Introduction

Economic globalization includes homogenizing processes but this has in no way eliminated geographical variation across the world (see Chapter 3). In Part B we focus upon world regions in order to illustrate this geography within globalization. The analysis is now limited to connectivity analyses utilizing the 525 cities × 175 firms service matrix with its 91,875 pieces of information. This introduction has three purposes: first to define and justify the regions we use; second to indicate the criteria for including cities in the analysis; and third, to describe the measures we conduct on the cities that constitute the raw material for each regional chapter.