International Business, Cities and Competitiveness: Recent Trends and Future Challenges

This paper considers the current and future relationships between multinational firms, cities and regions by examining how thinking about these relationships has evolved over the last five decades. We explain how some of the early post-war thinking about multinational firms began to take on board serious questions of cities and investment location decisions, but over time the research priorities of the international business field moved into other directions. At the same time, within the broad fields of economics and geography interest in location problems and cities either waned or shifted towards other priorities for several decades. Yet, after several decades various dramatic analytical, empirical and institutional developments gave rise to a surge of new thinking about the relationships between multinationals and cities, and these developments now allow us to consider about current and future challenges to multinationals and cities.