San Francisco Alone Has A Larger Budget Than Dozens Of Countries
![Money](https://cdn-v2.theculturetrip.com/20x11/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/17123251389_1881fb0ba2_k.webp)
Recent studies are highlighting the fact that tiny San Francisco, at only about 47 square miles in size, now has a budget larger than dozens of countries around the world. The city’s budget this year was recently announced as $9.7 billion, making it just over $11,000 per capita. Read on for examples of countries with smaller budgets than the City by the Bay.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, San Francisco operates on a budget nearly 20 times that of Belize, at $550 million. Some of the other countries with smaller budgets include Greenland at $1.68 billion, Aruba at $838.3 million, Albania at $3.535 billion and North Korea at $3.3 billion. Also on the list are Botswana, Bosnia, Senegal, Yemen, Madagascar, Cuba, Paraguay, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Iceland, Mongolia, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cyprus, Congo, Cameroon, Haiti, Bahrain, The Bahamas, Afghanistan, and Uganda.
![San Francisco skyline](https://cdn-v2.theculturetrip.com/10x/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1200px-san_francisco_downtown.webp)
San Francisco’s massive budget has been growing rapidly in the past few years. In 2013, the city was just approaching $8 billion, meaning the city’s spending has increased by almost $2 billion in the past three years. Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle delved into why the city’s budget is so big, especially this year’s record-breaking budget. ‘For starters, San Francisco is unique in the state for being both a city and a county, which means it has regular city duties like cleaning streets and providing a police force, and the county tasks of providing health services, including a major public hospital and a social safety net,’ Knight explains. This county-city combination is unusual for many metropolitan centers. Other factors include the fact that the city is host to a large international airport and the Hetch Hetchy water system. In spite of San Francisco’s astronomical spending, the city is still quite a penny-pincher in comparison to cities like Hong Kong, which is estimated to have spent $63 billion last year.
By Courtney Holcomb