Bangkok
The world's most extreme primate city — 40x larger economy than the next Thai city, half of national GDP, but per capita growth has flatlined.
Bangkok's economy is 40 times larger than the next biggest Thai city. In 1980, its population was 51 times that of the second-largest urban centre — the most extreme primate city ratio ever recorded globally. This is not a capital with a dominant position; it is a country with a single economic organ.
The city was founded in 1782 when King Rama I moved the capital across the Chao Phraya River from Thonburi, and its full ceremonial name — at 168 characters, the longest place name in the world — reflects the absolute centrality the Thai monarchy bestowed on it. Every institution, every ministry, every major company, every international flight routes through Bangkok. The 2011 floods, which inundated industrial estates surrounding the city and disrupted global hard-drive supply chains, demonstrated what happens when a country builds its entire productive capacity within the flood plain of a single river delta.
The Bangkok Metropolitan Region's 11.4 million residents generate roughly half of Thailand's $526 billion GDP. The city's economic output reached 8.1 trillion baht ($231 billion) in 2022 — wholesale and retail trade leads at 24%, followed by manufacturing (14.3%), real estate (12.4%), and transport (11.6%). Bangkok ranked as the world's most-visited city in 2025 by Euromonitor International. Tourism contributes approximately 18% of national GDP.
But the Wikipedia gap is stagnation hiding behind impressive absolute numbers. Bangkok's per capita GDP growth has flatlined — roughly matching population growth, which means the city is running in place. Meanwhile, Thailand's secondary cities are growing per capita GDP nearly 15 times faster than Bangkok. The World Bank has explicitly warned that over-concentration in Bangkok constrains national productivity, and recommended shifting investment to secondary cities to maintain competitiveness.
The biological parallel is a hypertrophied organ — like a liver that has grown to consume disproportionate blood flow, Bangkok absorbs so much of Thailand's capital, talent, and infrastructure investment that the rest of the body starves. The country's potential growth rate for 2023-2030 has dropped to 2.7%, half a percentage point below prior decades, partly because Bangkok's dominance prevents the economic complexity that comes from having multiple competing centres.