A granular look at China’s southern megalopolis

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (often referred to by the acronym GBA) is one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. With almost 90 million people, the region stretches far beyond Hong Kong and the historic hub of Guangzhou; adjacent cities including Dongguan and Foshan have boomed alongside their manufacturing industries.

We've taken a granular look at the region's 11 main urban centers, comparing their economic specialties, employment and more.

Our first chart looks at these cities over two decades as measured by gross domestic product. Hong Kong was by far the biggest economy in the region in 2006, but the electronics hub of Shenzhen surpassed it in 2017. Guangzhou, Guangdong's capital, had also surpassed Hong Kong in GDP terms by 2020.

The GBA (which is inclusive of the region known as the Pearl River Delta) stood out as a focus of China's 1980s and 1990s export-driven economic growth, but its relative importance has declined somewhat as industrialization spread to the rest of the economy. In 2006, the GBA accounted for about 16% of Chinese GDP; that share has fallen to about 11%.

Our second set of charts breaks down the economies of all 11 cities to show the importance of various sectors. The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau stand out for their relative lack of industry and focus on financial and other services, such as tourism. Primary industry is most notable in Jiangmen and Zhaoqing (a hub for gold mining).

We express this differently in our table correlating the 11 cities' industrial similarity with each other; a score of 1 would mean an identical sectoral profile. Hong Kong and Macau are again the outliers, being similar only to each other; among the manufacturing cities, Dongguan, Zhongshan and Huizhou display a high similarity.

We've added several more visualizations that break down the cities' manufacturing employment as well as consumer wealth, as measured by retail sales trends and per capita GDP.

Finally, we compare the GBA to another megalopolis - the Shanghai-focused and much more populous Yangtze River Delta. This greater size consistently makes the Yangtze Delta more important to Chinese exports as a whole (35-36% of foreign trade value, vs. 19-21% for the southern cities), but the nine cities in Guangdong province have a much higher dependency on trade - with a ratio as high as 75% of the economy. This highlights the region's vital role in global supply chains.