373 Global Cities (GaWC) - Page 9

GaWC (Globalization and World Cities Research Network), based at Loughborough University, is the world's premier think tank for studying economic globalization and its relation to cities. The think tank produces a report on global cities every two years, dividing world cities into Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Sufficiency cities, where Alpha cities are the most integrated into the world economy (e.g. New York City or Beijing) and Sufficiency cities the last (albeit still much more than unlisted cities). The GaWC tends to focus specifically on economic rather than political or cultural considerations in ranking cities, and their methodology differs from many other think tanks in that the GaWC does not look solely at cities in themselves in order to determine their rankings, but rather examines the relationships between a given city and other global cities. The GaWC report thus measures not only a city's economic strength, but also its interconnectedness to other global cities.