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and also the rankings of global financial centres (COL 2008) are calculated
in this way, and they therefore provide composite indicators of the level of
global connectivity of different cities viewed from different perspectives.
Not surprisingly, there is a very close correspondence between the level
of global connectivity of the cities and their GDP per capita. Of the top
50 most productive cities in the world, 35 of them are in the top 50 of the
global-city centres of commerce rankings (Mastercard 2008). If we were
also to include the highest productivity non-OECD cities of Tel Aviv,
Taipei, Singapore and Hong Kong,
9
then the number would rise to 39 out
of the top 50; in other words, the most productive cities in the world are
also in the top 50 globally connected cities. In terms of the global financial
centres, ignoring small tax havens,
10
30 out of the top 37 global financial
centres are among the world's 50 most productive cities. Of the ten largest
cities from the newly-industrializing world which from Table 7.2 are all
amongst the 15 largest cities in the world, nine are amongst the top 70
worldwide centres of commerce (Mastercard 2008), and two are also
amongst the top 37 global centres of finance (Mastercard 2008).
This striking correspondence between the worldwide centres of com-
merce rankings (Mastercard 2008), the global financial centre rankings
(COL 2008), and the world city-productivity rankings (OECD 2006),
is consistent with the argument that the cities with the highest levels of
global connectivity are also largely the world's most productive cities.
Moreover, these observations are consistent with the previous arguments
that the performance of these global cities is largely related to the scale of
the global engagement of the companies located there, and in particular,
the globally competitive MNEs. There are good reasons for this. The com-
bination of localized agglomeration advantages plus a range of specific
network effects which are characteristic of key nodal locations, allied with
major economies of transportation and communication, appears to maxi-
mize a firm's global market potential, exactly as the theoretical chapters
in this topic suggest. These 'global' urban centres are therefore locations
which not only exhibit significant agglomeration advantages, but which
also primarily interact with other similar globally-oriented cities in other
countries, rather than with other smaller urban centres within their own
countries, which tend to be oriented more towards the provision of local
goods for local markets. In many sectors such as financial services (COL
2007a, b; Mastercard 2007) there is already much evidence that global
markets are increasingly dominated by networks of global cities such as
London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney and New York (Sassen 2002). The increas-
ing relative dominance of these global cities appears to be associated with
the density of knowledge and information technology assets in the city
(e.g., Sassen 2002; Taylor et al. 2002a, b; Derudder et al. 2003; Simmie
