Tomorrow's Stars

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by JustSomeGuyWho

Looks like this has turned into the great Canada debate

it somehow always does.

[mello]

Originally Posted by Razor

I'm thinking the table has been set,

I would say the table is pretty much set unless another Shenzhen style place emerges out of China or India. In the sense that is was a back water in the mid 80's and now its a metro area over 10 million.

I know Cebu in the Philippines is really coming along and a lot of people are sick of overcrowded Manila and companies might look to locate there instead. If Vietnam's economy really explodes look for De Nang to possibly become like Busan for instance. It is half way between Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi and has a great coastal setting.

If anyone is familiar with Vietnam it would be interesting to get an update on how fast it is growing and what the projections are. Is it getting a lot of spill over manufacturing from China? Shifting more towards high tech and value added manufacturing instead of broom sticks and t shirts.

[Razor]

^ Well all I know about Vietnam is as of late is that they are manufacturing some models of the "made in England" and iconic Marshall amplification brand of guitar amplifiers. This explains the price drop..No English union wages to pay out I suppose...Still sacrilege...Shame on you Marshall!

[Yuri]

We mentioned São Paulo, so let's bring some info into the discussion:

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

As we're talking too much about São Paulo, figures for its expanded area:

GDP 2011 for São Paulo Macrometropolitan area*



---------------------------------------------- GDP 2011 ------ Pop. 2011
São Paulo Macrometropolitan Area ------ 681,530,000,000 -- 31,701,724

GDP per capita: US$ 21,498. Comprising the southeast quarter of São Paulo state (63,072 km²), it's as 2011, the third largest GDP of Americas, just behind New York-Philadelphia-Hartford corridor and Southern California; overtopping Chicago-Milwaukee corridor, expanded Bay Area and Washington-Baltimore. The weak Brazilian real (2012-2013) will flatten the GDP of São Paulo region, but it'll probably be able to hold the 3rd place.

Definition: Mesorregião de Campinas, Mesorregião Macrometropolitana de São Paulo, Mesorregião Metropolitana de São Paulo, Mesorregião de Piracicaba, Mesorregião do Vale do Paraíba Paulista and Microrregião de Itanhaém

São Paulo Macrometropolitan Area will be more and more used as definition for São Paulo metro area. This huge urban complex will count between 35-36 million inhabitants by 2020 and pushing 40 million by 2030.

Today, its GDP per capita is already on developed levels (US$ 21,500 nominal) and in the future the area will probably close the gap against other regions in the developed world. It definitely will be one of the major players.

[JustSomeGuyWho]

Originally Posted by JiminyCricket II

Nearly all the metros can say "_____ should be included in the metro but isn't."

San Jose not included as a whole with SF is pretty absurd though. The proximity and the network of money/funding, research, business structure is just too interwoven not to. I don't know how many thousands of companies have offices here as well as in the upper reaches of the Bay Area, my company is included though.

True but it isn't the only one. At some point they redefined metropolitan areas. San Jose is part of San Francisco's Combined Statistical Area but these GDPs are for the metropolitan area itself. San Jose is large enough and important enough to be distinct from San Francisco. Another one comes to mind ... Raleigh. It used to be Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. Raleigh and Durham are pretty much contiguous but they are now separated into Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill as two distinct metropolitan areas. It would have been nice to see these numbers for the combined statistical areas ... that would have made more sense.

[mhays]

San Jose's "importance" has nothing to do with it. It's stuff like commute patterns and apparently the width of the urban connection between the two. Criteria that make sense for other cities don't in the San Francisco area.

[hammersklavier]

Originally Posted by Shawn

I don't necessarily see this happening, at least not in the near or midterm.

Sure, Shanghai may become more the center of the Greater China finance, but not all of APAC. Lots of reasons for this, but a few of the biggest are:

- No one trusts the PRC's ability (or desire, for that matter) to properly legislate, regulate, and facilitate financial markets. Especially when the PRC has massive vested interests in state-owned financial institutions competing against foreign institutions - we all know who will receive preferential treatment. There is even less transparency and accountability in China than in East Asia on average.

- There are no true Chinese financial national champions who compete globally, and for the above reasons there aren't likely to be any soon.

