Why should any city want to host a billion-dollar World Expo?

South Korea has hosted two of the three events and aimed to complete the trifecta with a 2030 Expo in the second city of Busan. — AFP

THE World Expo might have a quaint quality for many in the English-speaking world – recalling events such as the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, perhaps most familiar through its appearance in The Simpsons, where the exposition’s symbolic Sunsphere has become a disused storage site for wigs.

But in large parts of the world, the exhibitions are still big business – and increasingly, politically fraught.