Fragmentation is Holding St. Louis Back
Date Posted: March 8, 2015
Posted In: Ideas,
by David Nicklaus
From STLtoday: St. Louis, most area residents would agree, has many elements of a great city. We have Forest Park, the Cardinals and world-class companies such as Express Scripts and Monsanto.
What we don’t have is a governmental structure that makes sense. That makes a big difference, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says.
The OECD, a think tank for 30 industrialized democracies, just issued a report called “The Metropolitan Century,” which predicts that 85 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2099.
It also attempts to describe what makes cities successful. Some results are intuitive: Bigger cities are more economically productive than small ones, and a highly educated citizenry is a plus.
Then there’s governance, the Achilles’ heel of St. Louis. When an area has what the OECD calls “a mismatch between functional boundaries and administrative boundaries,” its economy suffers.