Global Cities Index
The Global Cities Index provides a comprehensive ranking of the leading global cities from around the world. The Index shows how these cities are integrating with the rest of the world as leaders in globalization.
The Global Cities Index is designed to track the way cities maneuver as their populations grow and the world continues to shrink.
2012 Global Cities Index
The 2012 Global Cities Index ranks 66 cities from around the world. New York and London once again top the list, followed by Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seoul. Each of these cities excels across multiple dimensions.
This year, we added the Emerging Cities Outlook to our analyses, which examines the strengths and weaknesses of cities in developing markets by examining the rates of change and key factors that will affect their ability to capitalize on future globalization. The Outlook highlights the vast potential of Beijing and Shanghai, thanks to a thriving economy, a growing middle class, and infrastructure improvements.
 2012 Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook
Methodology
By measuring cities’ international presence, we can get an accurate picture of globalization—the workings of the interconnected world. The Index ranks cities on 25 metrics across five dimensions:
- Business activity is measured by headquarters of major global corporations, locations of top business services firms, the value of a city’s capital markets, the number of international conferences, and the flow of goods through ports and airports.
- Human capital evaluates a city’s ability to attract talent based on the following measures: size of foreign-born population, quality of universities, number of inter¬national schools, international student population, and number of residents with university degrees.
- Information exchange examines how well news and information circulate within and outside the city. This dimension has been reconfigured to include two new metrics: accessibility to major TV news channels (replacing interna¬tional coverage in major local newspapers) and Internet presence (capturing the robust-ness of results when searching for the city name in major languages). A third metric, number of international news bureaus, has been broadened to include 10 major TV networks. The final two metrics—level of censorship and broadband subscriber rate—are unchanged.
- Cultural experience measures diverse attractions, including number of major sporting events a city hosts; number of museums, performing-arts venues, and diverse culinary establishments; number of international travelers; and number of sister-city relationships.
- Political engagement reviews how a city influences global policy dialogue as measured by number of embassies and consulates, major think tanks, international organizations and local institutions with international reach that reside in the city, and the number of political conferences a city hosts.
Media highlights
America's Most Powerful Global Cities
9 May 2012 — The Atlantic Cities
The Combined Global City Index shows the rankings of U.S. citieis, which is based on five recent measures of global cities, including A.T. Kearney's Global Cities Index."
What Is the World's Most Economically Powerful City?
8 May 2012 — The Atlantic
In the past several years, a number of research teams, think tanks, and global consulting firms have come up with novel and innovative ways to gauge the relative economic strengths of global cities and metro areas.
New York, London, Paris and Tokyo are Top Global Cities in 2012 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index
2 April 2012 — atkearney.com
New York and London remain the world’s most global cities, while major emerging-market cities strengthened their ability to challenge global leaders in the next 10 to 20 years, according to the 2012 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index.
New York Tops London as City with Most Global Clout, Index Shows
2 April 2012 — Bloomberg
“Our goal was to find a measure that would help corporate and government decision-makers determine which of the world’s cities will best attract and shape the future flow of people, ideas, capital and goods,” said Mike Hales, a partner at A.T. Kearney, a Chicago-based consulting firm that helped Bloomberg conduct the study.
Earlier Reports
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