Chinese cities with GDPs as huge as countries

Chinese cities with rich GDP

The Chinese economy is considered as a key driver of the world’s economy and its cities are major economic players that serve as engines of its tremendous growth in the past decades.

As one of the world’s foremost economic mitochondrion, the Chinese economy is powered by about 1.4 billion people in a very vast part of Asia.

A communist government operating in a market-oriented economy, a long standing but ever evolving and complex cultural and historical vignette and with its recently aggressive economic and diplomatic pursuit of interests with other countries, Chinese economic growth remains a beautiful puzzle for many.

Chinese economy in perspectives

Just to give you an idea how monstrous the Chinese economy is, consider the following facts:

  • China is regarded as the second world largest economy by nominal GDP;
  • It is the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity according to IMF on its PPP Valuation of Country GDP report released in 2017. China produced US$ 23. 12 trillion in GDP (PPP), followed by the EU US19.9 trillion. The US fell behind with US$ 19.3 trillion.
  • Its growth rate averages to 10% over the last three decades making it the fastest growing major economy in the world.
  • Apart from the US and the European Union, China is the only Asian nation to have reached the US $10 trillion mark in terms of GDP based on power purchasing parity in 2009.
  • In 2015 (in just six years), China doubled its GDP output in the fastest time possible, making it the first country in the world to have a GDP based on power purchasing parity above the US$20 trillion mark.

Chinese cities with GDP comparable to a country’s economy

Dubbed as the sites of “World’s Factory,” Chinese cities are among the largest economic producers in the world today. They are world’s leading manufacturing hubs.

To put into perspectives the size of the Chinese economies, each of the 35 Chinese cities below have a GDP that is equivalent to a country.

Huge Chinese cities as wealthy as countries

As gleaned from the above data, Chengdu has the size of an economy equivalent to Norway; Chile that of Shenzen; Tianjin that of Romania; Guangzhou that of Switzerland; and Nanjng that of Denmark.

This map is based on the Chinese regional GDP of 2015, in billions of US dollars.

Looking further at this map, the economies of well-know Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Hongkong are at par with the economies of the Philippines, UAE and Peru respectively.

In the same map, three megaregions in China have economies comparable to three of the world’s leading economies. To put this in perspectives:

GDP-rich regions of countries

  • The combined economies of three Chinese cities in the Yangtze Delta river namely Shanghai, Nanjing and Ningbo is slightly ahead ($2.62 trillion) that of Italy ($2.31 trillion). This part of the country is regarded as the world’s leading economic region in the past millennium according to Winston Mok.
  • The Beijing-Tianjin region ($1.14 trillion) has an economic size comparable to Australia ($1.13 trillion);
  • The Pearl River Delta ($1.89 trillion) rivals that of the economy of South Korea ($1.83 trillion)

An economic force to be reckoned with

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) projected that that the top 600 global urban centers (based on GDP) will account for more than half of the world’s GDP.

MGI further predicted that by 2025, 136 new cities are expected to enter the top 600, all of them from the developing world and overwhelmingly—100 new cities—from China.

The foregoing data demonstrates that Chinese cities are economic powerhouses to be reckoned with.

China is touted to replace the US as the next superpower at least according to the opinions of some experts.

Others argue that with the presence of ever growing economies of Japan and India, the ever expanding Tiger economies of East Asia such as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hongkong and with the emergence of rapidly developing economies of ASEAN countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, it will come out as no surprise that the economic world will shift its attention to Asia in the not-too-distant future.

Will we ever a see this economic power shift from the West to the East in the years to come?

It’s a thought-provoking stuff to tinker with.

Source: Big Think, Business Insider, The Visual Capitalist

Photo: Visual Capitalist

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