The report, "The Largest City Economies in the World in 2005 and 2020," published by the international consultancy company PwC, cited the world's richest city as Tokyo, the capital of Japan, with its $1.19 trillion yearly income. This means that Tokyo alone is producing more than many major economies including Canada, Spain, Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia or Taiwan. New York follows Tokyo with $1.13 trillion. Ýstanbul passes nine EU member countries with its economy's size. These countries are Slovakia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Letonia, Estonia, Greek Cyprus and Malta.     

PwC arranged the list according to the relative size of the economies of the cities, and took their average income per capita levels into account. To be able to overcome this challenging task of producing a ranking by GDP at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates, the company applied to data from a number of reputable sources like the OECD, the UN and the World Bank as well as national statistical agencies.    As it regards the methodology, the PwC adopted the UN definitions of urban agglomerations from their latest World Urbanization Prospects report. The top 30 cities ranked by GDP accounted for around 16 percent of world GDP in 2005 and this share rises to around 25 percent for the top 100 cities, claimed the report. Only five emerging economy cities are currently in the top 30 -- Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Moscow and Rio de Janeiro. But the illustrative projections of the report suggested that all of these, except Rio, will all move up the GDP rankings by 2020 and be joined in the top 30 by fast-growing cities such as Shanghai, Mumbai, Ýstanbul and Beijing. Ýstanbul, according to the projection, is expected to rise among the largest 30, with a $287 billion GDP in 2020.

London is projected to grow somewhat faster than leading rivals such as Tokyo, New York, Chicago and Paris, moving up to fourth place by 2020, but other "old Europe" cities like Milan, Madrid and Rome seem likely to slide down the rankings as the emerging mega-city economies of Asia and Latin America rise, said the report.

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