Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cities and another 4 per cent accounted for by Latin American cities.
Obviously, rapid urban growth rates in developing countries in particular
mean that in 2025 the top 600 GDP cities will not be the same cities as those
listed today. Many cities from the developed world which are currently
in the top 600 rankings will fall out of the rankings and by 2025 will be
replaced almost entirely by cities from the developing world (MGI 2011a).
Interestingly, however, the increasing role played by cities, and in particular
by cities in developing countries, in global economic growth, is not expected
to come from the very largest cities. The contribution of the world's largest
100 cities (defined in terms of economic output) to global output is actu-
ally expected to fall from 38 per cent in 2007 to 35 per cent in 2025. Indeed,
and rather contrary to many popular assumptions, over recent years most
mega-cities of over ten million inhabitants have not grown faster than
their own economies, and many appear to be experiencing diseconomies
of scale. Their share of global output growth in 2025 is forecast to be some
10 per cent, such that the contribution of the mega-cities to global output
is expected to fall from 14 per cent in 2007 to 13 per cent by 2025. As such,
while major cities and city-regions are obviously going to continue to be
major investment locations for MNEs in the coming decades, the emerg-
ing patterns of multinational investment both in developed and developing
countries may be rather different from what we have observed over recent
decades. These issues are discussed in more detail in the following chapters.
6.6 CONCLUSIONS
As we have seen above, globalization is a process which has been taking
place over several centuries, and in this sense the current phenomena of
globalization represents nothing particularly new in comparison to the
previous long run historical trends (Steger 2003). On the other hand,
however, there is now enormous evidence that the current era of glo-
balization, which has lasted for approximately two decades, is in many
ways qualitatively very different from the previous ones, ensuring that
the magnitude of international interdependence is now far greater than in
earlier times (Steger 2003; MacGillivray 2006). Yet, the reasons why this
is the case is because of the particular set of structural changes which were
technological, institutional and organizational in nature, and which took
place at more or less the same time during the period spanning the end
of the 1980s and through to the mid-1990s. In all respects, trade, cross-
border investment, and international transactions appear to be becoming
relatively more geographically localized, at the level of both super-regions
and also at the level of sub-national city-regions.
