What kind of economy will L.A. have in 2025?

Quite a strong one, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, which places L.A. in sixth position worldwide in gross domestic product - below NY, Tokyo, Shanghai, London and Beijing. The study projects that Los Angeles will contribute around $300 billion toward global GDP growth in 2025. Those are the macro numbers - what's missing is the kind of economy - not to mention lifestyle or workstyle - that L.A. or any of the other metro areas are likely to have. (For good reason - we are talking 15 years down the road.) That said, one of the more interesting points brought up by McKinsey is the growth of middle-income households in the emerging market cities.

From 2007 to 2025, we estimate that nearly 140 million households in the City 600 will enter the consuming category globally. Of these, 120 million will be in developing cities--75 million of them in China alone. Therefore, the number of households in developing region cities is larger than the combined tally of consuming households of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe today. But this is not just a story of rising middle-class cohorts in emerging cities; the number of rich households in these regions will increase, too. The China region, South Asia, and Latin America are together likely to have more than 30 million households with incomes of more than $70,000 a year, close to the number of rich households we expect to see in Western Europe and Northeast Asia together.