The webinar will explore how metropolitan cities can serve as drivers of economic development. All cities, but particularly metropolitan cities, need to recognize complementarity of manufacturing and services and enhance productivity and innovativeness of manufacturing by increasing services inputs – design, research and development, maintenance, monitoring, leasing – among others. Even textiles and food products can be growth drivers with multi-disciplinary research and uptake of findings by firms. Larger cities, most of them metropolitan in nature, can enjoy benefits of agglomeration, economic diversity, and greater innovativeness. These cities can add 3 percent or more to productivity. Networked secondary cities can achieve comparable results but none of these a given. Composition of industry/services, role of trade critical as is entry/exit of firms and firm growth and global orientation. In the end, large productive cities are “skilled, open and diverse cities” with strong training/tertiary institutions and research infrastructure.