The European Bank for Restructuring and Development (EBRD) is one of the least visible and most controversial regional development banks. Its unique features include its political mission to advance liberal market transition in countries committed to democratization, as well as an exceptionally large and diverse shareholder structure that comprises 71 countries (including US, Japan, China, […]

The stock of Chinese foreign direct investment into the advanced capitalist economies has grown exponentially in the past decades, generating a large body of policy and popular discourse around the question of Chinese political influence in global financial markets. Scrutiny has almost exclusively fallen on the investment activities of Chinese sovereign wealth funds and state-owned […]

Some people might consider the ‘brick-and-mortar’ bank branch to be an obsolete concept destined to become extinct. Almost every decade, it has been predicted that technology will render the physical presence of banks unnecessary. However, the bank branch has yet to be replaced as the primary source of soft information with an intrinsic spatial dimension. […]

Financial nationalism is on the rise. Countries ranging from the United States, Russia, China, and Taiwan, to Bolivia and Hungary embrace financial nationalist policies although to varying degrees. For scholars, a core intellectual puzzle is to explain these governments’ sustained capacity to pursue financial nationalism in an era when the interconnectedness of global financial markets […]

The literature about financial geography is largely defined by three parts: financial geography (general), distance relations in banking, and location analysis of commercial banks. Two important parts of financial geography are, however, rarely discussed in their relationship to each other: financial centers and monetary policy. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the literature […]

The Covid-19 pandemic has reignited debates about the future of cities. Optimists hope that – in response to the pandemic – our cities can become greener, healthier, smarter, more pleasant to work and live in, more economically resilient and more sustainable. But let’s just imagine for a moment that, for whatever reason (vaccine supply delays; […]

We are delighted to invite you to submit towards our conference and a special issue in International Review of Financial Analysis (1st of August deadline): Guest editors: Lucia Alessi (European Commission), Theodor F. Cojoianu (Queen’s University Belfast and EU Platform on Sustainable Finance), Declan French (Queen’s University Belfast), Andreas G.F. Hoepner (University College Dublin & […]

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has led to a renewed interest in finance, financial instability, and financialisation among geographers and heterodox economists. In this context, capital flows, i.e. financial transactions between residents of different geographical units, have received attention for their potential role in geographically uneven economic dynamics such as local financial booms. In […]

Among the features of a global agenda centred on a finance-philanthropy-development nexus is a collaborative approach to advancing digital financial inclusion. The digital form of financial inclusion builds on earlier development interventions centred on microcredit and its more expansive version: microfinance. While these earlier interventions came across as grassroots initiatives to counter the exclusionary nature […]

– Paolo Balmas and Sabine Dörry – China’s global ambitions are being expressed, among others, by its huge infrastructure project ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) and the internationalization of its currency, the renminbi (RMB). An element that serves both ambitions is the global expansion of Chinese banks. This paper examines the expansion strategy of Chinese […]

— Cheng Fang and Fenghua Pan — The recent social unrest in Hong Kong, which began in 2019, has reignited debates about Hong Kong’s future as a financial brokerage between a transitional China and the volatile global economy. Some claim that Hong Kong will inevitably lose its bridging role with mainland China as a financial […]

New Year message from Prof. Dariusz Wójcik, FinGeo Chair Dear FinGeo Community! As we are settling into 2021, with all its uncertainties, I wanted to thank you all for collaboration and contributions in 2020. Despite adversity, FinGeo was active. We had lively fora, AGM and an amazing FinTech workshop. Dozens of new members joined. The […]