Global Cities and Socioeconomic Inequality: A Prospective Study

• In Event: Comparative Issues in Global Urban Politics

Abstract

Research into inequality in urban America tends to be concentrated around a triangle of often competing paradigms that juxtapose economic development, ecological sustainability, and socioeconomic equity. With respect to these, tradeoffs involving zero-sum outcomes favoring economic development appear to be the norm, and involve sustained inequalities of a wide variety. Reflecting on such tradeoffs, Englehart and Norris, argue that “a large share of the population in high-income countries has experienced declining real income, declining job security, and rising income inequality…” (2017, p. 447).
Furthermore, the precipitous 50-year rise in U.S. income inequality (e.g., Piketty, Saez and Zucman, 2016; Pew Research Center, 2015) suggests that the equity issue is at least coincidental with the rise of post-Cold War globalization.
As such, a plethora of agents are often identified as seminal aspects of this global integration, including “off shoring” of production, labor migrations, technological change, worldwide supply-chain competition, declining union power, highly-concentrated, technology-enabled corporate global “command and control” networks, and the governance of international trade policy.
But, is the corrosive role of globalization on inequality manifested principally as direct impacts on unions and supply-chain effects on manufacturing? If so, are these impacts evenly or generically felt across a nation’s landscape? Or, are globalization’s impacts also uniquely operating through particular policies and attributes of those metropolitan areas most integrally connected to globalization? If so, can we distinguish the severity of those impacts according to global-city status?
Most often, these macro agents of globalization and their consequences for socioeconomic equity are examined with respect to the national scene, with less focus on their comparative consequences occurring at an urban level. As a result, a major oversight seems apparent: metropolitan areas are not uniform in the political and economic connectivity they have with globalization and the centrality they maintain in global political and economic networks. Hence, metropolitan-level experiences with globalization are unlikely attributable in the same way to the aforementioned macro agents. What is also likely left out of the equation are numerous mediating or intervening secondary variables that make up the differentiating character and context distinguishing one metropolitan area from another according to their connectivity and centrality to globalization.
One might therefore expect outcomes of globalization, especially their development consequences on socioeconomic equity, to vary widely across metropolitan areas. Addressing this premise, the paper reports on prospective research that adopts a cross-sectional comparative urban focus to pursue two questions: (1) what makes global cities different than other metropolitan areas in fostering socioeconomic inequalities? (2) How might globalization’s impact on global cities explain interurban differences in inequality? To structure the investigation around these questions, the paper pursues the following hypothesis: The degree to which globalization contributes to cross-urban differences in inequality is associated with [probably caused by] the kind and amount of connectivity and degree of centrality metropolitan areas maintain in world political and economic networks.
Methodologically, the focus is on comparing current outcomes across a sample of 53 large urbanized areas in the U.S., where data on contemporary metropolitan context and inequality vary across several scalar dimensions. The paper’s argument and analysis is structured into five sections. The first lays out the literature on what inequality means in an American context, recognizing that the term varies widely in the literature in both context and measurement. As the dependent variable, inequality will be estimated both as general economic inequality in American society (e.g., as measured by Gini Coefficients and a 5/80 income disparity ratio) and as economic inequality specific to particular socioeconomic classes (e.g., a “hollowed middle class,”).
The second section develops hypotheses around the literature on global cities and their unique traits that both distinguish them from “less-global” cities and determine the type and magnitude of inequality found within their respective borders. Section three lays out the methodology, which includes both a OLS regression analysis and a path analysis that provides a multi-factorial analysis incorporating mediating and intervening variables. The fourth section contains results. The concluding section provides discussion of research limitations, governance and policy implications, and further research needs are discussed.

Author

• Herman L. Boschken, San Jose State University