Off-shoring of Work and London’s Sustainability as an International Financial Centre

The emergence, from the 1960s on, of a new spatial division of labour – with the old task-based division of labour within a firm taking on a spatial dimension, and comparative advantage increasingly shaping patterns of specialisation by func-tion/process as well as by sector/product – reflected both new possibilities opened up by developments in management, control and communications technologies and intensified competitive pressures within (generally) mature industrial sectors. On an international scale this primarily affected manufacturing activities, and was driven essentially by labour cost factors