Case study D Australia’s cities in a changing national and global economy

The world economy appears to be becoming increasingly interdependent. The fortunes of individual places are not autonomous, they are increasingly bound up with the fortunes of other places and with processes operating at wider geographical scales. This increasing interdependence within the world economy is the result of a number of related processes: the emergence of multinational corporations as major shapers of international economic flows, the concentration of international command centres in global cities, the deregulation of national financial markets and telecommunications advances ‘gluing’ together spaces and creating the ‘space of flows’ between cities in the world economy.