Cities with the Biggest Economies

only nyc,chicago, and losangeles are larger metro areas than dallas and Houston. They are 4th and 5th on the list respectively.

going by MSA, Dallas and Houston are 4th and 5th respectively. By CSA, Washington is 4th, then Dallas and Houston. I think Washington metro has a valid argument to be 4th MSA, since Baltimore is excluded in the MSA stat. Driving from Washington to Baltimore is just about identical distance as Dallas to Fort Worth.

The people closest to the money pile always pay themselves the best no matter how useful they are. The tax dollars in DC are obscene.

Well, when I think of Rio, I think of Christ the Redeemer, the favelas on the side of the mountain, the copocabana and carnivale. But I don't know anything about Sao Paulo other than the face that it's big and in Brazil.

Chungking should be acceptable for Chongqing

Having far more people than London or Los Angeles helps. As does being the capital of one of the world's largest economies at the heart of one of the major global regions for trade and industry.

For the record, Wikipedia (citing Korean government sources) lists Seoul as the world's fourth largest metropolitan area. WorldAtlas.com lists it as the fifth largest. South Korea's per capita GDP of $35,000 would certainly imply, given Seoul's enormous population, that it should be one of the world's largest city economies.

Easy if you know your Chinese and American cities, otherwise a PITA.

Suzhou is a large city just west of Wuxi and Shanghai. It has a population of around 10 million people as well as its very own metro system.

I missed some obvious ones (got every Chinese city on here except for Beijing). I am skeptical of some of these figures, though. Is Brussels really that large? Belgium's per capita GDP is only 80% of Australia's and Brussels' metro population is 1.8 million vs 4.9 million for Sydney. I expect Sydney is disproportionately wealthy compared to Australia and to a greater extent than the same may apply to Brussels vs Belgium as a whole. Given this it seems rather remarkable that Brussels has a larger economy than Sydney. Also, what's happening with Germany? German cities much smaller than Berlin make it on, but the capital itself doesn't. Is it really that much poorer than the rest of Germany? Berlin has about twice Hamburg's population - is Hamburg more than twice as wealthy?

I'm not impressed with the Brookings Institute's notion of a metro area. Amsterdam is 49 miles from Rotterdam, over an hour by road.

Most definitions of urban areas are liberal. In the U.S., Dallas and Forth Worth, San Jose to Oakland, Washington to Baltimore, Los Angeles to pretty much anywhere in its region are all around that distance. Hell, I grew up in a town 35 miles from Atlanta and people would still say they were "from Atlanta."

Has this been updated for 2018, or are we working with old data?

As a Minneapolis resident, I typed in my city while not expecting it to make the list. But we made it in at #49!

These figures combines financial economy and real economy (goods and services produced). I don't think London and New York would rank high without financial economies. One have to bear in mind that many banks have their headquarters in London city for secrecy reasons (ability to avoid taxes in tax havens in Cayman islands etc.) and New York because proximity for Wallstreet. Big part of this money goes to speculative derivatives, which are more "productive" in financial sense than investing in real economies in UK or US. In contrast in China there are trillions of dollars invested in building infrastructure and services: high speed railroads, cities, hospitals, schools etc. I have traveled almost 60 countries in world including exotic places like North Korea and lived in China for years but nothing is as horrible as roads and rail roads in UK and USA. They are like 21 years ago in China, when I was there for the first time. Even Japan's high speed rail looks ancient compared to Chinese.