After reading about
Brits coming to New York to shop I got to thinking about the economics of New York City. What interests me is how diverse the cities revenue stream must be. Clearly finance is a major contributor (according to
Wikipedia is accounts for 1/3 of the city's GDP), but tourism must play a large role as well. As the strength of the dollar decreases, the strength of New York City as an international tourist destination increases. Clearly this isn't enough to make up for lost revenues, but it's kind of a fascinating idea to me nonetheless.
Anyhow, in the course of looking for sources of revenue for the city (which I wasn't able to find and would really appreciate it if someone could track down), I did manage to uncover
NYCdata (which has lots of good stats about NYC) and
this New York Times article from 1913 which breaks down how the city made it's $197.7 million.