Next week’s Economist Magazine has a great feature on the world’s most competitive cities.
New York is the world’s most competitive city, according to the Global Urban Competitiveness Project. The study ranks 500 cities on their ability to attract and use resources to generate wealth. The cities are assessed on nine measures, including income, economic growth, innovation, jobs, prices and the presence of multinational firms. The report found that the gap between the best-performing cities and the worst is widening. Indeed, there is a fairly large gap between the top two cities, New York and London, and Tokyo in third place. Cities in Europe and North America are richest, but China has the fastest-growing ones. Asian cities also score highly in patent registrations and attracting multinational companies.
Not surprising that NYC, London, and Tokyo – the ’superstar cities’ – top the list and are going in the right direction. But what about the others? Emerging cities such as Dubai which would not have been found on this list a few years ago are climbing the ranks. What do you think it would take to get your city on this list?
August 14th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
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.
s
August 14th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
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.
August 14th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
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?
August 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
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.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
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.