the country and city level), of city governance, and of city performance (access and quality of service delivery). This city database integrates existing data with new data gathered specifically for this research project.<sup>3</sup> The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a discussion of conceptual and definitional issues on city globalization, providing a partial survey of the literature. In Section 3 we discuss the issue of urban governance in the context of globalization and review some of the relevant literature to capture the dynamics of city performance. Section 4 provides simplified hypotheses on the globalization and governance nexus in explaining city-level performance in terms of service delivery, includes a working definition of urban governance, and presents a reduced-form model specification to test key hypotheses. Section 4 also describes the extended city level dataset we have compiled, comprising data on 412 cities in 134 countries, from which we make use of over 35 variables.<sup>4</sup> In this section we also present in brief the results, both in terms of simple summary charts synthesizing the uncontrolled correlations, as well as the econometric specifications and the synthesis of the econometric results of the determinants of city performance. Given the extensive set of variables in the dataset, and multiple econometric specifications, we present synthesis tables and graphs summarizing the main econometric results.

In Section 5 we present the results of the preliminary empirical investigation of the potential determinants of city governance. Future research questions are dealt with in the concluding section, where we also present emerging policy implications from this analysis.

# **2 City Performance in the Context of Globalization**

There are two main threads in the literature that treat the subject of globalization of cities, which mostly refer to the term “world city” to describe the phenomenon. We take the theoretical underpinnings of this definition from the work of Doel and Hubbard (2002), who clarify key definitions and develop the conceptualization of globalization of cities. The two conceptualizations of world cities that we draw from include the following definitions:

> 3   See Annex D for the list of cities in the current version of the database.  We use various sources of data for this analysis, detailed in the Annex.  First, a comprehensive city level data set is taken from the UN Urban Observatory which has data on 232 cities in 114 countries for the year 1998.  We refer to this database as the UN database.  We also use data from the GaWC research which we call the Taylor database, which includes a roster of 265 cities constructed from data on the number of firms (advertising, accounting, banking, and law) and number of practitioners/offices in 265 cities for the year 2000.  We construct a special database which we refer to as the KLM (Kaufmann, Léautier, Mastruzzi) database which includes data in 412 cities from 134 countries for the year 2003, based in large part from a worldwide enterprise survey (EOS).  This database consists of 36 variables of governance as well as city and country economic data.

> 4 The expanded city level dataset includes over a hundred variables.  However, since part of this consolidated dataset is aggregated from different existing data sources comprising a different set of cities, the consolidated dataset contains many missing values. One of the objectives for the future is to build up this city level dataset and fill in these data gaps.

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