Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Firms’ Linkages in the World City Network

Abstract

This article concentrates on the connectivity of global pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms in the contemporary ‘world city network’ that constitutes a ‘space of flows’ in which particular urban regions achieve an outstanding nodal centrality. World city network analyses have mostly concentrated on global service providers. Yet globally operating manufacturing firms also select distinct urban regions all across the world as locational anchoring points. Thus the network structures of distinct industrial sub-sectors need to be analysed in order to detect the differing nodal centralities and ‘sectoral profiles’ of cities functioning as geographical hubs of transnational production networks. A macro-scale analysis is presented of how the top 40 global firms in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry connected cities across the world in 2010. Subsequently, the nodal centralities of cities included in this sub-sector’s global network are compared with the findings of previous analyses that concentrate on the advanced producer services sector.