Dario Musolino (p), Ilaria Mariotti

Wim Meester

See extended abstract

Mina Akhavan (p), Hilda Ghiara, Ilaria Mariotti (p), Cecile Sillig

Dario Musolino

The processes of globalization has been accompanied by the rise of a few world cities that appear as control centers of the global economy. The World City Network (WCN) research field adopts a vision of global economic processes that emphasizes the space of - financial, informational, goods - flows (Castels, 1996), which connect these cities in a network. Empirical analysis of World Cities (Sassen, 1993) showed that they were characterized by a strong presence of Advanced Producer Services firms (APS). In fact, while large companies in these sectors have adopted a worldwide localization strategy in order to better serve their clients, they tend to concentrate in only few cities (i.e. World Cities) because they represents clusters of knowledge that give APS firms a special competitive advantage. The interlocking network methodology (Taylor, 2001), which is based on the intra-firm networks of large APS firms, has been developed on this starting point.
The present contribution aims to provide new insights in the analysis of locational behavior of global 3PL management function within the WCN framework. The first objective of the research is to draw an interlocking network dedicated to logistics cities. The analysis is applied to the European Union end Schengen area, and based on the location of management function of the 27 largest global 3PL active in the area. This part of the research is mainly based on firm data provided by the Bureau Van Dick Amadeus database. The logistics city network does not merely point the presence of companies in European cities, but highlights their level of connectivity and the links between pair of cities. Geographically speaking, the most obvious traits of the network we have built are the absolute dominance of Paris and a center of gravity of the networks oriented toward the Centre-North Europe.
The second objective of the study is to analyze the determinant of the connectivity level of European logistics city (that depends on the number of firms they host, the importance of local offices, and the extension of firms’ network of offices). The investigation is performed through an econometric analysis where we consider the importance of factors already identified by the WCN literature on the transport sector (Jacobs et al., 2011; O'Connor, 2012; O'Connor et al., 2015): transport infrastructures, localization economies (advanced logistics), World Cities and agglomeration economies (APS, urban related variables).

Wim Meester (p), Dario Musolino

Ilaria Mariotti

See extended abstract