Uploaded on 2015-06-09 by DimIoss

2. **People**: ‘Stocks’ refer to Residents and ‘Flows’ refer to Commuters or Immigration. Zurich belongs to a much larger economical area that can easily extend to north/central/east Switzerland including up to Schaffhausen, St-Gallen, Zug, Luzern or even Basel and Bern. The ‘stock’ of people living in Zurich consists of half a million residents, but looking at daily scale an important ‘flow’ of people that don’t live and work in the same city but rather commute from/to Zurich thanks to highly reliable transportation networks. Looking at another scale, we can consider immigration as another ‘flow’. This has been an important development factor for Zurich in the last years with the booming of international companies having settled their activities in the economical area, in the meantime increasing ‘stock’ of resident people. ![enter image description here][1] **Energy**: ‘Stocks’ refer to energy reserves like fuel, natural gas or hydroelectric and ‘Flows’ refer to energy consumption mainly electricity production and distribution. Zurich has very environmental friendly energy policy; it imports and produces electricity ‘flows’ from clean environmental sources like hydroelectric ‘stocks’. In the meantime, it promotes limitation of energy consumption for example through incentives to use public vs. private transportation, thus reducing fuel ‘stock’. ![enter image description here][2] **Financial Information**: Zurich is one of the leading worldwide financial centers. An important number of finance-related information ‘flows’ through Zurich where a high amount of banking sector decision-making is happening. ‘Stocks’ refer to financial accounts and physical wealth hosted in the city, ‘Flows’ refer to the financial information and transactions traded. Although not all accounts or wealth are located here, the high density of financial institution present in Zurich generate an important ‘flow’ of financial information transiting through the city to/from local and foreign stock exchanges as well as any global trading institution. ![enter image description here][3] 3. **People**: Transportation networks in Zurich region could, and probably will, develop even more in the future, increasing the quality of commuting from/to neighboring cities and therefore the daily people ‘flow’ volume. E.g. you can live in Zurich and work in Bern or live in Basel and work in Zurich with a confortable commuting shortest than any commuting in any big metropolis like Paris or London. In the meantime, immigration flow is an uncertain factor with the political willing to better control it at national level in the near future. Important expansion of people ‘stock’ in a city like Zurich might not necessarily happen, at least not at the same rate as commuters ‘flow’ expansion. **Energy**: Environmental policy in Zurich will probably expand further in the near future. This will have following impact of Energy stocks and flows: expansion of environmental friendly energy ‘stocks’ like hydroelectric sources while limiting consumption of non-renewable energy ‘stocks’ like carbon fuel. In parallel, a reduction of energy ‘flows’ like electricity consumption will probably happen due to development of energy efficient technologies. **Financial Information**: Further globalization of world economy as well as further concentration in the top financial centers will probably lead Zurich to acknowledge a volume increase of financial information ‘flow’ in the near future. While physical location of wealth ‘stock’ might be narrowed in Swiss financial centers like Zurich, due to change of international regulations i.e. bank secrecy, the high concentration of financial and wealth management expertize will definitely stay a core business pillar of Zurich, which will probably observe a continuous growth of financial information ‘flow’ volume. [1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14338925483674269.jpg [2]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14338925758704205.jpg [3]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/1433892639799083.jpg