GROWTH, unemployment, industrial production—data for comparing countries is in rich supply. But if economists want to analyse and contrast cities, they have less to go on: most information is not standardised and is thus hard to compare. This is a problem, given the world’s rapid urbanisation and cities’ ever growing economic weight: the UN expects the urban population to double between 2010 and 2050, from 2.6 billion to 5.2 billion.
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