Seven cities including Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo occupy the next level and are classed Alpha+. London and New York are the only two ranked Alpha++. The ranking is used to classify cities into 12 categories from Alpha++ down to cities with sufficiency of services. The top 20 connected cities according to GaWC 2020: The more firms present in a city, and the more networked they are, the higher the city ranks.īeing home to the headquarters of one of the 175 businesses included in the study, such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, PwC, Epsilon, Experian, Barclays, Capital One, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, will also increase a city’s score.ĭetailed data for 2016 and 2013 have also been released, providing free access for further analysis. The World According to GaWC 2020 was compiled by looking at the size and function of the offices of large management consultancies, law firms, accountants, financial services and advertisers based in each city. Researchers from the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network, based at Loughborough and Ghent University, have ranked 707 cities from across the globe according to how integrated they are with the world economy.

Ranking of global cities