Long ago, I traveled with Dallas civic leaders to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and to the global headquarters of Japanese trading giants in Tokyo. The foreign big shots listened politely to the Dallas boosters. Then they tried to sell DART cars or something else to the city.

The back and forth continues. For more than a quarter century, City Hall has harbored a persistent belief that Dallas has to sell itself globally to keep moving forward.

Now economist Lyssa Jenkens of the Greater Dallas Chamber has pushed a PowerPoint presentation to City Hall saying "sell harder."

"The growing edge of the economy is global. You don't want to make that 90 percent of your economic strategy, but to be in that top tier of growth, we've got to do a much better job of capturing that edge in the global economy," Jenkens said.

The chamber sponsored a global competitiveness study that puts Dallas-Fort Worth in the top 10 business cities of the world – ahead of cosmopolitan powerhouses like Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Corporate CEOs scattered across the top tier in Tokyo, New York and Paris might not give this study much of their time, but they're not the prime audience. Jenkens wants Dallas to pay attention.

There is a familiar need for a world-beating university, she said, and liberal immigration rules so that more foreign engineers and scientists can work at the region's technology companies.

And there is the more startling thought that the region may need two or even three giant international cargo airports.

The region already has two huge air cargo facilities – Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Fort Worth Alliance Airport, operated by Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood companies.

D/FW is a regional hub for UPS, while Alliance is a regional hub for FedEx. Both move hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo to other sites across the country. But both are also major players in international cargo as well.

"I've been studying this for a long time, and you have to stand back and say, at the metro level, do we need two or three D/FWs?" Jenkens asked. "That is important, especially since we don't have a water port."

Airport managers would be happy to get back to what they had before the traumatic air trade slowdowns that followed 9/11 and the current global recession. And both D/FW and Alliance have room to grow.

"Between the two airports, I think we've got a platform that can really put us, this region, at the forefront of the international air cargo community globally," said Tom Harris, a senior vice president with Hillwood Properties.

Alliance is lengthening its two runways so that fully loaded 747 cargo jets can make direct flights to Europe and Asia year-round. D/FW has a giant air cargo area on the northwest side of the airport, with room to grow.

Some Lancaster civic leaders hope their small airport might someday be an air cargo giant serving the Dallas Logistics Hub.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area gets a lot of its economic strength from its role as a hub in global logistics chains for rail, truck and air cargo containers. Bulk goods coming from Asia arrive on unit trains loaded at West Coast seaports. Cargoes from Latin America and Europe arrive by train and truck from Houston, and tremendous volumes of goods from Mexico and Canada move to and through the area by truck.

It's not port activities that give Dallas its high ranking as an international commerce center, however. The service sector – law firms, banking, accounting and marketing services – are strengths that elevate Dallas above port cities like Hong Kong.

But if Dallas wants to eclipse Chicago, it should give more thought to its capacity as a port, Jenkens said. And that means air cargo.