GDP of the world metro areas

[New Brisavoine]

The OECD has published the GDP of the metropolitan areas in OECD countries in the year 2019. Here is the list. All metro areas are defined by OECD using the same methodology (central core area + commuter belt with more than 15% of residents in employment commuting to the central core area). Figures are in billion US dollars at market exchange rates (not at PPP).

This is the position of the respective metro area economies in the last year before Covid-19. It won't be possible to produce another snapshot of metro area economies before 3 or 4 years due to the upheavals of Covid, which make data rather meaningless after 2019 and probably until 2023.

For comparison, I'm also adding the Brazilian metro areas (defined by the Brazilian statistical office, whose definition is very similar to OECD's definition of metro areas). I'm also adding Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and the Chinese metro areas. For China, the figures refer to the Chinese municipalities, i.e. large regions that correspond reasonably to the metro areas of the large Chinese cities (in fact the municipalities are slightly larger than the metro areas, as they include rural territories, but these add little to the overall GDP of the municipalities). Only exceptions: Guangzhou, which is aggregated with Foshan in the list, as Guangzhou and Foshan form essentially one city nowadays, and Chongqing, whose municipality is way too large, so here I've given the figures for two smaller statistical territories defined by the Chongqing authorities.

I've also added Moscow. Nobody has ever defined the extent of the Moscow metro area, so I give the GDP of the city of Moscow alone (this is the lower bound), and the GDP of city of Moscow and Moscow oblast combined (this is the upper bound). St Petersburg has a GDP too small to make it in the list.

I've added the population of all areas, to better understand the extent of each territory.

PS: I'm also adding Delhi, even though its GDP is still too low to normally make it in the list. Delhi is the only Indian city for which we have a GDP figure, due to the fact it is a union territory of India (similar to states). There are no data for divisions below state level (unlike China which produces GDP figures for administrative divisions below province level).

GDP of the metro areas in 2019, in billion of US dollars (at market exchange rates):

• New York (19.9 million inh.): 1,902
• Tokyo (36.4 million inh.): 1,695
• Los Angeles (17.8 million inh.): 1,240
• San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (6.7 million inh.): 940
• Paris (13.1 million inh.): 876
• London (12.4 million inh.): 827
• Seoul (23.6 million inh.): 816
• Washington-Baltimore (9.2 million inh.): 791
• Chicago (9.5 million inh.): 727
• Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (17.0 million inh.): 640
• Dallas-Fort Worth (7.8 million inh.): 556
• Shanghai (24.6 million inh.): 555
• Beijing (21.6 million inh.): 517
• Houston (7.2 million inh.): 513
• Guangzhou-Foshan (26.9 million inh.): 505
• Philadelphia-Wilmington (6.5 million inh.): 492
• Boston (4.4 million inh.): 449 (does not include Providence, RI)
• city of Moscow + Moscow oblast (20.9 million inh.): 446
• Atlanta (5.7 million inh.): 427
• Seattle (4.0 million inh.): 427
• Nagoya (8.7 million inh.): 405
• Shenzhen (16.3 million inh.): 394
• Miami-West Palm Beach (6.3 million inh.): 385
• Singapore (5.9 million inh.): 375
• Hong Kong (7.5 million inh.): 363
• city of Moscow (12.7 million inh.): 353
• Toronto-Oshawa (7.5 million inh.): 348
• São Paulo (21.7 million inh.): 318
• Suzhou (12.4 million inh.): 278
• Phoenix (5.0 million inh.): 278
• Detroit (4.4 million inh.): 278
• Minneapolis (3.6 million inh.): 278
• Sydney (5.2 million inh.): 277
• Mexico City (20.4 million inh.): 275
• Madrid (6.9 million inh.): 273
• Chongqing "metropolitan developed economic area" (主城都市区; 20.8 million inh.): 266
• Taipei (9.7 million inh.): 265
• Milan (5.0 million inh.): 261
• Chengdu (20.0 million inh.): 247 (or 281 if Deyang is also added, which is 23.5 million inh.)
• Melbourne (5.0 million inh.): 247
• San Diego (3.3 million inh.): 235
• Denver (3.0 million inh.): 235
• Wuhan (12.0 million inh.): 235
• Munich (3.0 million inh.): 229
• Hangzhou (11.4 million inh.): 225
• Berlin (4.9 million inh.): 218
• Istanbul (13.3 million inh.): 207
• Tianjin (13.7 million inh.): 205
• Amsterdam (2.9 million inh.): 204
• Nanjing (9.1 million inh.): 203
• Dublin (2.1 million inh.): 199
• Brussels (3.3 million inh.): 197
• Ruhr (5.1 million inh.): 194
• Hamburg (3.4 million inh.): 191
• Rome (4.3 million inh.): 187
• Montréal (4.6 million inh.): 185
• Barcelona (5.0 million inh.): 177
• Frankfurt (2.6 million inh.): 171
• St. Louis (2.6 million inh.): 171
• Portland (2.4 million inh.): 171
• Austin (2.2 million inh.): 171
• Perth (Australia) (2.1 million inh.): 171
• Stockholm (2.3 million inh.): 170
• Stuttgart (2.5 million inh.): 163
• Vienna (3.0 million inh.): 158
• Zürich (1.5 million inh.): 152
• Copenhagen (2.1 million inh.): 151
• Rio de Janeiro (12.8 million inh.): 148
• Chongqing "central urban area" (中心城区; 10.1 million inh.): 137
• National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi (18.5 million inh.): 114

