Where the money actually is
Top cities
Three continents, one method: take the cities that carry the commercial weight, cut them into four tiers, and put them on a map. China's tiers come from a published commercial ranking. America's and Europe's are built from metropolitan GDP.
The 120 cities that hold China's commercial gravity
The top 120 of the 337 prefecture-level cities and above that Yicai ranks each year. The tiers are not a government designation — they are a commercial ranking built from retail brand placement, transport connectivity and platform activity data. 116 of the 120 fall east of the Hu Huanyong line, the 1935 diagonal that still separates roughly 94% of China's population from 6% of it.
Tier assignments from the 2025 City Commercial Charm Ranking (第一财经·新一线城市研究所), the most recent full edition published. Ranks shown are positions in that single ranked list; the tiers are cut points in it. The boundary between second and third tier shifts every year and secondary sources disagree on a handful of cities near it — treat the top of the list as firm and the tail as indicative. Yicai's third tier holds exactly 70 cities, so its four tiers run out at 119; the 120th place in the same single ranked list is Zaozhuang (枣庄), the highest-ranked fourth-tier city, shown here in the third-tier colour and marked as such in its tooltip. Provincial outlines are simplified; Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are drawn as separate administrative units.
The 120 metros that hold America's commercial gravity
The same four-tier shape applied to metropolitan GDP. Together the 120 produce $22.6 trillion — and New York alone out-produces the bottom 40 on this list combined. 89 of the 120 lie east of the 100th meridian, the line John Wesley Powell drew in 1878 to mark where rainfall stops being enough to farm without irrigation. Hawaii and Alaska are excluded.
GDP figures are current-dollar county GDP from the BEA's regional accounts for 2024, aggregated to 2023-vintage Census metropolitan statistical area definitions — the BEA no longer publishes a standalone MSA table. Ranks below about 100 are separated by a few hundred million dollars and could reorder under a different vintage; the 120th place (Fort Wayne, $32.9bn) leads the 121st by $0.3bn, so the cut itself is not a coin-flip. Each metro is placed at its principal city and attributed to that city's state, so multi-state metros such as New York, Washington and Kansas City count once. "First tier" and the other tier names are borrowed from the Chinese ranking to make the three maps comparable; they are not an American convention.
The 120 metros that hold Europe's commercial gravity
Geographic Europe excluding Russia and Turkey, ranked on the same four-tier shape by metropolitan GDP — together €9.6 trillion, of which Paris and London alone account for €1.35 trillion. 53 of the 120 sit within 200 km of the Blue Banana, the corridor from north-west England through the Low Countries and the Rhineland to Lombardy that Roger Brunet identified in 1989 as the continent's economic spine. Paris, famously, sits outside it.
Metro GDP from Eurostat's met_10r_3gdp for 2021 — metropolitan regions are NUTS-3 groupings covering the functional urban area and its commuting zone. UK figures are ONS regional accounts for the same year (17 April 2025 release) converted at the 2021 average of €1.16324 to the pound; Kyiv is Ukrstat's 2021 gross regional product converted at UAH 32.273. Irish figures are restated onto a GNI* basis (×0.5487, CSO 2021), because Eurostat's Irish GDP is inflated by multinational profit and IP flows that do not represent activity in Dublin or Cork — unadjusted, Dublin ranks 4th in Europe and Cork 22nd, which is an artefact of tax accounting rather than commercial weight. Two caveats on the ordering. The Eurostat metro footprint is a statistical container, not a functional city, and where a metro is a single large département or Kreis it gets the whole hinterland for free: Bordeaux out-ranks Toulouse on this basis even though Toulouse's functional urban area is the larger of the two and its output per head is 11% higher. And Berlin's lead over Munich is 2%, inside revision noise — read them as tied for fifth. Finally, the east of the continent is thin here because this ranks nominal output, not population or purchasing power; on GDP per head at purchasing power parity the picture changes considerably. Tier names are borrowed from the Chinese ranking so the three maps read the same way.
Built by Fred Pelard. Hover any dot for detail; click a tier's Only to isolate it. City names that cannot be placed clear of a higher-ranked name are dropped from the map rather than stacked — every one of the 119 is listed beneath each map.