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New Urban Economic Geography of Secondary Cities 87become more self-organized and self-reliant in raising capital and resources that wouldleave them less dependent on importing and national governments. This will requirenew tools and models to analyze the efficiency of functionalities of secondary cities andthe reasons for market failures, and a framework for strategic interventions by governmentand international development agencies to provide support to address these.4.5.3 Fostering Collaborative Competition Between CitiesThe new order of competiveness in cities is dependent on both functional efficienciesand achieving collaborative advantage (Kanter, 1995; Huxham, 1996; Yves and Hamel,1998; Considine, 2005). Secondary cities that collaborate, reciprocate in trade, investmentand development, and leverage their resources make it possible to overcome theeconomies of scale possessed by larger cities and out-compete them. Mass collaborationis the new competition and many US and European cities are already doing this togain competitive advantage (Feiock, 2012). For governments to support the developmentof secondary cities there is a need for new thinking and approaches to the NEG ofcities. This will likely occur through collaborative competition, otherwise poorer citiesin developing countries will struggle to compete against the growing dominance ofprimate or large metropolitan cities.The challenges for secondary cities in developing countries to engage in inter-citycollaboration are enormous. Rivalry and competition for any form of developmentor investment between secondary cities is high, with few cities able to recognize thatcollaboration may provide a basis for expanding inter-regional trade and investment.One of the best examples of inter-regional collaboration has been in the Australian andNew Zealand wine industries, where wineries in regions forming part of the immediatehinterland of smaller secondary cities actively collaborate in blending wines to producenew products, which have become international market leaders.Cities in developing regions must learn the art of mass collaboration as a way ofcarving out some form of competitive advantage. New technologies offer many ways forsecondary cities to do this, but first they need to identify areas where they can collaboratein marketing and infrastructure-sharing, resource-leveraging and knowledgedevelopment, to reduce transaction costs to both business and government. Secondarycities that follow a pathway of identifying opportunities to collaborate to reduceexternality costs will likely be much more successful than those that choose not to.

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