Imagine a boardroom where executives decide where to place a global company's Asian headquarters. The question on the table is Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul. The real unit of competition for global capital and talent across borders today is not the country but the city.
Evidence of that competition is close at hand. Hong Kong and Singapore have traded places in recent years in the contest for pride of place as Asia's financial hub. Singapore led for a time, but in the Global Financial Centres Index released in March 2026, Hong Kong came out ahead at third, with Singapore fourth. What deserves attention is not the ranking itself but the fact that even a hard-won position can slip in an instant once a city grows complacent.
Europe has seen a similar scene. After Brexit, Britain's departure from the European Union, the European Medicines Agency moved its headquarters from London to Amsterdam in 2019, and the Netherlands is credited with using that shift to grow into one of Europe's leading bio-health clusters. It showed how the relocation of a single agency can move the center of gravity of an industrial ecosystem.
Where does Seoul stand? The global reach of K-culture, world-class information and communications infrastructure, a deep talent pool — Seoul's assets are second to none. The city climbed from seventh in 2022 to sixth in 2025 on the Global Power City Index, narrowing the gap with fifth-place Singapore each year. Still, compared with London, New York, Tokyo and Paris at the very top, Seoul has drawn criticism for its capacity to actually attract global capital and for its regulatory environment. The assets were there; the circuitry to convert them into investment was not.
Filling in that circuitry is one of the aims of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's new blueprint, the G3 Seoul Plan. The plan seeks to lift Seoul into a city that combines the competitiveness of the world's top three cities with quality of life for its residents. Its backbone is to draw on the convenient, safe environments of major world cities while building, in Seoul's own way, a city where global talent stays and every generation can live with security. It is also about neighborhoods where foreign residents who have settled in the city want to stay rather than leave, and where both our parents' generation and our children can live with peace of mind. Urban competitiveness, a phrase that can sound abstract, is in fact tied to a colleague's job and to the vitality of the shops in our own neighborhood.
That change can now be felt in daily life across Seoul. Foreign tourists strolling along Cheonggyecheon Stream have grown noticeably more numerous, and overseas visitors keep coming to the National Museum of Korea in search of Korean traditional culture. Global artificial intelligence companies continue to move into Teheran-ro, and world-class firms such as Netflix are sustaining long-term investment in Korea's content ecosystem. Points of contact with the world that began in culture and tourism are widening into industry and investment. Each time I see this, I feel that Seoul is being transformed into a city where global capital, talent and culture meet as a matter of course and create new opportunities.
Seoul must now become not a follower but a pioneer that shapes the currents among world cities. The measure of success will be a remark from the field, not a number on a league table. Only when Seoul becomes a city where businesses can breathe freely and global capital flows in naturally will "G3 Seoul" become reality.
