The World's Leading Cities Go Head to Head

Global management consultancy A.T. Kearney often counsels its corporate clients where to set up or expand overseas operations and where to locate key executives. To buttress its advice, the firm two years ago assembled a study of the world's top cities in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, ranking them on such criteria as trade, education, political influence, and cultural life. The top winners were predictable giants New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. But the study also highlighted the importance of less obvious cities, such as Chicago, Seoul, Brussels, and San Francisco.

A second edition of the study has now been released. The top towns are largely the same, despite the global economic and financial turmoil of the past two years. But in the 2010 edition, A.T. Kearney added a metric for censorship, which pushed down the rankings of many emerging-market cities and lifted those in the developed world, where freedom of the press is more established.

The study measures five broad areas:

• Business Activity (Fortune 500 headquarters, presence of global service firms, depth of capital markets, flow of goods via air and sea, and international conferences);

• Human Capital (international schools, international student population, inhabitants with university degrees, global 500 universities, size of foreign-born population);

• Information Exchange (broadband subscribers, news bureaus and international news coverage, censorship);

• Cultural Experience (museums, visual and performing arts, sports, international travelers, culinary offerings, sister cities);

• Policy Engagement (international organizations, embassies and consulates, think tanks, political conferences, local institutions with international reach).

For a look at the top 20 cities on the list, click on.

For a slide show of the 2008 rankings, click here.