ANNEX  III

City GDP at 300 km²

Introductory notes

The data for GDP are at nominal, current prices, and, since most of the data were available from the Eurostat, are expressed in Euros. The currency rate between euro and US dollar is given for each of the selected years at the top of the table.

The cut-off line for inclusion into the list was set at a GDP of 10 billion Euros, for the last year chosen (2012). Close to 300 cities made it to the list. A few were close, but for some several dozen candidates there was no data on GDP per capita available at least at the regional level.

The sequence of years was chosen to maximize the use of available data, and to avoid the peaks and troughs in this period of the 15 years (1997-2012).

Key problem is that data on city GDP are rather scarce, and that the time series are rather short. More available are data on GDP at regional level, or at least the data on relative difference in GDP per capita among regions. In many cases, particularly for cities in LDC it seems that data on their GDP are lacking altogether.

Therefore the starting point was a hypothetic GDP per capita for each city where the data for GDP per capita at the country level were multiplied by the population number of a city within its first at 300 km². This benchmark was supposed to be the bottom level of GDP for each of the cities, which may be useful for comparison of cities within the same urban hierarchy. Yet it turned out that in very centralized hierarchies almost all other cities except the primate one have a GDP per capita bellow this average for the entire country!

Next step was to repeat the procedure with the data for the GDP per capita at the regional (metropolitan, cantonal etc.) level. In all cases this hypothetical City GDP based on the regional GDP per capita data was considerably higher that the previous one, bringing us closer to the GDP per capita at the city level. Unfortunately, that was the end of the road for the vast majority of cities, and only in few instances the data were available at the city level. Without exception, these figures were still higher than the ones based on the data for the regional level.

For the years where data were not available an estimate (marked with an asterisk) was given. The estimates are based on the same ratio between the data on the regional, and the country GDP per capita for the latest year for which the data were available.

The data of City GDP per capita for the last year (2012) were given in the final column. For previous years only the totals for the city GDP at 300 km² are given, but per capita data can easily be calculated since the population figure at 300 km² for each city is given in the first column.

Sources

Main sources for this ANNEX III are local statistical offices. But in many cases helpful were data from national and supranational statistical offices (like Eurostat, or IMF data). Wikipedia is in several instances providing a helpful comparison among the regional GDPs. For some cities Brookings Global Metro Monitor data for 2012 were translated from PPP to nominal prices.

Key problem though is that the data on city GDP are rather scarce, and that the time series are rather short. Data on regional GDP (or at least the data on relative difference in GDP per capita among regions) are somewhat more available.

Comments

It turned out that cities with the largest population within 300 km² are not taking the leading positions in this GDP for the first 300 km² table. In fact some have not even made to the list. Actually of the 275 cities, with population of at least 1 million, less than half had a city GDP greater than 10 billion Euros in 2012. This indicates that their human capital is still heavily underused, and that there is an ample room for progress in this regard. Eventually (as it is already happening with Chinese cities), they will take considerably higher place in the list of cities with highest city GDP at 300 km².

In instances when data were available for the GDP of entire Metro area, there was a dilemma whether to ascribe the entire GDP figure to the first 300 km² of the city, since this is where all the headquarters of most important companies providing the bulk of the entire GDP are located. Yet it was hard to deduct some lump sum (let’s say 10-15%) for their hinterland (The Greater City area), so the per capita data for GDP on regional (metropolitan, cantonal, etc.) level were used instead.

But, in extreme cases those per capita data are several times higher for the Inner City than for its hinterland. Notoriously, GDP per capita for Inner London is 3,5 times higher than that for the Greater London. Therefore we mat safely assume that the data for the City GDP of New York and Tokyo are obviously much higher (quite likely, several times higher) than the ones quoted here.

Since the large metro areas were disentangled, as in the ANNEX I (“the city meter”), in the list it is possible to find independently cities like Yokohama, Kawasaki, Chiba and other cities from the Tokyo metropolitan area, or Newark and Jersey City from the New York metropolitan area. But there is no separate data for their city GDP, so the data at the regional, or metropoliatn level were used instead. As a result figures presented for the Jercey City and Newark city GDP seem to be considerably above the real ones. Since this is a provisional list this doesn’t matter much, but it clearly indicates the need to have better data at the local, city level.