Unpacking the advanced producer services complex in world cities: Charting professional networks, localisation economies and markets

Abstract

Limited empirical evidence in support of world-city formation has been the ‘dirty little secret’ of the eponymous research area. Since the late 1990s, inspired by Sassen’s account of The Global City, the field focused on advanced producer services (APS) firms as primary actors in world-city formation. While generating robust insights into the shifting geographies of world cities, empirical attention has mostly focused on mapping inter-urban world city networks formed by APS firms. Despite a rich literature on APS clusters, the degree to which specific intra-urban agglomerations and their inter-firm connections shape up has received little systematic attention. Based on a company survey in Brussels (Belgium), our study charts interactions between APS professionals to better understand the geographies, quality and intensity of their encounters. Our findings reveal that the Brussels-based APS cluster constitutes a hybrid of an industrial complex with stable formal ties and a social network based on informal exchange. Financial services assume a central position in what might be called ‘a para-financial services complex’, revealing close ties with legal services, accountancy and audit, and ICT. Geographically, we find that the APS complex depends on fine-grained localisation economies, which allow a small share of APS professionals to service both domestic and international clients. We conclude that APS actors in Brussels exhibit a strong domestic anchoring, indicative of the continued relevance of world cities as national financial centres amidst financial globalisation.

The advanced producer services complex as an obligatory passage point: Evidence from rent extraction by investment banks

“…That is, financiers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, together perform an economic function that is more than the sum of its parts, like bringing an IPO into being (Pan et al, 2020). In a recent article, Bassens et al (2020) confirm the existence of the APS complex through an analysis of its internal relations and note that it is particularly the 'para-financial' complex centred around finance, law and accountancy that exhibits the characteristics of an intertwined cluster. W� ojcik (2020) also confirms that finance has increasingly been the 'propulsive actor' that determines the direction and strategy of the APS complex as a whole.…”

“…Key in this notion is that the strategic positioning within financial networks (Van Meeteren and Bassens, 2016) enables the APS complex as a fraction of capital to extract class-monopoly rents (Harvey, 1974) from the wider economy. The APS complex, in general and tangibly in its local manifestations in financial centres, is comprised of strong formal and informal interdependencies within and between APS sectors, with finance acting as the crucial intermediary (Bassens et al, 2020). However, the relation between these interdependencies and rent extraction remains unexplored.…”

Welche Standorte wählen wissensintensive Unternehmen in Deutschland? – Ein Erklärungsrahmen mit exponential random graph modeling

“…While focusing on the location patterns of such firms, several studies found different location choices among APS sectors at the local city scale. (e.g., Vandermotten and Roelandts 2006;Bassens et al 2020;Chong and Pan 2020;Waiengnier et al 2020). Waiengnier et al's (2020) study on Brussels, for example, shows that the location preference, and therefore the concentration of firms, depends on the size of the firm and the service they provide.…”

Channeling the capital of others: How Luxembourg came to be asset managers’ “plumber” of choice

“…Due to these factors, it should not be a surprise that AMC has developed in the Global Cities famously described by Sassen (2001Sassen ( [1991): New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, among others. It is in these cities where the "command and control" of AMC takes place, activities whose "path-dependent pull" leads to "advanced accumulation [and thus] deepening global core-periphery structures" (Bassens et al, 2021(Bassens et al, : 1288(Bassens et al, -1289.…”

“…Likewise, what roles do the formal and informal structures linking these professionals play in the development of new niches, products, and legislation? Lastly, do the OFC's various actors make up "an industrial complex, marked by stable formal trading links driving location behaviour, or [do] clusters rely on more informal club-like structures where access depends on experience, routine interaction, personal relations and trust" (Bassens et al, 2021(Bassens et al, : 1291?…”