Ranking world cities: Multinational corporations and the global urban hierarchy

World-city literature often relies on a priori assumptions rather than quan tifiable measures to discern the global urban hierarchy. In search of compa rable international indicators, many studies use the corporate headquarters of multinational corporations (MNCs) as primary locational data. Recognizi ng that MNCs play a dominant role in the global economy, we argue that reli ance on headquarters locations alone distorts the contours of the urban hie rarchy. The method overstates the importance of urban, centers in the devel oped countries and economies dominated by large corporations; conversely, i t underestimates the importance of lower-level circuits of regional communi cation, transaction centers in developing countries, and cities in less-cen tralized economies. This bias is not simply a technical matter: it asserts the power of the core economies, while understating the diversity and compl exity of global interactions. We propose to include MNC first-level subsidi ary locations in a more refined measure of world-city status.