- The few bright spots for Chinese brands - namely new media companies like Weibo and Alibaba - launch their IPOs in NYC, not even HK . . . because that's where the transparency is and where non-Chinese are comfortable investing.

- It may be improving, but China will never have the English-speaking population tiny Singapore has all in one place, nor will it ever have a legal system built on British Common Law (like Singapore).

- There is just no way other large APAC economies will allow the PRC to dominate Finance regionally. I deal with this all the time - both Japanese corporate and government leadership vastly prefer Singapore to remain the defacto APAC financial capital over anywhere in mainland China. I cannot stress enough just how much non-Chinese business and political leaders in the region do not like China.

Shawn, I'm not attempting to elide the very real issues that plague the APAC region. My point is that historically, a region's financial capital is wherever the regional hegemon's financial capital is.

I don't disagree that there is a lot of stuff the region still has to work out, and that the smaller nations all distrust the PRC (and for good reason), that the laws and regulations aren't there yet; neither are major Chinese financial firms, and so on. Indeed, I don't see it happening anytime in the near- or medium-term either.

I'd also argue, however, that China cannot be a hegemon unless it controls the region's financial capital (i.e. the flow of money itself). So in that sense for China to be a hegemon, it would need to control, well, the financial capital (now, the convergence of capital flows). And to do that it would have to solve its very real financial issues. Until then it can be a bully, exerting military might, but the APAC region's financial capital will be too decentralized to really have a single point of control.

[JustSomeGuyWho]

Originally Posted by mhays

San Jose's "importance" has nothing to do with it. It's stuff like commute patterns and apparently the width of the urban connection between the two. Criteria that make sense for other cities don't in the San Francisco area.

By importance ... that is entirely what I mean. San Jose has grown to be an entity in itself. It isn't a bedroom community to San Francisco where a significant percentage of people make their daily commute from San Jose to San Francisco. It is its own center of economic activity to enough of a degree to make the distinction.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by JustSomeGuyWho

By importance ... that is entirely what I mean. San Jose has grown to be an entity in itself. It isn't a bedroom community to San Francisco where a significant percentage of people make their daily commute from San Jose to San Francisco. It is its own center of economic activity to enough of a degree to make the distinction.

No, that's not even remotely related to the basis upon which the government delineates MSAs nor why it has sliced and diced up the Bay Area into seven supposedly discrete MSAs.

The MSA is a decent enough measure of commuter sheds, and for most population centers it seems to work well enough. But when the very specific formula for drawing MSA lines is used as a proxy for "importance" or "discrete centers of economic activity" or "the definition of metropolitan areas," it sometimes falters--as it does with the Bay Area and the Southland specifically.

[JustSomeGuyWho]

Originally Posted by fflint

No, that's not even remotely related to the basis upon which the government delineates MSAs nor why it has sliced and diced up the Bay Area into seven supposedly discrete MSAs.

The MSA is a decent enough measure of commuter sheds, and for most population centers it seems to work well enough. But when the very specific formula for drawing MSA lines is used as a proxy for "importance" or "discrete centers of economic activity" or "the definition of metropolitan areas," it sometimes falters--as it does with the Bay Area and the Southland specifically.

Ok, then since you are the expert in how the government delineates an MSA vs a CSA, you tell me why San Jose does not deserve to be its own MSA and why it doesn't "work" for the Bay Area.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by JustSomeGuyWho

Ok, then since you are the expert in how the government delineates an MSA vs a CSA, you tell me why San Jose does not deserve to be its own MSA and why it doesn't "work" for the Bay Area.

I neither made a claim about what San Jose "deserves" nor did I reject the very narrow and specific MSA formula for delineating commuter sheds when understood and used in its proper scope. Outside the proper scope: the MSA formula for commuter sheds as a proxy for something unrelated and ill-defined like an area's "importance."

[mhays]

A distant blob of suburbia can have very high non-commuter levels. That doesn't mean it has a center or is independent really. Or in SJ's case, it can have a center but that doesn't mean its oriented toward that center vs. the adjacent larger center.

[Yuri]

To me, it's irrelevant whether a suburb is independent enough in terms of defining a metro area. A metro area can be very well multi-centric, the most classic example, Rhein-Ruhr. Or even with several nodes scattered around (e.g. Los Angeles).

Therefore, in my opinion, Bay Area forms one single 8 million people metro area.