Cities of the North

I’m a few weeks late in blogging about Paul Romer’s novel proposal for ‘Charter Cities’. As he describes them:




One of Romer’s three cases would be in northern Australia.

Case 2: Australia and Indonesia create a new regional manufacturing hub


People from Indonesia, many of them lower-skilled workers, could come live as temporary or permanent residents in this zone, but would remain citizens of Indonesia. A portion of their labor income could be taxed and return to the government in Indonesia. Levels of free public services and welfare support would be comparable to those in Indonesia. As citizens of Indonesia, the Indonesian inhabitants of the city would have no claim on residency or citizenship in Australia proper. They would be subject to the same immigration controls whether entering Australia from this zone or from Indonesia.

Highly skilled workers from all over the world would be welcomed as well, but would be subject to the same immigration controls they would face from their home countries. Australian citizens and firms would be able to pass freely between Australia proper and the new charter city.

As part of the treaty, the Indonesian government could agree to award the chance to move to the new city preferentially to residents from a small number of rural areas where people practice environmentally harmful forms of subsistence agriculture and forestry. The government could designate part of the land to be freed up in this way as a nature preserve, setting aside a much smaller portion of the now uninhabited land for a charter city of its own.

More here. And Chris Blattman responds (and Romer again).

2 thoughts on “Cities of the North”

    Sounds like colonisation.  Basically selling pieces of territory to a foreign power.
    Could work fine in the short term, but what happens after a few generations when the “charterist” no longer feel loyalty to a distant government and think they are being neglected by all?


  2. Might Romer’s Charter City be a solution to the refugee “crisis” that seems to be sucking up so much political capital in Australia?
    My first thought was whether Australia might finance the development of a Charter City in Indonesia, populated by refugees arriving in Indonesia.  My second thought is to turn Christmas Island into a Charter City.
    Paul Romer might be able to put together a group of entrepreneurs to run the Charter City at Christmas Island.  If I were running the Charter City, I would invite the Singapore government to be an investor, and invite migrants from mainland China to help set up a “seed colony” with rules that blend together Aussie values, Chinese entrepreneurial spirit, and Singaporean bureaucracy.


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