“Improving the competitiveness of cities is a vital pathway to eliminating extreme poverty and promoting prosperity for a country’s citizens, a new World Bank Group report finds. Launched today, Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth: What, Who, and How analyzes 750 cities to determine what makes them competitive and how they have grown their economies. It provides a catalogue of urban data that city officials can use to benchmark their performance. Three quarters of the cities studied in the report grew faster than their national economies since the early 2000’s, the report finds, but there is still room for improvement. Millions of jobs can be created if more cities performed at the level of the most competitive ones. The report finds that to achieve success, competitive cities did not always overhaul their existing economies. Very often they simply became better at what they already did, leveraging their comparative advantage, especially when exporting tradable goods and services to other cities and countries…”