Shenzhen took ninth place among world cities, and a leading place among the cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), in a ranking of global urban competitiveness, according to a report released at an online seminar Tuesday.

The Global Urban Competitiveness Report 2020-2021 is the result of cooperative research conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and U.N.-Habitat focusing on sustainable urban competitiveness, urban land and urban finance. It was headed by Marco Kamiya, head of the Urban Economy and Finance Branch of U.N.-Habitat, and Ni Pengfei, assistant to the director of the National Academy of Economic Strategy, CASS.

Through theoretical research and empirical investigation, the report establishes an indicator system to measure the economic competitiveness and sustainable competitiveness of more than 1,000 cities in the world.

The report showed the GBA takes a leading place in competitiveness in China.

In economic competitiveness, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou are three core engines. Shenzhen takes ninth place, Hong Kong takes 11th place and Guangzhou takes 42nd place in the global ranking. The report showed the average strength of economic competitiveness of the GBA (0.75) is lower than that of the Tokyo Bay Area (0.94), San Francisco Bay Area (0.86) and New York Bay Area (0.84).

The sustainability competitiveness of the Greater Bay Area cities is graded into three tiers. Hong Kong (4), Shenzhen (9) and Guangzhou (69) are in the first tier as core cities which are ranked among the top 100 cities. Dongguan (119), Foshan (123), Macao (138), Zhongshan (160) and Zhuhai (194) are among the second tier as the main stream, while Huizhou (296), Jiangmen (390) and Zhaoqing (487) are among the third tier as supporting cities.

In science and technology innovation, GBA cities get 0.482 points, much higher than global average 0.316 and China’s average of 0.269. It is much lower than New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo bay areas, that all scored above 0.7 points.

The technology index of the core cities of Hong Kong (14), Shenzhen (30) and Guangzhou (40) is higher than 0.7 points.