Service Activities’ Urban Hierarchy and Cumulative Growth

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly evident that economic growth is a cumulative process, and spatially uneven business services now play the strongest role in promoting economic growth. They do it mainly by locating in large cities, where they are attracted by both the concentration of demand and agglomeration economies with other services. However, large cities are not the only place where business services locate. They are also present across all levels of the urban hierarchy, which they change through their networking functions, their multiplant organisation or their market strategy. The interest in monitoring the role played by business services in the changing pattern of economic growth makes conceptual and empirical difficulties in the measurement of service activities all the more challenging.