A roster of world cities

Although there is a general consensus on which are the leading world cities , there is no agreed-upon roster covering world cities below the highest le vel. This paper reports the construction of an inventory of world cities ba sed upon their level of advanced producer services. Global service centres are identified and graded for accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law, Aggregating these results produces a roster of 55 world cities at thr ee levels: 10 Alpha world cities, 10 Beta world cities and 35 Gamma world c ities. These are found to be largely geographically concentrated in three " globalization arenas", northern America, western Europe and Pacific Asia. ( C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.