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The rapid economic ascent of China and the increasing integration of the world economy in the past two decades have made metropolises in China such as Shanghai and Beijing emerging global cities. Foreign investment is a central force underlying the emergence and transformation of the Chinese metropolises into global cities. This is especially true in Shanghai, which has experienced massive infusion of foreign investment. Varied forms of foreign investment or development zones have been created to promote foreign investment inflows, yet remain under-studied. This paper analyzes structure, performance, and underlying factors of development zones in Shanghai, and discusses the implications for global city-formation; it unfolds the variations among development zones, and illustrates the significant role of the state and local conditions. As the literature on global cities dwells primarily on the experiences of advanced economies, this paper further contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of emerging global cities in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today rapidly growing economies depend more on the creation, acquisition, distribution, and use of knowledge. As such, strategies for enhancing research and innovation capabilities have come to occupy a more important position in many developing nations, including China. Already the leading production center, and often seen as China's economic locomotive, Shanghai is striving aggressively to retain its national preeminence and has launched concerted efforts to increase local innovative output. The primary purpose of this paper is to understand how state-led efforts have fared in promoting technology innovation. By situating the city in the national and global context, the paper shows that Shanghai has gained a substantial lead in developing an innovation environment with extensive global linkages and leading research institutions. Recent efforts in building up the research and innovation capacity of the enterprise sector have begun to show progress. Although firms are enthusiastic about its future as an innovation center, Shanghai continues to face challenges of inadequate protection of intellectual property, lack of venture capital investment, and the tightening supply of highly qualified knowledge workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Shanghai strives to build itself into an international center of finance, trade, and commerce, a new retail economy has evolved accordingly. In the past two decades, its retail sector has been transformed from a simple and inefficient distribution system to a much more complex and highly competitive market-oriented economy. The new retail economy in many ways resembles the contemporary capitalist retail economy in the Western cities, but it also exhibits significant differences with Chinese characteristics. While the affluent consumer market is the necessary condition for sustained retail growth, it is the retail deregulation that has been the fundamental driving force for the structural changes in Shanghai's retail sector. Its liberal policies attracted major international retailers to either choose Shanghai as the gateway city to enter the China market, or locate their China headquarters offices in Shanghai to command their operations throughout the country. Indeed, the retail transformation in post-reform Shanghai is a clear testimony of the Economic Transition Model. The main data sources for this empirical study are the 1999 Census of Commercial Activity in Shanghai and the Shanghai Statistical Yearbook. They are supplemented by data collected from reputable Web sites and through field work in Shanghai. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]