The chart above shows the state and city economies of the European Union. The largest metropolitan economy, London, would rank seventh if it were a state. The list only includes the metropolitan areas that are amongst the 300 largest metropolitan economies in the world.

Findings

Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands are the only EU countries that do not have any EU cities with economies larger than them.

Cities not included in the list (with the exception of Vilnius and Thessaloniki) all have smaller GDPs than Malta.

Not a single EU city has a GDP over $1 trillion.

Caveats

The data is from 2016.

State and city data come from two different sources.

State data was converted from euros to dollars at the average 2016 0.77 euros to dollars rate.

Vilnius ($20 billion - 2014) and Thessaloniki ($19.808 billion - 2011) also have larger economies than Malta but are not among the world's 300 largest urban economies that Brookings looked into and so are not included on the chart.

Details

Only two cities crack the top ten economies in the EU. A total of 75 cities (the 73 in the study and Vilnius and Thessaloniki) have larger economies than the smallest EU state's, Malta, GDP.

It takes the 11 largest metropolitan GDPs (London, Paris, Rhine-Ruhr, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Milan, Madrid, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, and Vienna) to best the largest state GDP (Germany).

Sources

Brookings Institution. "Global Metro Monitor." Accessed December 17, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-metro-monitor/.

Eurostat. 2017. "Gross Domestic Product at Market Prices. Accessed October 26, 2017. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/refreshTableAction.do?tab=table&plugin=1&pcode=tec00001&language=en.