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Seattle is one of 19 “knowledge capitals” in the United States and Europe, according to a wide-ranging study released today by the Brookings Institution. Authored by Jesus Leal Trujillo and Joseph Parilla, the report examines the 123 largest metro economies on the planet. Together, they produce one-third of global gross domestic product despite having only 13 percent of the world’s population.

They describe knowledge capitals as “highly productive innovation centers…with talented workforces and elite research universities. These regions are at the world’s innovation frontier, and thus constantly challenged to generate new knowledge and ideas to sustain growth.”

The list contained the usual suspects, such as San Jose, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Stockholm. But Portland also made the list, as well as San Diego and Denver. They are ranked by 16 metrics, including GDP, growth, university research, educational attainment, internet speed and “tradable clusters.” The latter are “typically anchored by globally engaged firms, which have valuable spillovers for local economies.”

For example, Seattle ranked fifth in GDP per worker in 2015, but 10th in annual average GDP per worker growth from 2000 to 2015. Seattle generally ranked high-to-middle in the different measurements.

Beyond knowledge capitals, the metros fall into global giants, Asian anchors, emerging gateways, factory China, American middleweights and international middleweights. It sweeps in plenty of competitors. You can read the entire report and see the interactive charts here.

It offers a different lens than the famous “Alpha City” report by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) at Loughborough University in England. The think tank analyzed the “intercity connectivities” of the world’s leading “strategic places.” Think New York and London as Alpha-plus cities. In that report, Seattle ranked as a Beta City. Rising would take an enormous increase in population, something we all want, right?


Today’s Econ Haiku:

Stumpf gets Congress-shamed

And the Justice Department?

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