The 300 richest cities in the world, including the 20 richest cities in the world by 2015 GDP per Capita, are responsible for over 50% of the total output produced in the world. These cities unsurprisingly belong to countries which have a stable, well performing economy, a high literacy rate, a high rate of employment and can boast low crime rates as well. These cities tend to enjoy a high standard of living as well, with an extremely low poverty rate. If you find this interesting, you might also want to discover previous article on the same topic, the top 10 richest cities in the world.
Unfortunately, while we can easily access the projected data for the GDP per capita in 2015 for countries, prepared by the International Monetary Fund, there is no such data available for cities. However, we do have reports regarding the GDP per capita for cities in 2014, which have been prepared by Brookings, by analysing the US Census Bureau, Moody’s Analytics and Oxford Economics.
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We have then compared the projected GDP per capita for countries in 2015 with the GDP per capita for countries in 2014, and noted the percentage. We have applied this percentage to the Brookings report detailing the GDP per capita for cities in 2014, and hence, created a projection for the 20 richest cities in the world by 2015 GDP per capita.
It should come as no surprise that this list is utterly dominated by the world’s premier superpower, the United States of America, which has an incredible 10 cities on this list alone. Meanwhile, 9 of the remaining 10 spots belong to the continent of Europe, with the only other place going to Australia. While China is also competing to become a superpower in its own right and Russia is trying to regain lost glory, it is interesting to note that there is not a single Asian city which has made this list. This may lend credence to the belief that Asia has a lot of work to do if it wants to catch up with the United States of America and China. Even countries in the Middle East such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are counted among the richest countries in the world, do not have a single country, which shows that maybe the wealth generated by the huge reserves of oil is not being appropriately utilized.
Furthermore, the strength of these cities, and more importantly, their countries, can be seen by the fact that in the projections made by the International Monetary Fund for GDP per capita in 2015, of all the countries whose cities are featured on this list, there isn’t a single country where the GDP per capita has been estimated to fall in 2015. This is a sign of how well the cities are performing and that this trend is expected to continue in the foreseeable future.
