Interesting facts

Bought a copy of The Economist yesterday. I used to read it regularly and found that I was always up-to-date with what was going on in the world – and quite annoyingly clued-up about things in general too.

The Eitai Bridge in Tokyo,  the world's largest city in 2010.

Anyway, in the current edition – and I'd imagine in all issues – there's a page called Liveanomics and it lists various facts about this and that. For instance, the world's fastest growing cities in terms of forecasted annual growth between 2006 and 2020. The fastest is Beihai in China with 10.6 per cent followed by Ghaziabad in India (5.2 per cent), Sana'a in Yemen (5 per cent); Surat in India (5 per cent) and Kabul (4.7 per cent).

What I found staggering, though, was London's demise as one of the world's largest cities. Back in 1950, New York-Newark was the largest city with a population of 12.34 million people. Tokyo was second with 11.27 million people, followed by London with 8.36 million, Paris with 6.52 million and Moscow with 5.36 million.

Today, Tokyo takes top place with 36.67 million, Delhi is second with 22.16 million, Sao Paulo with 20.26 million, Mumbai with 20.04 million and Mexico City with 19.46 million. London is nowhere to be seen! And nor is New York!