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Thursday 11 August 2016 4:13 pm

One chart showing what would happen to the UK’s GDP if you stripped out London

By: Emma Haslett

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Since the Brexit vote and the ensuing realisation of a divide in national political priorities, an increasing amount of noise has been made about turning London into its own state.

Admittedly, that's pretty unlikely – but figures put together for City PM by Statista using research from German think tank Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft suggests what might happen if we did strip London out of the nation's GDP figure.

It doesn't make for happy reading: according to the figures, UK GDP per capita would be 11.2 per cent lower if the capital became its own city state. 

Indeed, figures from EY last year suggested London's average gross value added is likely to rise 3.4 per cent a year by 2018, while per worker, the capital adds 40 per cent more to the economy than the rest of the UK. 

Still – the UK wouldn't come off as badly as some countries, such as Greece, where removing the capital from national GDP would shrink it by 19.9 per cent. Meanwhile, taking Paris out of France's figure would cut it by 15 per cent.

In fact, the only country which would stand to benefit from the capital being stripped out was Germany – where Berlin actually pushes GDP per capital down 0.2 per cent. 

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