Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND KEY RECOMMENDATIONS The nature of the problem: • Geographical inequalities in the UK are a longstanding and persistent problem rooted in deepseated and cumulative processes of local and regional divergence with antecedents in the inter-war years and accelerating since the early 1980s. • This spatial divergence has been generated by the inability of some places to adapt to the emergence of the post-industrial service and knowledge-based economy whose geographies are very different from those of past heavy industries. As a consequence, the "left behind" problem has become spatially and systemically entrenched. • Challenging ideas of market-led adjustment, there is little evidence that real cost advantages in Northern areas are correcting and offsetting the geographically differentiated development of skilled labour and human capital and the quality of residential and business environments. • A variety of different types of "left behind place" exist at different scales, and these types combine common problems with distinctive economic trajectories and varied causes. These different types will need policies that are sensitive and adaptive to their specific problems and potentialities. • Contemporary economic development is marked by agglomeration in high-skilled and knowledge-intensive activities. Research-based concentrations of high-skilled activity in the UK have been limited and concentrated heavily in parts of London and cities in the Golden Triangle, especially Oxford and Cambridge. Even in London, the benefits have been unevenly spread between boroughs. • Existing analyses of the predicaments of left behind places present a stark division between rapid growth in "winning" high-skilled cities and relative decline in "losing" areas. This view is problematic because it oversimplifies the experience in the UK and other countries. A false binary distinction is presented to policymakers which offers only the possibility of growth in larger cities and derived spillovers and other compensations elsewhere. • Yet, the post-industrial economy involves strong dispersal of activity and growth to smaller cities, towns and rural areas. However, this process has been highly selective between local areas and needs to be better understood. The institutional and policy response: • Past policies in the UK have lacked recognition of the scale and importance of the left behind problem and committed insufficient resources to its resolution. The objective of achieving a less geographically unequal economy has not been incorporated into mainstream policymaking. When compared with other countries, the UK has taken an overcentralized, "top-down" approach to policy formulation and implementation, often applying "one size fits all" policy measures to different geographical situations. • Political cycles have underpinned a disruptive churn of institutions and policies. In contrast with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, particularly in Europe, there has been limited long-term strategy and continuity, and inadequate development of local policymaking capacity and capabilities, especially for research, analysis, monitoring and evaluation. • Past policies have been underfunded, inconsistent, and inadequately tailored and adapted to the needs of different local economies. We estimate that, on average over the period 1961–2020, the UK government invested on average £2.9 billion per annum in direct spatial policy (2020 prices), equivalent to around 0.15% of gross national income (GNI) per annum over the period. European Union Structural and Cohesion Policy support has added around 0.12% GNI (2020 prices) per annum to this over the period from the late 1970s. • These broad estimates suggest that discretionary expenditure in the UK on urban and regional policy when both domestic and European Union spatial policy was in operation was equivalent to 0.27% per annum of UK GNI (2020 prices). This is dwarfed by mainstream spending programmes (by comparison, the UK committed £14.5 billion (0.7% of GNI) to international aid in 2019). The level of resources devoted to spatial policy has been modest given the entrenched and cumulative nature of the problem. • Policies for "levelling up" need clearly to distinguish different types of left behind places and devise a set of place-sensitive and targeted policies for these types of "clubs" of left behind areas. This shift will need a radical expansion of "place-based" policymaking in the UK which allows national and local actors to collaborate on the design of appropriate targeted programmes. • A key priority for "levelling up" is revitalizing Northern cities and boosting their contribution to the national economy. Underperformance in these urban centres has been a major contributor to persistent geographical inequality in the UK. • Addressing the UK’s geographical economic inequalities and the plight of left behind places requires substantially more decentralization of power and resources to place-based agencies. This would enable the current UK government’s "levelling up" agenda to capitalize on the many advantages of more "place-based" policymaking to diagnose problems, build on local capabilities, strengthen resilience and adapt to local changes in circumstances. • Crucially, place-based efforts need to be coordinated and aligned with place-sensitive national policies. The key