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=FUA_CITY

[fleonzo]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

The OECD has published the GDP of the metropolitan areas in OECD countries in the year 2019. Here is the list. All metro areas are defined by OECD using the same methodology (central core area + commuter belt with more than 15% of residents in employment commuting to the central core area). Figures are in billion US dollars at market exchange rates (not at PPP).

This is the position of the respective metro area economies in the last year before Covid-19. It won't be possible to produce another snapshot of metro area economies before 3 or 4 years due to the upheavals of Covid, which make data rather meaningless after 2019 and probably until 2023.

For comparison, I'm also adding the Brazilian metro areas (defined by the Brazilian statistical office, whose definition is very similar to OECD's definition of metro areas). I'm also adding Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and the Chinese metro areas. For China, the figures refer to the Chinese municipalities, i.e. large regions that correspond reasonably to the metro areas of the large Chinese cities (in fact the municipalities are slightly larger than the metro areas, as they include rural territories, but these add little to the overall GDP of the municipalities). Only exceptions: Guangzhou, which is aggregated with Foshan in the list, as Guangzhou and Foshan form essentially one city nowadays, and Chongqing, whose municipality is way too large, so here I've given the figures for two smaller statistical territories defined by the Chongqing authorities.

I've also added Moscow. Nobody has ever defined the extent of the Moscow metro area, so I give the GDP of the city of Moscow alone (this is the lower bound), and the GDP of city of Moscow and Moscow oblast combined (this is the upper bound). St Petersburg has a GDP too small to make it in the list.

I've added the population of all areas, to better understand the extent of each territory.

PS: I'm also adding Delhi, even though its GDP is still too low to normally make it in the list. Delhi is the only Indian city for which we have a GDP figure, due to the fact it is a union territory of India (similar to states). There are no data for divisions below state level (unlike China which produces GDP figures for administrative divisions below province level).

GDP of the metro areas in 2019, in billion of US dollars (at market exchange rates):

• New York (19.9 million inh.): 1,902
• Tokyo (36.4 million inh.): 1,695
• Los Angeles (17.8 million inh.): 1,240
• San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (6.7 million inh.): 940
• Paris (13.1 million inh.): 876
• London (12.4 million inh.): 827
• Seoul (23.6 million inh.): 816
• Washington-Baltimore (9.2 million inh.): 791
• Chicago (9.5 million inh.): 727
• Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (17.0 million inh.): 640
• Dallas-Fort Worth (7.8 million inh.): 556
• Shanghai (24.6 million inh.): 555
• Beijing (21.6 million inh.): 517
• Houston (7.2 million inh.): 513
• Guangzhou-Foshan (26.9 million inh.): 505
• Philadelphia-Wilmington (6.5 million inh.): 492
• Boston (4.4 million inh.): 449 (does not include Providence, RI)
• city of Moscow + Moscow oblast (20.9 million inh.): 446
• Atlanta (5.7 million inh.): 427
• Seattle (4.0 million inh.): 427
• Nagoya (8.7 million inh.): 405
• Shenzhen (16.3 million inh.): 394
• Miami-West Palm Beach (6.3 million inh.): 385
• Singapore (5.9 million inh.): 375
• Hong Kong (7.5 million inh.): 363
• city of Moscow (12.7 million inh.): 353
• Toronto-Oshawa (7.5 million inh.): 348
• São Paulo (21.7 million inh.): 318
• Suzhou (12.4 million inh.): 278
• Phoenix (5.0 million inh.): 278
• Detroit (4.4 million inh.): 278
• Minneapolis (3.6 million inh.): 278
• Sydney (5.2 million inh.): 277
• Mexico City (20.4 million inh.): 275
• Madrid (6.9 million inh.): 273
• Chongqing "metropolitan developed economic area" (主城都市区; 20.8 million inh.): 266
• Taipei (9.7 million inh.): 265
• Milan (5.0 million inh.): 261
• Chengdu (20.0 million inh.): 247 (or 281 if Deyang is also added, which is 23.5 million inh.)
• Melbourne (5.0 million inh.): 247
• San Diego (3.3 million inh.): 235
• Denver (3.0 million inh.): 235
• Wuhan (12.0 million inh.): 235
• Munich (3.0 million inh.): 229
• Hangzhou (11.4 million inh.): 225
• Berlin (4.9 million inh.): 218
• Istanbul (13.3 million inh.): 207
• Tianjin (13.7 million inh.): 205
• Amsterdam (2.9 million inh.): 204
• Nanjing (9.1 million inh.): 203
• Dublin (2.1 million inh.): 199
• Brussels (3.3 million inh.): 197
• Ruhr (5.1 million inh.): 194
• Hamburg (3.4 million inh.): 191
• Rome (4.3 million inh.): 187
• Montréal (4.6 million inh.): 185
• Barcelona (5.0 million inh.): 177
• Frankfurt (2.6 million inh.): 171
• St. Louis (2.6 million inh.): 171
• Portland (2.4 million inh.): 171
• Austin (2.2 million inh.): 171
• Perth (Australia) (2.1 million inh.): 171
• Stockholm (2.3 million inh.): 170
• Stuttgart (2.5 million inh.): 163
• Vienna (3.0 million inh.): 158
• Zürich (1.5 million inh.): 152
• Copenhagen (2.1 million inh.): 151
• Rio de Janeiro (12.8 million inh.): 148
• Chongqing "central urban area" (中心城区; 10.1 million inh.): 137
• National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi (18.5 million inh.): 114

