The Emerging Urban World-2025

World gross economic product (Photo credit: Arenamontanus)

We'd better get ready...the urban world is shifting. Today only 600 cities generate over 60 per cent of global growth, but by 2025 the membership of this group, the City 600, will change. Companies will need to adjust their strategy to include the 577 fast-growing "middleweight cities" and that will affect us all.  Over the next 15 years, the center of gravity of the urban world will move south and, even more decisively, east. Cities in China and India will have an outsized role in the global economy.


By 2025, one-third of these developed-market cities will no longer make the top 600; and one out of every 20 cities in emerging-markets is likely to see its rank drop out of the top 600. 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. In fact, China is projected to overtake the U. S. as the world leader in trade as early as 2015, just three years away.

In 2050, ten countries will command World Trade:

#1.    China           18.2%
#2.    India               9.0%
#3.    USA               6.6%
#4.    Germany        3.5%
#5.    Korea             3.4%

These five countries will be followed by Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the UK to round out the top ten.

 McKinney Global Institute, the valuable data source, provides a wealth of information on this subject.

Most importantly, what does this all mean to the American people?  It means that we need to prepare for the coming changes in the urban world.  We must find a way to grow the middle class to sustain our economic viability.  We need to focus on American goods and services in a global economy and educate our current and potential workforce to be competitive in the world market.  Education, training, infrastructure... all will experience drastic reductions in funding in the Ryan Budget currently circulating in Congress. Health care, an aging population, and other issues must be addressed by politicians to prepare our country for the future.

If we look at the lack of accomplishments of the current Congress and project a continuation of the "just say no" stance of the past two years, we will be doomed to become unable to compete in the coming global market. Time's a wasting!