challenge of a levelling up mission is to integrate "place-based" policies with greater place sensitivity in national policies and in regulation and mainstream economic spending. • It is important to develop policies that spread the benefits from agglomeration and ensure that the income effects and innovations produced by high-skill concentrations diffuse to the wider cityregional economies and their firms (especially small and medium-sized enterprises) and workers. There is a clear need for more policy thinking on how this can be achieved. • Policy for levelling-up needs to align and coordinate with the other national missions for net zero carbon and post-pandemic recovery. This suggests that a strong "place-making" agenda focused on quality of life, infrastructure and housing in many left behind places is important for post-industrial and service growth. • Genuine place-making is a long-term process involving public, private and civic participation which allows local responses to those economic, environmental, and social constraints and problems that most strongly reduce the quality of life in local areas. A truly "total place" approach is required. The quality of infrastructure, housing stock and public services is crucial for the quality of place as well as the ability to secure and attract more dispersed forms of growth. There is little hope of delivering "place-making" if public sector austerity is once again allowed to cut back public services more severely in poorer and more deprived areas. The way forward: • The scale and nature of the UK’s contemporary "left behind places" problem are such that only a transformative shift in policy model and a resource commitment of historic proportions are likely to achieve the "levelling up" ambition that is central to the current government’s political ambitions. KEY RECOMMENDATIONS In summary, our recommendations are that the UK government should: • Grasp the transformative moment for local, regional and urban development policy as the UK adjusts to a post-Covid-19 world and seeks a net zero carbon future. • Establish a clear and binding national mission for "levelling up". • Realize the potential of place in policymaking. • Decentralize and devolve towards a multilevel federal polity. • Strengthen subnational funding and financing and adopt new financing models involving the public, private sector and civic sectors to generate the resources required. • Embed geography in the national state and in national policy machinery. • Improve subnational strategic research, intelligence, monitoring and evaluation capacity. A failure to learn from the lessons of the last 70 years of spatial policy risks the UK becoming an ever more divided nation, with all the associated economic, social and political costs, risks and challenges that this presents.
This book examines Russia’s capacity to respond to a changing world through the lens of the country’s oil industry. Against a backdrop of social, political and climatic change, Indra Overland and Nina Poussenkova present a systematic analysis of how modern energy developments in the form of shale oil, offshore oil and the global energy transition are handled.
The Global Investment Competitiveness Report 2019-2020 provides novel analytical insights, empirical evidence, and actionable recommendations for governments seeking to enhance investor confidence in times of uncertainty. The report's findings and policy recommendations are organized around "3 ICs" - they provide guidance to governments on how to increase investments' contributions to their country's development, enhance investor confidence, and foster their economies' investment competitiveness. The report presents results of a new survey of more than 2,400 business executives representing FDI in 10 large developing countries: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. The results show that over half of surveyed foreign businesses have already been adversely affected by policy uncertainty, experiencing a decrease in employment, firm productivity, or investment. Foreign investors report that supporting political environments, stable macroeconomic conditions, and conducive regulatory regimes are their top three investment decision factors. Moreover, the report's new global database of regulatory risk shows that predictability and transparency increase investor confidence and FDI flows. The report also assesses the impact of FD! on poverty, inequality, employment, and firm performance using evidence from various countries. It shows that FDI in developing countries yields benefits to their firms and citizens-including more and better-paid jobs-but governments need to be vigilant about possible adverse consequences on income distribution. The report is organized in S chapters: Chapter 1 presents the results of the foreign investor survey. Chapter 2 explores the differential performance and development impact of greenfield FDI, local firms acquired by multinational corporations {i.e. brownfield FDI), and domestically-owned firms using evidence from six countries. Chapter 3 assesses the impact of FDI on poverty, inequality, employment and wages, using case study evidence from Ethiopia, Turkey and Vietnam. Chapter 4 presents a new framework to measure FDI regulatory risk that is linked to specific legal and regulatory measures. Chapter S focuses on factors for increasing the effectiveness of investment promotion agencies.
