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2004; Button et al. 2006; Taylor et al. 2011). Moreover, empirical evidence
suggests that the importance of major urban nodes (Limtanakool et al.
2007) within such networks is also reinforced by the existence of hubs
within the global air (COL 2002; Burghouwt 2005), rail, and marine trans-
portation systems (Leinbach and Capineri 2007). In addition, there is also
clear indication that the performance of these global-cities is also playing
an increasingly important role even with respect to their own hinterland
local, national and continental economies (e.g., Glaeser 2005; COL 2005a;
2006b; 2007c; HMT-DTI 2001, BTRE 2004).
For example, if we take one particular aspect of this notion of con-
nectivity, namely that of the relationship between the location of major
corporate headquarter functions and the spatial structure of global
intercontinental airline linkages, recent evidence from European regions
suggests that, controlling for endogeneity bias, the supply of direct
intercontinental flights is found to be a major determinant of corporate
headquarter location decisions (Bel and Fageda 2008). While proximity
to large markets and specialist suppliers is also important as expected,
the size of the city has little if any explanatory power, and the size of the
city relative to the country is not at all significant. As such, in the modern
European context, urban scale and national scale alone appear to be much
less important as location determinants for key corporate coordination
and control functions than the structure of global airline networks (Bel
and Fageda 2008). These observations are also supported by the findings
of Ni and Kresl (2010) who found that the most important element in
the competitiveness rankings for global cities is connectivity, rather than
urban size or structure.
Additional empirical evidence in support of these findings comes from
Button et al. (1999) and Wickham and Vecchi (2008). Button et al. (1999)
examined the relationship between US high technology employment and
the location of hub airports. They found that proximity to a hub airport
increases local high-technology employment, and the Granger causality
test implies that the former drives the latter. Following the case study
research of Wickham and Vecchi (2008) the reason for this is that proxim-
ity to hub airports allows companies, and small companies in particular,
to easily access a much wider market, thereby reducing the constraints
associated with a lack of scale. Moreover, the importance of the access
to the hub airport appears to dominate any role played by local cluster
institutions, a finding which is consistent with the Bel and Fageda (2008)
finding that the size of the city is not significant.
Following the connectivity arguments, the reasons for these findings
are that the spatial network structure of global airline system (Grubesic et
al. 2008, 2009) determines the geographical patterns of knowledge flows
