Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 7.3
The world's most productive cities 2002-2004
US cities
City
population
4
(million)
City per
capita
produc-
tivity (US
$000 PPP)
Non US
OECD
cities
City
population
(million)
City per
capita
produc-
tivity (US
$000 PPP)
San Francisco
4.2
62.3
London
7.4
46.2
Washington DC
5.1
61.6
Paris
11.2
42.7
Boston
4.4
58.0
Dublin
1.6
38.9
Seattle
3.2
54.4
Vienna
2.2
37.6
Minneapolis
3.1
53.0
Stockholm
2.2
36.7
New York
18.7
52.8
Stuttgart
2.7
36.4
Denver
2.3
50.8
Milan
7.4
35.6
Philadelphia
5.8
50.5
Lyon
1.6
35.2
Dallas
5.7
50.1
Munich
6.1
35.2
Atlanta
4.7
47.8
Oslo
1.7
35.0
Houston
5.2
47.4
Sydney
4.2
35.0
San Diego
2.9
46.8
Brussels
3.8
35.0
Chicago
9.4
45.6
Toronto
4.7
34.9
Los Angeles
12.9
45.3
Helsinki
1.8
34.0
Detroit
4.5
44.0
Frankfurt
5.6
33.6
Sources:
OECD (2007, pp. 38-40); World Bank (2006, 2008b)
5
; McCann and Acs (2011).
For the rich countries, apart from the cases of USA, Japan and Korea,
city size is not an indicator of city productivity. Indeed, within the OECD,
for cities of over 6 million inhabitants, there is actually a weak but statis-
tically significant negative cross-sectional relationship between city per
capita productivity and city population (OECD 2006). Obviously, if the
largest cities from the developing countries listed in Table 7.2 were also to
be included in such cross-sectional estimations, then the effect of popula-
tion scale will be very much more negative amongst mega-cities than is the
case with just the OECD cities. On the other hand, for cities of less than 10
million, the positive relationship between city per capita productivity and
OECD city population is both statistically significant and strong (OECD
2007). Further evidence in favour of this argument comes from the fact
that amongst the rich countries, 12 out of the 15 most entrepreneurial
cities are small to medium sized cities (Acs et al. 2008), while eleven out of
the world's fifteen most competitive cities are small to medium sized (COL
2008). As such, amongst OECD cities there appears to be something of an
∩-shaped relationship between city per capita productivity and population
scale. Moreover, over recent decades, more cities in the developed world
