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September 17, 2017

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Home » Business » Economy

The power of people and partnerships

By Brian Duperreault | 10:30 UTC+8 September 17, 2017 | Print Edition

SHANGHAI has embarked on a courageous path to transform into an even more vibrant, attractive, and sustainable city by 2040. To achieve the goals set out in the city’s master plan, Shanghai must prioritize what AIG believes are two key components to becoming a global gateway city: attracting new talent and forging meaningful partnerships.

In preparation for this year’s IBLAC session, AIG conducted proprietary research across Shanghai and five other global cities — London, New York, Osaka, Seoul, and Atlanta — to better understand the true power of people and partnerships in building popular global destinations for talent and businesses. More specifically, the study examined how residents define an “attractive city” and how public-private partnership projects can be used to increase a city’s appeal.

According to our research, residents in Shanghai and the other five cities surveyed all agreed on what makes a city an attractive place to live and work: having a healthcare system, security and emergency services, employment opportunities, utilities infrastructure, and housing. When you examine the data more critically, what’s remarkable is that of those top attributes, the overall respondents rated employment opportunities as the most important factor in making a city an attractive place to live.

The only city that’s an outlier? Shanghai.

In Shanghai, residents rated employment opportunities as not the first, but the third most important factor in building an attractive global city, ranking behind quality of healthcare and emergency services, which scored at first and second, respectively. What this anomaly suggests is that Shanghai’s residents have such confidence in their city’s ability to provide high quality jobs that it is less salient in their minds (and therefore strongly value other contributions to quality of life).

When we looked deeper at the results, we found that across the six cities, residents’ rating of a city’s employment opportunities is most highly correlated with their rating of the city as an international hub and as a research center for cultivating leadership in science and technology. In addition, Shanghai’s residents also feel confident that their city outperforms other top global cities in travel infrastructure, culture, cuisine, and mass transportation. This is exactly what Shanghai is looking to further strengthen in its pursuit of a “global city of excellence” title. Not only a city with a reputation for international economics, science, trade, and innovation but also a cultural metropolis.

An actionable insight from the Shanghai-based research results is that residents believe employment opportunities in particular are the best area for building public-private partnerships. One effective way to execute this is to work with universities and private sector partners to foster insight and collaboration, and ultimately develop a strong talent pipeline. AIG has forged partnerships with Tongji University here in Shanghai and Clemson University, a renowned research and engineering institution in the US. Both of these partnerships look to foster the exchange of scientific and insurance research, training, and teaching.

Beyond working with academic institutions, AIG envisions a number of benefits to utilizing public-private partnerships to support the construction and renovation of infrastructure and cultural projects. The most notable of which, from the insurance perspective, is the reduction of risk on major projects. Public-private partnership projects introduce considerable risks: high costs, imbalance between partners, and financing structures that are fraught with complex funding dynamics. To help builders and operators manage the unique risks of public-private partnership projects, AIG has begun underwriting policies for both constructional and operational phases. This “end-to-end” insurance solution can play a key role in helping a city and its partners manage risk and simplify the development process.

Economy


 

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