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SCMP Reporter

More than seven years ago, after Shanghai won the right to host the 2010 World Expo, thousands of people whooped it up on the city's streets.
People from all walks of life believed the big show would help Shanghai catch up with Beijing, which was splashing out roughly US$40 billion on the 2008 Olympics.
The municipal government mobilised enormous resources to ensure that expo-related projects were completed on time, allowing the city to show its best face to the world.
Real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle says Shanghai has spent US$95 billion on expo-related infrastructure, with analysts describing the scale and pace of development over the past two years as something never seen before - anywhere.
Now the Shanghai government and people are hoping it all pays off.
Xinhua has reported that the international fair could create as many as 250,000 jobs in the city and increase Shanghai's gross domestic product growth by 5 percentage points.
If the expo attracts the 70 million visitors that have been forecast, income from ticket sales and food and beverage sales could top 10 billion yuan (HK$11.4 billion).
The hospitality sector will be one of the top beneficiaries of the six-month event, which looks like being a windfall for the city's 310 star-rated hotels and 6,000 or so inns, which have 334,000 rooms and 557,000 beds.
Cheng Meihong, a deputy director of the Shanghai Tourism Administration, told a press conference this month  that hotel prices were expected to rise slightly during the expo, as thousands of travellers from other parts of the country and abroad flocked to Shanghai.
But economists say that while the expo may boost the retail  and hospitality sectors in the short term, it will be difficult for Shanghai to sustain rapid growth after the event.
'After all, the economy doesn't necessarily hinge on the event,' Morgan Stanley analyst Allen Gui said. 'Taking a long view, the outlook is still unclear because it's too early to assess whether the massive infrastructure investments are redundant or properly needed.'
When the expo opens tomorrow, Shanghai's Metro system will have 420 kilometres of track in operation - nearly double last year's total.
That breakneck pace of subway expansion has seen 'decentralised' office blocks sprout up outside the central business district.
At the end of last year, Shanghai had 415,000 square metres of decentralised Grade A office space, Jones Lang LaSalle said. It predicted the figure would jump to 1.8 million square metres by the end of 2013.
More corporate tenants are leaving the city centre to take advantage of cheaper rents in the suburbs.
Shanghai, one of the mainland's two main economic locomotives, failed to dodge the bullet when the global financial crisis struck two years ago. 
Shrinking external demand knocked the steam out of Shanghai's economic growth and robust retail sales, which grew 13.6 per cent last year, were not enough to offset the export slowdown. 
The city's GDP grew 8.2 per last year, 1.7 percentage points less than in 2008, and the second consecutive year of single-digit growth. 
Shanghai had posted double-digit growth in the previous 16 years - from 1992 to 2007 - as exports from the Yangtze River Delta boomed and foreign capital flooded in. To add to the blushes of the city's leaders, including Mayor Han Zheng, Shanghai's GDP growth last year was also among the lowest recorded by any of the  provincial-level regions. 
'Shanghai would have to draw a lesson from the slowdown in the past two years,' Zhang Youwen , the chief world economy researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said. 'It will be difficult to gauge how much the expo can help the local economy in the long term.'
The city took a hammering from the global financial crisis, lagging behind mainland rivals whose economies kept growing rapidly, fuelled by Beijing's 4 trillion yuan stimulus package. 
Shanghai has been striving to shift its economic focus from manufacturing to services, seeking to become a big-name metropolis on a par with New York, London and Paris. Beijing drew up an ambitious blueprint for the city last year, encouraging Shanghai to transform itself into a global financial and shipping centre.
However, in the absence of substantive liberalisation policies, economists have seen the plan as nothing more than an empty promise. Without full convertibility of the yuan, they said, Shanghai's dream of becoming an international financial hub centre would remain illusory.
An official with the Pudong Financial Services Office said district government and city government officials were preparing to host several events during the expo where they would lobby for accelerated market deregulation and seek to attract more overseas investors.
Some other governments around the country have also sniffed out opportunities during the expo, hoping to promote investment and trade when influential government officials and businesspeople visit the big show.
'We can't afford to miss the big party because it provides a good chance to get to know the big shots,' said Guo Yi, a deputy director of the economic research department in Jining , Shandong. 'It will be a platform to promote Jining's trade and draw investment to the city.'
Big investment
Shanghai is estimated to have spent on expo-related infrastructure an amount totalling, in US dollars: $95b



Shanghai hopes it will all pay off as it shows its best face