The backbone of our research and analysis is the Digital City Index. As part of our market scans, we often come across rankings of cities. Some are particularly noteworthy, such as the A.T. Kearney’s Global Cities Index.
It ranks metropolitan areas according to 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 (weighting: 30 percent).
•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 international schools, international student population, and number of residents with university degrees (weighting: 30 percent).
• Information exchange examines how well news and information circulate within and outside the city. This dimension has been reconfigured this year to include two new metrics: accessi- bility to major TV news channels (replacing international coverage in major local newspapers) and Internet presence (capturing the robustness 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 (weighting: 15 percent).
• 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 (weighting: 15 percent).
• 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 (weighting: 10 percent).