Winning Global Markets: How Businesses Invest and Prosper in the World's High-Growth Cities

Chapter 2How City Metropolitan Regions Compete in the Global Economy

Although many cities are looking for more growth, their chances of successfully attracting multinational companies (MNCs) depend on their individual extrinsic and intrinsic characteristics. We have identified 11 characteristics that make a difference: the city's or metropolitan region's scale, the nature of its demographics, its logistics, its potential for awarding incentives, and whether it has industrial clusters, good supply chains, a favorable central government policy, social stability, political and civic leadership, institutional strength, and commercial strength. Cities that are blessed with many of these characteristics do better than cities that lack them. Here, we examine and illustrate each characteristic in turn.

Scale

Larger cities, cities with scale and infrastructure and talent resources, are better able to compete for MNCs and large companies than smaller communities. It is unlikely that a small town could offer the size of opportunity that a large business might need. We see most major urban centers in the world extending their market scale and capacities through metropolitan organization and through city region infrastructure agreements to create superior demand and supply conditions for prospective enterprises to perform and prosper.

According to the pioneering work of Bruce Katz and the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program,¹ Denver is an outstanding example of transformation. ...