City mercantilism and consequences
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Urban areas compete with one another for people, goods, capital, ideas and other inputs of economic activity. Under the rubric of globalization, instead of only maintaining or improving the initial stock of assets in a city, the power of a place to attract outside flows of economic activity from elsewhere is increasingly important to economic development. Similarly, global or world cities are characterized as the command and control points through which these global economic flows operate. In response to the heightened mobility of highly-skilled labor across national borders, research has begun to examine the role of international human capital as an economic flow. This paper will examine the role of places in determining where the highly-skilled go in the global economy by viewing global city command and control functions as requiring unique labor flows.
Migrants, markets and multinationals: city competition
Globalization has increased the role of a country's capital city as an agent of cross-national cooperation. The arduous task of solving urban problems can no longer be handled by a single city or viewed as the domestic affair of a nation-state that cannot be interfered by others. In Northeast Asia, the three capital city governments of Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo have taken steps to cooperate among themselves through promoting the exchange of capital, labor, information, and technology.
Globalization and inter-city cooperation in Asia
There are three purposes: (1) to illustrate diversity amongst world cities; (2) to show how this reflects/constitutes power relativities between cities; and (3) to place debates on diversity and power on a firm empirical basis. The power of cities is interpreted both as a capacity ('power over') and as a medium ('power to'). World cities are treated as global service centres and the world city network is conceptualised as being 'interlocked' through provision of business and financial services by global firms. The study is primarily empirical and uses a global data set comprising information on100 global service firms in 123 world cities. Seven different ways of measuring and illustrating power differentials are presented: global network connectivity, banking/finance connectivity, dominant centres, global command centres, regional command centres, high connectivity gateways, and gateways to emerging markets.
Diversity and Power in the World City Network
Purchase Richard Florida's related book As I walked across the campus of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University one delightful spring day, I came upon a table filled with young people chatting and enjoying the spectacular weather. Several had identical blue T-shirts with "Trilogy@CMU" written across them---Trilogy being an Austin, Texas-based software company with a reputation for recruiting our top students. I walked over to the table.