Comparison of Toronto's Municipal Budget to the Municipal Budget of 16 Similarly Ranked Cities.

Arthur Gron
Nov., 2017.

The purpose of this research paper is to determine if the overall size of Toronto's budget is within a reasonable range of other cities' that are similarly ranked to Toronto.

The 16 cities chosen, were based on the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ranking of world cities.(http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2016t.html) To simplify the research, only municipalities with budgets published in English were selected. The most recent, fully published budget on the municipalities' website were used. Also Alpha++ cities were excluded, as the size of those cities' budgets were magnitudes larger than Toronto's.

One limiting factor in the research conduced was that only the official political boundary for a city was used. For example Toronto's metropolitan region may include Peel, and Durham for some, other's may consider the boundary area of metropolitan Toronto to include Hamilton and Newmarket. The discrepancy between the official boundaries of a city and a metropolitan area pronounced particularly for places such as Sydney and Atlanta. However by prorating the total budget expenditure by total population gives how much each city is spending per individual. This allows for some direct comparison.

Ranking of Cities by Total Budget

City	Budget $CAD	Budget $USD	Population
Manchester	356,458,140	278,796,960	550,000
Sydney	55,4702,419	435,924,078	205,339
Melbourne	588,793,828	460,205,041	136,000
Atlanta	825,127,960	648,647,258	472,522
Dublin	1,435,581,461	1,128,448,857	527,612
Edinburgh	1,628,008,560	1,272,884,129	492,680
Auckland	3,233,872,221	2,529,019,890	1,614,400
Boston	4,016,892,100	3,140,000,000	673,184
Dallas	4,082,912,679	3,194,892,351	1,317,929
Houston	6,645,340,000	5,200,000,000	2,303,482
Miami-Dade	9,471,718,996	7,404,032,000	2,712,945
Toronto	12,300,000,000	9,669,697,291	2,800,000
Los Angeles	12,385,919,117	9,743,830,703	3,976,322
Chicago	12,805,442,650	10,010,000,000	2,704,958
San Francisco	12,929,403,428	10,106,900,000	870,887
Washington	17,781,783,500	13,900,000,000	681,170
Singapore	68,795,585,975	53,802,762,391	5,612,300

Singpore was left off the graph as it was an outlier.


Singpore was left off the graph as it was an outlier.

Open Data File