Move over Hong Kong, here comes... Chengdu?

What does the far-inland provincial capital of Chengdu have on cosmopolitan and financial centres such as Hong Kong and Shanghai?

A lot, when it comes to growth in jobs and income, according to a report on Asia's fastest-growing and most dynamic cities, released by United States-based think tank Milken Institute.

Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and more than 1,500km from China's highly developed coast, ranked third in the Best-Performing Cities Asia report while Shanghai came in 10th. Nowhere to be seen in the Top 10, Hong Kong landed hard in 14th place.

Mainland Chinese cities took six of the top 10 spots in the report. Shenzhen and Guangzhou took the first and second places, respectively. Chengdu and Tianjin grabbed the third and fourth spots while national capital Beijing came in sixth.

The report, the Milken Institute's first ever for the Asia region, is not a mark against the financial prowess or cultural standing of the cities.

On the contrary, it explicitly did not factor in quality of life but rather took a reading on four metrics over two set periods of time that the institute said reflect dynamism in urban economies; namely job growth, income growth, growth in high-value-added industries and per capita household income.

"Just being a key financial centre doesn't mean you're going to rank very high on something like job growth," Minoli Ratnatunga, one of the authors of the report, told the South China Morning Post.