The changing geography of globalized service provision, 2000–2008

This empirical paper maps changes in the global geography of advanced producer service provision across major cities in the 2000-2008 period. The analyses are based on a systematic assessment of geographical shifts in the office networks of leading firms in finance, management consultancy, accountancy, advertising and law, using measures of inter-city connectivity. It has been previously shown that there has been a general shift of these services from ‘West to East’. In this paper, variations in the degree and pattern of this global shift among the different sectors are described and interpreted. The results point to an inherent complexity in economic globalization that is sometimes overlooked in general descriptions of the meta-process.