Individual report, you are required to produce a report (of up to 2,000 words) on the following topic:
1. Global cities are the primary nodes in the global economic network. Evaluate the business environment of one New York paying particular attention to the competitiveness indicators. You should describe and evaluate the state of advanced business services, incentives for foreign investors, issues of political stability, state of housing, infrastructures and environment.
Choose the following city:
– New York
Assessment Criteria:
a. Appropriate length (no more than 2000 words), format and structure.
b. You must supply full references for all your sources; you should aim to provide at 15-20 good academic sources (journal articles or books).
c. Your work should be grammatically sound
d. Evidence of adequate research and the use of an appropriate range of data sources and data presentation formats (graphs, charts, figures and tables, as relevant).
e. Quality and originality of analysis, which focuses on the question requirements; appropriate use of economic concepts will be rewarded.
f. A brief Executive Summary and Conclusion, each of no more than 250 words.
Research and logical flow:
1. Analysis your recommended readings and create clear definitions of the following terms: ‘global city’; ‘business environment’; ‘competitiveness indicators’. Establish the logical connection between these terms.
2. Your task is:
a. to show that your chosen city (e.g. New York) is global
b. to identify the sectors and types of businesses which represent this global status:
i. Financial services
ii. Health care
iii. Professional and technical services
iv. Retail trade
v. Manufacturing
vi. Educational services
c. to indicate which external factors are most likely to affect the performance of the sectors and businesses, identified above, using PESTLE-type analysis; PESTLE – Political; Economic & financial; Social, Technological, Legal; Environmental (Harrison, 2014, p.15).
d. To select the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ elements of business environment of the chosen city and support this selection by data collected from reports, reliable newspapers and recent journal articles.
e. Conclude, analyzing whether, and if yes, how the strengths and weaknesses of business environment of the chosen city influence changes in its competitiveness.
Structure
1. Summary (250 +/- 5%): summary is a ‘short version’ of your report and describes both rationale and findings; one sentence should indicate how you found your sources of information, e.g. Google Scholar search, etc. The summary is usually written when the whole report is finished (!)
2. Main sections of the report (1500 +/- 5%): you may divide this part of your report into sections according to the ‘research flow’ logic suggested above (points 1 and 2 a, b, c, d). Your sections will be of different size. The tittles of sections and subsection you create are not included into the total word count.
3. Conclusions (250 +/- 5%): conclusion is not a repetition of the previous findings; here you must discuss point e. from the ‘research flow’ indicated above.
4. Bibliography: You must include all sources – journal and newspaper articles, reports, academic papers and books – you used in the report; your citing in the text and bibliography list should correspond. Both should be in Harvard referencing style. Use the recommended literature and reports and search for new sources. You must reference original, published and reliable sources; your references should include variety of sources – referencing only websites is not acceptable. Bibliography list is not included into the total word count.