The Global Financial Centres Index - 1 - Z/Yen

The Global Financial Centres Index5. Instrumental FactorsIn this section we examine the five key areas of financial centrecompetitiveness and how these combine to contribute to thecompetitiveness of centres. The GFCI factor assessment modelwas run with one set of factors at a time and the results comparedto identify which factors influence which centres.This approach does identify one issue with the instrumental factorsthat have been used. Instrumental factors are used as proxies forsomething that is not directly measurable. A number of theinstrumental factors we used are based on rankings derived at anational level (i.e. country by country). There are clearly regionalvariations within countries and taking a national ‘average’ is likelyto skew the results. When the GFCI model is used with allinstrumental factors there are sufficient city rankings to give anaccurate reflection but when the model is run only using one set offactors (as in the following sections) some of the ratings are undulyinfluenced by the use of these nationally based factors.24