharply from this pattern. Despite widespread recognition of this pattern, spatial mismatch is rarely quantifiedin ways that enable consistent monitoring or cross-city comparison. Most existing stud-ies focus on commuting time, rely on household travel surveys, or are limited to a singlecity. These approaches are costly, infrequent, and difficult to scale. Policymakers lack aconsistent, data-driven way to monitor spatial labor market frictions over time and acrosscities. This paper proposes such a framework, with a global analysis using building vol-umes and population density to establish global benchmarks and then combining censusand administrative data