ABSTRACT
Producer services offer legal, financial, advertising, consultancy and accountancy services to companies. They have become increasingly important to companies who are required to respond rapidly to changing market conditions which require that they draw upon a range of specialised inputs. These services have become the fastest growing sectors of national economies and the economies of large cities in Europe and North America with significant numbers of international linkages (Thrift 1987; Sassen 1991; 1994; Hamnett 1995; Knox 1995). Producer services have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the central areas of major world financial centres. They draw on the highly innovative environments of these cities and the extensive and instantaneous links to other industries and experts they offer. As well as the physical and electronic infrastructures of these sites, the social environments of bars, restaurants and health clubs are particularly important to the formation of social networks which are heavily drawn upon in business. This social milieu is impossible to reproduce outside these tight agglomerations of related activities even with sophisticated telecommunications links (Sassen 1994; Graham and Marvin 1996). The main customers for producer services are the headquarters of multinational corporations. As the increasing extent and complexity of these corporations have proceeded an effective central co-ordination, control and command complex has become ever more crucial. This effectiveness has come to depend to a large extent on the utilisation of specialised producer services. Producer services have become a vital part of the co-ordination of an internationally dispersed but increasingly interlinked global economy. The concentration of corporate headquarters in global cities has provided them with a lucrative, spatially circumscribed market.
