Mumbai - Economy

Economy

Mumbai is India's largest city (by population) and is the financial and commercial capital of the country as it generates 6.16% of the total GDP. It serves as an economic hub of India, contributing 10% of factory employment, 25% of industrial output, 33% of income tax collections, 60% of customs duty collections, 20% of central excise tax collections, 40% of India's foreign trade and 4,000 crore (US$728 million) in corporate taxes.

As of 2008, Mumbai's GDP is 919,600 crore (US$167.37 billion), and its per-capita income in 2009 was 486,000 (US$8,845.2), which is almost three times the national average. Many of India's numerous conglomerates (including Larsen and Toubro, State Bank of India, Life Insurance Corporation of India, Tata Group, Godrej and Reliance), and five of the Fortune Global 500 companies are based in Mumbai. Many foreign banks and financial institutions also have branches in this area, with the World Trade Centre being the most prominent one.

Until the 1970s, Mumbai owed its prosperity largely to textile mills and the seaport, but the local economy has since been diversified to include engineering, diamond-polishing, healthcare and information technology. As of 2008, the Globalization and World Cities Study Group (GaWC) has ranked Mumbai as an "Alpha world city", third in its categories of Global cities. Mumbai is the 3rd most expensive office market in the world. Mumbai was ranked among the fastest cities in the country for business startup in 2009.

State and central government employees make up a large percentage of the city's workforce. Mumbai also has a large unskilled and semi-skilled self-employed population, who primarily earn their livelihood as hawkers, taxi drivers, mechanics and other such blue collar professions. The port and shipping industry is well established, with Mumbai Port being one of the oldest and most significant ports in India. In Dharavi, in central Mumbai, there is an increasingly large recycling industry, processing recyclable waste from other parts of the city; the district has an estimated 15,000 single-room factories.

Most of India's major television and satellite networks, as well as its major publishing houses, are headquartered in Mumbai. The centre of the Hindi movie industry, Bollywood, is the largest film producer in India and one of the largest in the world as well as centre of Marathi Film Industry. Along with the rest of India, Mumbai, its commercial capital, has witnessed an economic boom since the liberalisation of 1991, the finance boom in the mid-nineties and the IT, export, services and outsourcing boom in 2000s.

Mumbai has been ranked 48th on the Worldwide Centres of Commerce Index 2008. In April 2008, Mumbai was ranked seventh in the list of "Top Ten Cities for Billionaires" by Forbes magazine, and first in terms of those billionaires' average wealth.

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