Comments on: Who’s Your ‘Competitive’ City ?

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:14:03 +0000

I find the metrics used in this study suspect. A city with many multinational firms and high prices would rank high, even if it has underdeveloped infrastructure, entrenched bureaucracy, and systemic corruption. Moscow, for example, has so much international business simply because there’s no practical alternative to tap the huge market that is Russia.

By: RF

RF — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:57:02 +0000

A – Great find! These folks are associated with the Globalization Network at George Washington.

M – There’s a word.doc summary here. Curious thing is the cities look a little different than what is reported in the Economist. If my read is right, Chicago makes the top 10 (like Steven would suspect). The text reads:
“The top 20 most competitive cities identified by the report are: New York City, London, Tokyo, Paris, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Stockholm, Singapore, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Seoul, Boston, San Diego, Auckland (U.S.), Helsinki, Madrid, Vienna, Philadelphia, and Houston.”

That puts Chi-town in 10th, San Fran in 9th, and the Big TO in 11th.

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:48:50 +0000

I Googled “Global Urban Competitiveness Project” and got several hits, one of which downloaded an English language press release. But I wanted to look at all 500 cities so I went to the basic homepage, http://www.gupc,org and it’s in Chinese!

Is this a Chinese study? Fascinating by itself.
And does anyone know how to get the whole list in English?

By: Zachary Neal

Zachary Neal — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:56:46 +0000

I wonder how the list would change if cities were ranked by competitiveness per capita. Many of the indicators used to generate these rankings are driven by the presence of a large creative class: int’l patents, labor productivity, multinational corporations. But, it isn’t very surprising that the largest pockets of such people are in the largest cities. I would suspect that smaller places with larger concentrations (rather than absolute numbers) of such things would actually be more competitive. They would have, for instance, greater flexibility and fewer infrastructural demands. Imagine the competitiveness of a New York or a Tokyo that wasn’t weighed down by mundane challenges like trash collection.

By: steven

steven — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:40:45 +0000

I surprised not to see Chicago on this list and to see Washington, DC so high. Also, no mention of San Francisco or Silicon Valley.