It turns out the Twin Cities may be a lot more like Tokyo than New York.

Sure, both are a lot bigger and one happens to be in Japan, but there's still a lesson to be learned from the comparison, looking at it the way Pankaj Ghemawat does.

And his point is that it would be far better to be more like New York.

Ghemawat is an academic superstar and author perhaps best known for disagreeing with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times on just how flat and connected our world is. He's also co-author of a regular study of global economic connectedness by country, based on capital flow, trade and other factors.

The United States turned up at No. 23 in his latest ranking of 140 countries released earlier this month, up two slots from his previous ranking. Our country scores high on breadth of connections, meaning we touch just about every corner of the globe and information seems to flow freely. We lag badly on depth, largely due to the low relative value of trade.

He observed that Americans often fret about importing too much stuff. He thinks many Americans would be surprised to learn that given the size of our economy, we import less than just three other countries.

Global connectedness matters because economies that are connected throughout the world tend to grow faster than more closed ones, due to everything from the increasing value of exports to the contribution of talented immigrants.

Ghemawat has recently started thinking more about the international economic connections of ­cities, looking at the data for a number of big metropolitan areas. His thesis here is the same, that it's far better for any urban economy to have broad and deep connections throughout the globe.

His university affiliations are in Spain and New York, but he has a particular interest in the Twin Cities and was just here, delivering the semiannual "global matters" lecture at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

And here, as everywhere he goes, he found his Tokyo vs. New York case study to be a really good way to talk about what he is learning about ­cities.

This fall, when addressing new MBA students at New York University's Stern School of Business, he asked them which of these two mega cities is more "global," and the ­students overwhelmingly picked New York.

Then he continued his presentation, and as he explained, "by the great city dimension, Tokyo does better than New York on just about every ­imaginable criterion."

Despite sluggish Japanese economic growth, Tokyo over the past 10 years has been growing faster than metropolitan New York. It has more Fortune 500-sized companies with headquarters there than New York. It dramatically beats New York in the issuance of high-tech patents.

New York must have the lead in quality-of-life measures like the culinary arts, right? Nope, Tokyo wins there, too, and has more Michelin Guide highly rated restaurants than New York, London and Paris combined.

Maybe the most telling ­statistic is the percentage of workers engaged in so-called creative class occupations, a key measure of economic vitality in a postindustrial world. "And unless you define finance and accounting as part of the creative class," he said, "Tokyo is higher than New York."

At this point in his talk, he said, a few of the Stern MBA students began to look a little worried that they not only answered his question wrong, they picked the wrong business school in the wrong city.

But those great assets favoring Tokyo aren't what matter that much in global trade. In looking at the kinds of things he tracks for global connectedness scores, New York does awfully well.

International flights is a number he tracks, as is the percentage of the population born abroad — 37 percent in New York vs. 2 percent in Tokyo. He cites the higher number of international students attending local colleges and universities in New York and the volume of international ­telephone calls.

Another indicator he's recently found quite interesting as a proxy for participation in global financial markets is the total number of subscriptions for Bloomberg market data terminals, and New York leads the world.

"Obviously, New York is a little bit more connected" than Tokyo, he said. "That's why we call it global."

So in thinking about the Twin Cities, he said, he sees the kind of great assets Tokyo has. We are overrepresented with the headquarters of large companies and have a highly educated population engaged in creative class occupations. We also have a strong record in innovation. And much like Tokyo, he said, we have many fine restaurants.

But those things define what's really good here, and say little about the ability of our businesses to increase their participation in global trade and capture growth opportunities that may lie a long way from home.

"Whether you look at exports or a few other ­metrics," he said, the Twin Cities area "is not quite as global as it should be, given the local assets."

Ghemawat echoes the common sense policy ideas of the Brookings Institution and others, suggesting that our business and government leaders work together to raise the international profile of the Twin Cities region and look to develop trade ties anywhere they can be found.

He was also relieved to hear, on his recent visit, that the rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul has largely taken a back seat to working together across the region.

"This is a fabulous area," he said. "It should be a lot more global than it currently is."

lee.schafer@startribune.com • 612-673-4302