The paper attempts to answer the following key question: how will a city′s world rank change in the face of crisis in its main economic sector? Crisis is defined here as a decline in financial performance in the given sector, which leads to the decline of its constituent firms and corporations on the world economic scene. The World Economic Center Index (WECI) has been created in order to rank cities based on the value of their resident corporations by sector and show their level of stability upon the removal of the most important sector. This provides information on the potential of each analyzed city as well as on its advanced features or area of specialization. Research has shown that nearly half the World Economic Centers are dominated by the financial and materials sectors of the economy. Different sectors dominate different regions of the world. For example, consumer staples and materials were dominant in North America, while information technology and financials were dominant in Europe. In Asia, several sectors tend to dominate the economy. Research has shown that the ability of a principal economic sector to resist economic crisis largely depends on the strength of the command and control function of a city. Finally, a high globalization level of a city is a key determinant of its susceptibility to economic crisis.

The aim of this paper is to discuss changes in the spatial distribution of cities that perform the command and control function created by the largest corporations, based on the method of gravity centres. The analysis was performed both for individual sectors of the economy as well as for the global scale. A shift occurred in an easterly direction. This also pertains to sector indices, although the centroids of knowledge-based sectors, such as information technology and healthcare, shifted the most in the direction of Asia. At the same time, information technology was the only sector whose centroid shifted to the west in the study period. Moreover, the magnitude of the shift of the centre of gravity of the number of corporate headquarters in the studied cities does not converge to the shift of the centroid based on the value of the financial potential of the companies.

This article describes the command and control function of eastern European cities based on the financial performance of the largest corporations with headquarters in the region and the impact of selected sectors on this function. Research has shown that, despite the global economic crisis of 2008–2012, the revenue and net income of the companies studied have increased to some extent. Currently, the strongest “command and control cities” in eastern Europe are Warsaw and Prague. The sector that exerts the greatest influence on the regional command and control function in eastern Europe is the consumer business and transportation sector. The economic crisis has also produced a geographical pattern in eastern Europe that runs counter to current global trends: companies in the region currently tend to concentrate their headquarters in fewer cities, which is becoming common in other parts of the world. The article employs a standardization method based on the mean and standard deviation of financial values for each corporation studied.

The authors propose a new approach to the analysis of cities in a time of potential major crisis in a dominant sector consisting of the largest firms generating the command and control function of a city. This purpose is served by the creation of the Central and Eastern European Economic Centre Index (CEEECI), which reflects the potential of each studied city and its development and/or fields of economic specialisation of its largest companies capable of generating regional command and control (C&C) functions of cities. Research has shown that the C&C functions of cities such as Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest are the most resistant to economic crisis of the dominant sector. More than half of the analysed cities are economically dominated by the consumer business and transportation and manufacturing sectors.

The aim of the study was to analyze changes in the command and control functions of cities in 2006 and 2016 based on the method of gravity centers. The analysis was performed both for individual sectors of the economy as well as for the European economy as a whole. The shift in the center of gravity of the studied command and control functions of cities in the direction of Central Eastern Europe is examined in the paper. The fairly recent development of CEE and European integration increasing to the east and south has triggered the relocation of many companies from west to east and has also increased the importance of local companies. It may therefore be argued that the importance of the command and control functions of cities in developing countries has also increased (Poland, Russia). There is also a related decline in the importance of the so-called blue banana region and cities in Great Britain and Germany. This is especially visible in terms of the number of corporate headquarters in the western part of the continent. However, the shift in capital is not that clear – and both German and British corporations still remain the leaders in Europe.