Cities as command and control centres of the world economy: An empirical analysis, 2006–2015

Abstract

Abstract. As a result of their rapid economic growth, several powerful corporate giants have emerged in developing countries, especially in China, operating not only in the traditional manufacturing sector, but also in high-tech industries and finance. Major cities in developing countries have gradually become important command and control centres of the global economy, and have also become powerful enough to be in the same tier as major cities of developed countries around the world. In this paper, I examine the position of cities as command and control centres on the basis of the power of their headquartered corporations. The result shows that until 2012, New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris; i.e. the global cities, were the leading command and control centres. However, the gap between these global cities and Beijing gradually closed, and by 2015, the Chinese capital outranked all the global cities. The outstanding performance of Beijing-based corporations that operate in financial, energy, and construction services sectors is the driving force behind Beijing's increasing global power. In addition, the leading position of the global cities as command and control centres has been threatened by the San Francisco-San Jose metropolitan region, a newly emerging economic hub in the United States.

Mapping Urban Networks through Inter-Firm Investment Linkages: The Case of Listed Companies in Jiangsu, China

“…Coordinating the analysis results of all-industry and subdivided-industry investment networks, we find that Nanjing and Suzhou are the dual cores in Jiangsu Province, and Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen are the top three nationwide centers. This finding is slightly different from the existing ranking of Chinese cities in the world economy [22,23]: Shanghai overtakes Beijing as the most influential node in investment networks. In fact, Shanghai is far ahead of Beijing in terms of both the intensity of investment inflows and the number of times it has been selected as the Top 1 linkage node by Jiangsu's cities.…”

“…Instead, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen dominate the bulk of the domestic financial activities in China [40]. In addition, this study finds the rise of Shenzhen in China's domestic economic exchanges, which is similar to that of Csomós's [22] study: the Command and Control Index value of Shenzhen holds the greatest increase in China's cities from 2006 to 2015. Undoubtedly, the rapid economic development of Shenzhen is inseparable from the support of national policies.…”

“…Against the backdrop of the sizable economic growth of China in recent years, a large number of recent empirical studies have focused on using diverse economic activities to explore the control function or network status of Chinese cities. In the study of the "world city", Csomós [22] found that Beijing has become the leading command and control center of the world economy on the basis of the rich corporate headquarters it hosts. Raźniak's [23] ranking of world economic centers proves Beijing's leading position in China's inland cities.…”

“…Table 5 lists the 13 cities selected by cities in Jiangsu as the TOP 1 linkage nodes. Shanghai (22), Beijing (8), and Nanjing (5) are the top three cities. Shanghai is selected almost twice as often as the sum of Beijing and Nanjing, while the cumulative times of remaining TOP 1 linkage nodes selected is only 12.…”

Urban Planning Against Poverty

“…Certain general trends should nonetheless be borne in mind, given the global nature of this phenomenon, which heavily impacts emerging and developing countries. To begin, there is the synergy between economic development and urban growth as, generally speaking, cities tend to be highly technified hubs and motors of the contemporary econ-omy 2 (Csomós 2017;Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation 2017;Sassen 2011). The concentration of infrastructures and the sophistication of technologies and services are assets that reinforce cities' spatial centrality, economic primacy and social interactions (Duranton 2014).…”