New report reveals global economic impact of sister city relationships

Sister Cities International (SCI) has released a new report, Measures That Matter, revealing the major economic benefits of sister city relationships in America and their impact on the global economy.

SCI, which creates and strengthens partnerships between localities in the US and other countries through establishing ‘sister cities’, has quantified the economic impact on the global economy of its members. Measures That Matter found that in 2014, 14,153 visitors came to the US in 2014 alone via 1,123 inbound sister city exchanges.

Almost 10,000 (9,899) US residents participated in 944 outbound sister city exchanges abroad. The report estimates that sister city activities such as cultural and economic development exchanges, events and volunteering contributed US$525 million to the US economy. Globally international exchanges by US based members brought US$106.8 million.

“We not only promote peace, we promote prosperity,” Mary Kane, Sister Cities International President and CEO, told Cities Today. “You’re never going to have lasting peace if people are not prosperous.”

She added: “Measures that Matter is the first survey of its kind to quantify the economic impact of sister cities through tourism, trade and investment. This report shows that foreign investments happen because of sister cities relationships. Cities leverage relationships and create and build business in other countries and we thought it important to capture those things as a network.

“I think this report will spur on our 545 members to note the contracts that have occurred from their sister city relationships. There has never been a reason to do that before. Our goal is to increase sister city relationships between US cities and cities around the world and vice versa. We’re still seeing student exchanges, municipal employee exchanges and cultural exchanges but now that cities can play more of a role in trade they’re looking to their sister cities as an extremely efficient and organised way to reach out to trading partners across the world.”

Jay Mathur, a consultant on the report, said: “We think sister city relationships could become a leading indicator and important part of determining how progressive and how effective a city can be in their relationship to other cities around the world.

“Sister cities’ relationships by definition are an agreement between cities but the actual relationships are citizen to citizen which means there are all kinds of influential people who are part of the sister city organisation anywhere whether it’s a public, government or business relationship. We find that when you go from one city to another city, you already have well-built relationships and ready-made infrastructure to leverage the development of new business and economic development in a city.”

SCI, which was founded in 1956 by former US President, Dwight Eisenhower, will celebrate its 60th anniversary with a Sister Cities Day in July 2016. Next week marks the two-day US-China Sister Cities Conference.