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=FUA_CITY

Something is wrong with this list....the NYC's numbers they're using is for the MSA only while all the others (in the US) are using the CSA numbers. This is not apples to an apples comparisons.

[Crawford]

Boston is MSA too. They should at least be applying the same standard within each country.

They don't seem to be applying common standards in other countries either. There's no German standard where Berlin and the Ruhr are essentially the same size. Ruhr would be twice the size using U.S. metro standards, or Berlin would be much bigger using German city standards.

[Steely Dan]

chicago's population figure is MSA too.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by fleonzo

Something is wrong with this list....the NYC's numbers they're using is for the MSA only while all the others (in the US) are using the CSA numbers. This is not apples to an apples comparisons.

It's not consistent. They are using the CSA population for LA, while other cities appear to use MSA (NYC, SF, Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc).

[Yuri]

It's a mess. Those international lists are completely useless. They cannot keep a coherence inside one country, let alone in the world. Garbage.

Washington-Baltimore CSA vs Detroit MSA. And what are this 13 million people Paris or 3 million people Munich and Vienna? And why Moscow is the city proper when the metro area is getting close to 20 million?

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by fleonzo

Something is wrong with this list....the NYC's numbers they're using is for the MSA only while all the others (in the US) are using the CSA numbers. This is not apples to an apples comparisons.

It's neither MSA nor CSA. It's FUA (Functional Urban Area), whose definition I gave (a core central area defined by density, and then a commuter belt with more than 15% of residents in employment commuting to the core area). This is the definition of metro areas developed by Urban Audit, and now used for international comparisons by OECD, Eurostat, and various other organizations and statistical offices.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Ruhr would be twice the size using U.S. metro standards, or Berlin would be much bigger using German city standards.

No because the old definition of urban areas (continuous urbanization with no more than 200 meter gap) is not used to define the core areas of FUAs, because geographers and economists have concluded that the old definition of urban areas is rather meaningless in this day and age of sprawl. Treating the entire Pearl River Delta as a single metro area, for example, makes little sense when there are in fact several quite distinct labor markets in this region, with their distinct centers.

In the case of the Ruhr: Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Solingen, Iserlohn, Bocholt, Krefeld are separate core areas which don't have more than 15% of their residents commuting to the central core area of the Rurh (Moers-Hamm), and are therefore not part of the Ruhr FUA, and form separate FUAs.

Originally Posted by Crawford

Boston is MSA too. They should at least be applying the same standard within each country.

That must be because more than 15% of residents in Baltimore are commuting to DC (and its closest suburbs), probably, whereas less than 15% of residents in Providence commute to Boston and its closest suburbs.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

It's not consistent. They are using the CSA population for LA, while other cities appear to use MSA (NYC, SF, Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc).

The grid they use in the US is the county, because there are no GDP figures below county level. Given the huge size of counties in Southern California, it's not surprising the Los Angeles FUA is going to be the same as the CSA (although not quite, because the LA CSA includes Ventura county, whereas the LA FUA does not include Ventura county), but in other parts of the US where counties are smaller the FUAs are going to be smaller than the CSAs (because the CSAs include much more than the commuter belt at 15% threshold).

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Yuri

And what are this 13 million people Paris or 3 million people Munich and Vienna? And why Moscow is the city proper when the metro area is getting close to 20 million?

