ABSTRACT
The third international trend is that the small and medium cities where economic growth has been the highest and the fastest are also the places where the inflow of poor people has been much higher than in the metros and their contribution to the economy, measured by their labour values or wage rates, is far in excess of what they get back from city governments in terms of access to infrastructure, whether environmental infrastructure like water and sanitation, or growth infrastructure, like subsidised interest rates for housing, or whatever. This happens in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, in Vietnamese cities, and it happened very harshly in places like Shanghai where various barriers are put up to hold back this trend of poor people continuously moving in. The irrelevance of donor-driven requirement, when grounded in the investment decisions of the municipal government as a work place, is very apparent once the debt finances run up.
