Building an International Financial Centre in Mumbai

Earlier this year, the Indian government’s High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC) put forward its recommendations on how Mumbai could be made into an International Financial Center. The HPEC’s report covers a very wide range of issues, including urban infrastructure and financial regulations 1 . It serves no purpose to enumerate the HPEC’s numerous recommendations here. The goal of this paper is to provide a simple analytical framework that can focus the debate and be used to evaluate, prioritize and sequence the various measures. To begin with a basic question – why do we need large financial hubs in a globalized, post-internet world? More fundamentally, since financial hubs are also major cities, why do cities even exist in the twenty-first century?