That's the definition of FUAs at 15% threshold (although in the case of Germany they use entire districts (Kreise) as the grid, and not municipalities as in France, Spain, Italy, Canada, etc), which is unfortunate as it makes the German FUAs a bit larger than they really are (that's especially the case for Dresden where the Kreise are very large, so it makes the Dresden FUA much bigger than it really is if we used municipalities as the grid).

As for Moscow, as I said it's not a FUA. Nobody has ever defined the Russian FUAs (Russia is not a member of the OECD). So I gave figures for the city, and the for city + oblast (the FUA is in the middle between these two territories).

[JManc]

The Bay Area is closer to 8 million and is actually two separate MSA's (SF and SJ). Still, considering it's much smaller size compared to the others at the top, it's the Muggsy Bogues of money making.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Yuri

And why Moscow is the city proper when the metro area is getting close to 20 million?

It's always crazy to remember that Moscow is like 13,000,000 in the city! with a 20M Metro not out of reach. Hard for North Americans and Europeans to fathom.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Wigs

It's always crazy to remember that Moscow is like 13,000,000 in the city! with a 20M Metro not out of reach. Hard for North Americans and Europeans to fathom.

it's really not that hard to fathom considering that the city proper of moscow is 970 sq. miles, or over 3x the land area of NYC.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by JManc

The Bay Area is closer to 8 million and is actually two separate MSA's (SF and SJ). Still, considering it's much smaller size compared to the others at the top, it's the Muggsy Bogues of money making.

The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest GDP per capita in the world for metro areas larger than 1 million people. Seattle metro area has the 2nd highest GDP per capita in the world. #3 is Boston metro area, and #4 is Zurich metro area. #5 is New York metro area.

All that at market exchange rates of course. It may be different at PPP.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

it's really not that hard to fathom considering that the city proper of moscow is 970 sq. miles, or over 3x the land area of NYC.

Yeah, I was going to say much the same. The Russians have enlarged the territory of the city of Moscow in an insane way, but then it's on par with the rest of their nouveau riche culture (crazy supertall skyscrapers that make no sense, shockingly super rich people who waste money, etc).

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

it's really not that hard to fathom considering that the city proper of moscow is 970 sq. miles, or over 3x the land area of NYC.

yes, mostly covered by countless apartment blocks, not single family home sprawl.

I think people forget the Moscow Metro is 270+ miles (435+ km), carrying ~7 million riders a day, and reportedly peaked in 2014 at 9.7 million!
just hard to comprehend by North American standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro

[New Brisavoine]

The Russians put all their eggs in the same basket. It's very unhealthy for such a large country. Their second city, St Petersburg, is 2nd tier in comparison, with a GDP lower than 150 billion US dollars (from memory I think it's only around 100 billion). Most of the rest of the country, with the exception of 3-4 ok cities, is frankly decrepit and shabby.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

it's really not that hard to fathom considering that the city proper of moscow is 970 sq. miles, or over 3x the land area of NYC.

Keep in mind they added that weird tale southwest of it ten years ago and no one no one lives there. The original Moscow, with its oval shape, is just slightly bigger than New York. It’s a very dense city.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

The Russians put all their eggs in the same basket. It's very unhealthy for such a large country. Their second city, St Petersburg, is 2nd tier in comparison, with a GDP lower than 150 billion US dollars (from memory I think it's only around 100 billion). Most of the rest of the country, with the exception of 3-4 ok cities, is frankly decrepit and shabby.

I don't think it's unhealthy at all. For one thing, it's the most attractive city. It's certainly much better to live there than say in Omsk.

And that's the new trend: big metropolises are once again the most attractive ones. They're more efficient and environmentally friendly. In a world of declining population, it's much better for people to focus on fewer places.

Regarding St. Petersburg, they're coming back after a very rough 1990's/early 2000's:

Moscow
2002: 14,789,795
2010: 16,367,450 -- +10.7%
2021: 19,170,684 -- +17.1%

St. Petersburg
2002: 5,441,433
2010: 5,733,927 --- +5.4%
2021: 6,775,365 -- +18.2%

It grew faster than Moscow. Russia, in comparison, grew -1.6% (2002-2010) and +1.3% (2010-2021).

------------------------------------------

Regarding Moscow city proper, it has 12,365,568 people (2021, original boundaries) in 1,063 km²; New York + Hudson County 9,529,044 people (2020) within 898 km². Moscow is denser.

[fleonzo]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It's neither MSA nor CSA. It's FUA (Functional Urban Area), whose definition I gave (a core central area defined by density, and then a commuter belt with more than 15% of residents in employment commuting to the core area). This is the definition of metro areas developed by Urban Audit, and now used for international comparisons by OECD, Eurostat, and various other organizations and statistical offices.

However it’s being defined, it’s completely off bases as far as comparing the US cities and their respective metros (MSA or CSA)….