Global networks, cities and economic performance: Observations from an analysis of cities in Europe and the USA

Abstract

International audienceThe network paradigm has been highly influential in spatial analysis in the globalisation era. As economies across the world have become increasingly integrated, so-called global cities have come to play a growing role as central nodes in the networked global economy. The idea that a city’s position in global networks benefits its economic performance has resulted in a competitive policy focus on promoting the economic growth of cities by improving their network connectivity. However, in spite of the attention being given to boosting city connectivity little is known about whether this directly translates to improved city economic performance and, if so, how well connected a city needs to be in order to benefit from this. In this paper we test the relationship between network connectivity and economic performance between 2000 and 2008 for cities with over 500,000 inhabitants in Europe and the USA to inform European policy

Connectivity Along Overland Corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative

“…A key conceptual reasonin addition to the lack of data on inter-city flows of goodsfor quasiexclusively focusing on passenger transport is that knowledge flows between urban economies foremost move through the people communicating through these networks. This results in the emergence of all sorts of asymmetries between cities based on their level of connectivity to other cities in passenger networks (Neal 2011;Pain et al, 2015). In addition, O'Connor (2010) and Ducruet and Notteboom (2012) show that the possibility for freight movements, although very important and central to the BRI as a concept, have a more complex and implicit relation with urban economies than the movement of people.…”

Reshaping the urban hierarchy: patterns of information diffusion on social media

“…Another direction is related to constructing the urban hierarchy, which involves expanding the numbers of regions to build a more complete urban hierarchy or introducing other metrics that can rank cities and regions differently. Other possible indexes can include the Creative City Index (Hartley et al 2012) or the economic performance and network connectivity of cities (Pain et al 2015). The hierarchy of political importance in the country may also be important, as Washington, D.C. clearly stands out in this research.…”

Disentangling agglomeration and network externalities: A conceptual typology

“…Taken together, this suggests we can define the spatial‐economic dimension of both types of externalities as follows: agglomeration externalities are defined as externalities that attenuate with distance, while networks are externalities where the effect of distance has become negligible. This distinction has been fruitfully applied in empirical research (e.g., Bentlage et al ; Camagni et al ; Pain et al ).…”

“…However, in spite of this consensus, which takes the form of a ‘stylized fact’, actual research on how (much) and why this matters generates a fair dose of controversy. For instance, scholars still puzzle over the causal direction between the development of agglomerations and inter‐agglomeration networks (Rozenblat ; Neal , ; Pain et al ). Similarly, it remains unclear whether interaction patterns between the two remain stable over time.…”

“…Although these are all pertinent questions and debates, they risk becoming unproductive once there is ambiguity regarding the research object (van Meeteren et al ): as soon as polyvalence arises in terms of how we understand what an ‘agglomeration’ or what a ‘network’ is, and how these are spatially articulated, the debate becomes muddled. Adding to the confusion is that these fundamentally academic questions tend to get adopted by policy‐makers as they start considering urban size and/or urban network connectivity as policy goals to allocate scarce public resources (van Oort et al ; Rodriguez‐Pose and Fitjar ; Pain et al ).…”