Aspects, Models and Measures for Assessing the Competitiveness of International Financial Services in a Particular Location

The International Financial Services (IFS) industry is restructuring internally and by location. This paper outlines the economic forces and analytical methods that may be applied to examine the economic drivers of these processes as ever more countries and cities are vying for attracting IFS providers and their clients. The ICT revolution has made those IFS that can be commoditized footloose in search of cost efficiency. High value-added services, however, will continue to be developed and co-ordinated in a few major IFS centers that have invested in, or capitalized on, regional or global advantages for themselves and their clients. This fragmentation and geographic dispersion of the industry by service function and sophistication may facilitate analyses of the comparative economic efficiency of particular financial services by methods such as stochastic frontier analysis.