The paper discusses Taipei's status as a regional global city within the context of the theoretical framework of Hill and Kim. The discussion is based on both theoretical and empirical considerations. On the one hand, theoretical discourses revolving around global cities tend to ignore the possible variations between global cities, so much so that the type based on New York has been regarded as a standard global city and the politico-economic peculiarities of Tokyo and Seoul have tended to be downplayed. On the other hand, Taipei, a Third World city that might gain the status of a regional global city, has not hitherto received extensive examination and observation. Resorting to the binary framework formulated by Hill and Kim to emphasise the salient features of Tokyo and Seoul, the author describes and underscores Taipei's development experiences.

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This paper explores whether Taipei is an innovative city by critically examining Taipei's industrial and economic performance, developmental visions and spatial planning, as well as institutional settings and political contexts. With the aid of institutionalist perspective, the author argues that Taipei's innovative efforts are mostly policy innovation, rather than institutional innovation. The author also describes the institutional dynamics that have caused the lack of Taipei's institutional innovation. The case study of Taipei could be helpful in conducting comparative studies on urban innovation. PrefaceThrough an institutionalist analysis, this paper intends to investigate whether Taipei as a semi-peripheral world city is an innovative city by examining secondary data and by conducting a series of short interviews. This paper is based on two research motives. First, a number of studies of and debates revolving around world cities/global cities have demonstrated that an institutionalist analysis is indispensable in relevant case studies and comparative analyses. The paradigm of world cities/global cities has revealed the macro structure of the world city system embedded in and intertwined with the globalizing and incessantly evolutionary capitalist system [42], but it has been indicated that the contexts and embeddedness of the cities being studied are important, too [14,45,46]. This suggests that an institutionalist analysis is necessary to better understand the institutional dynamics of and structuring effects on various world cities because an institutionalist analysis is

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