Financialization has become the go-to term for scholars grappling with the growth of finance. This Handbook offers the first comprehensive survey of the scholarship on financialization, connecting finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society and the economy. It takes stock of the diverse avenues of research that comprise financialization studies and the contributions they have made to understanding the changes in contemporary societies driven by the rise of finance. The chapters chart the field’s evolution from research describing and critiquing the manifestations of financialization towards scholarship that pinpoints the driving forces, mechanisms and boundaries of financialization. Written for researchers and students not only in economics but from across the social sciences and the humanities, this book offers a decidedly global and pluri-disciplinary view on financialization for those who are looking to understand the changing face of finance and its consequences.
Local and regional development is an increasingly global issue. For localities and regions, the challenge of enhancing prosperity, improving wellbeing and increasing living standards has become acute for localities and regions formerly considered discrete parts of the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. Amid concern over the definitions and sustainability of ‘development’, a spectre has emerged of deepened unevenness and sharpened inequalities in the development prospects for particular social groups and territories. Local and Regional Development engages and addresses the key questions: what are the principles and values that shape definitions and strategies of local and regional development? What are the conceptual and theoretical frameworks capable of understanding and interpreting local and regional development? What are the main policy interventions and instruments? How do localities and regions attempt to effect development in practice? What kinds of local and regional development should we be pursuing? This book addresses the fundamental issues of ‘what kind of local and regional development and for whom?’, frameworks of understanding, and instruments and policies. It outlines what a holistic, progressive and sustainable local and regional development might constitute before reflecting on its limits and political renewal. With the growing international importance of local and regional development, this book is an essential student purchase, illustrated throughout with maps, figures and case studies from Asia, Europe, and Central and North America.
Territory and Power in the United Kingdom is about the nature of the UK state, where it came from and where it is going. Bulpitt sought to summarise the political code and statecraft that has helped govern the territories of the United Kingdom for much of the twentieth century, though it had its antecedents many years before. He provides an account of its emergence, operation and decline, which summarises an important phase in the United Kingdom's history and marks out why the country stood out from its continental neighbours in terms of its territorial organisation and state tradition. This ECPR Classics edition includes a new introduction by Peter John placing this important, classic work in a current context.
*** Winner of the Myrdal Prize for Evolutionary Political Economy *** The last few years have seen the spectacular failure of market fundamentalism in Europe and the US, with a seemingly never-ending spate of corporate scandals and financial crises. As the environmental limits and socially destructive tendencies of the current profit-driven economic model become daily more self-evident, there is a growing demand for a fairer economic alternative, as evidenced by the mounting campaigns against global finance and the politics of austerity. Reclaiming Public Ownership tackles these issues head on, going beyond traditional leftist arguments about the relative merits of free markets and central planning to present a radical new conception of public ownership, framed around economic democracy and public participation in economic decision-making. Cumbers argues that a reconstituted public ownership is central to the creation of a more just and sustainable society. This book is a timely reconsideration of a long-standing but essential topic.
The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.
Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies. An interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging urban researchers examine critical questions about urban infrastructure in different global contexts. The chapters address water, sanitation, and waste politics in Mumbai, Kampala and Tyneside, analyse the use of infrastructure in the dispossession of Palestinian communities, explore the pacification of Rio’s favelas in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, describe how people’s bodies and lives effectively operate as ‘infrastructure’ in many major cities, and also explores tentative experiments with low-carbon infrastructures. These diverse cases and perspectives are connected by a shared sense of infrastructure not just as a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an ‘output,’ but as a complex social and technological process that enables – or disables – particular kinds of action in the city. Infrastructural Lives is crucial reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners in urban studies globally.
