Against (the idea of) financial markets

The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact – and thus as essentially separate from banks – but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems – it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, “the market” to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse.     

Determining factors of the development of a national financial center: the case of China

This study explores, theoretically and empirically, one of the important issues of the geography of finance, namely the location of high-level financial services. Specifically, we will try to explain why foreign financial services are spatially concentrated in a particular city so as to form a national financial center in China. By reviewing various forces behind the formation of a financial center, we argue that information problems have created the need for geographic agglomeration of financial activities based on the source of information. This is true even in an era when financial markets work through sophisticated telecommunication networks. Based on a survey of the actual location of multinational corporation (MNC) regional headquarters, and through investigation of reasons for the agglomeration of these headquarters, we anticipate that Beijing, as the prime source of policy information, is more likely than other Chinese cities to be the national pre-eminent financial center when the Chinese financial markets become more open to foreign firms in the near future. This study illustrates, using China as a case study, that geography still provides strong justification of why major financial services continue to have a high degree of spatial agglomeration in particular locations, despite the fact that the electronic transmission of information has substantially reduced the friction of distance.     

Knowledge makes the money go round: Conflicts of interest and corporate finance in London’s financial district

This paper argues that the conflicts of interest cases brought against Wall Street investment banks in the early 2000s were neither geographically nor institutionally isolated events. Rather, by combining recent work on financial knowledges in both economic geography and the social studies of finance with the growing interest in topological spatial imaginaries, I explore how London’s corporate finance industry was unable to distance itself from both the conflicts of interest allegations and the ensuing regulatory changes of the ‘Global Settlement’ in the US. Analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in London in the early 2000s is used to explore how a range of individual interests, institutional demands and structural changes within London’s financial district affected analysts’ ability to produce ‘objective’ research. As well as pointing to the problematic nature of certain aspects of knowledge rich ‘communities of practice’ [Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], I explore how the resulting contingent and situated nature of research practice is at odds with a weakly defined notion of ‘objective’ research that underpins the Financial Services Authority’s regulatory response.     

The (ir)relevance of geography for school choice: Evidence from a Swedish choice experiment

The increased opportunity to choose one’s school of preference has been raised as a key factor in many countries to promote equal opportunities and a higher quality of education. This has been endorsed by policymakers who assume that students make well-informed rational choices and that students stress only academic quality when deciding which school to attend. If this is true, it will benefit schools of high academic quality, rendering improved school quality overall. To date, little research has examined the validity of these assumptions despite the profound effects they have had for changing the school systems in many countries. This article describes an experiment to investigate the relative importance of factors in school choice. The aim is to test the validity of the theoretical assumptions that guided the school choice reforms in Sweden. Specifically, we draw on experimental data from prospective upper secondary school students in Sweden to contrast the principal school quality attributes behind the policy change (knowledge reputation and program feasibility), with the presence of friends and geographical attributes such as distance, location and accessibility, while controlling for individual characteristics. The results have important policy implications as they show that geographical factors are highly relevant for school choice preferences. In contrast to the reforms’ intentions, geography appears to have become more important than ever before. The findings thus reveal significant flaws in the assumptions that motivated the school choice policy reform.     

Tackling social exclusion in European neighbourhoods: experiences and lessons from the NEHOM project

Disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods with their complex social, economic and physical situations have increasingly become the focus of governmental policies in the EU. The emphasis has shifted from improving physical qualities to building opportunities for social groups in these areas. While physical upgrade is easier to achieve, at least in the short run, initiatives often fail in outcomes on communities and local participation. This paper aims to improve understanding on how to tackle area-based social exclusion and create socially coherent communities. Building on the results of the NEHOM project, the focus is on examining how various interventions have impacted local communities and their opportunities for better inclusion. A comparison between neighbourhoods shows that mixing social groups to a certain degree is likely to be a necessary step towards opening long-term opportunities for a disadvantaged neighbourhood. The planned initiatives should at the same time directly benefit local communities, and the involvement of local groups in the planning and implementation process helps to guarantee that the overall changes are accepted by the local community. However, the proposed guidelines do not provide a universal recipe for a successful renewal suiting each neighbourhood—the contextual matters should always be a starting point when planning an initiative.     

Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: the construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768

This paper engages with the material geographies of political conflict. It applies the concerns of actor-network theory around the entangled character of material/social relations to the geographies of subaltern politics. It explores how interconnected strikes of riverside labourers and sailors in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768 contested the terms on which materials were enrolled into mercantile capitalist networks. The dynamic geographies of these strikes are used to unsettle constructions of subaltern spaces of politics as bounded and localised. The paper then demonstrates how labourers crafted multiple antagonisms through negotiating their location in materially heterogeneous networks. It uses this concern with contested material geographies to engage with the entangled construction of political identities. The paper concludes that interrogating the materialities of political conflict does not just add a neglected technical dimension to the study of political activity; it provides considerable resources for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity and agency [Barry, A., Political Machines: Governing A Technological Society, Continuum Publications, London, 2001].     

Locating benefits: Decision-spaces, resource access and equity in US community-based forestry

In the US, the Ford Foundation’s Community-based Forestry Demonstration Program (2000-2005) promoted an internationally prominent model of community forestry centered on the simultaneous, balanced pursuit of ecological, economic and social goals (often symbolized as the “three-legged stool,” or “triple bottom line”). This paper develops an alternative framework for analysis that emphasizes the causal precedence of shifts in power relations, specifically the devolution of resource access and decision-making authority, rather than environmental, social and economic outcomes. These outcomes are not necessarily beneficial, and any benefits realized seldom occur simultaneously. Rather, they can be envisioned as the floors of a house erected sequentially on a foundation of resource access and control. While no universal claim is made, the “house” model proves an apt fit for many community-based forestry initiatives, including the two case studies presented. Who among the differentiated social groups within a community gained access to resources and decision-making influence largely predicted who gained individually. Nonetheless, indirect benefits felt at community and higher scales were significant. The findings further indicate that community forestry generally will not advance social equity unless it specifically targets marginalized groups. Crucially, equity is understood to embrace not only distributional justice, but also capacity-building and empowerment.     

长江三角洲的形成和演变

文章从地质构造背景、泥沙来源、动力条件和海底坡度四个方面阐述了长江三角洲的形成条件：长江三角洲主体位于构造下沉区；塑造长江三角洲的泥沙主要来自长江，少量来自废黄河三角洲和钱塘江；长江口门地区的波浪、潮流及沿岸流的作用比较适中、海底坡度平缓，有利于三角洲的保存。文章进而对不同历史时期三角洲岸线的变迁做了描述。最后，文章对本世纪三峡工程等流域人类活动将导致的河流来沙锐减对三角洲演变的影响做了初步的展望。     

Who’s afraid of red, yellow and green?: Redlining in Rotterdam

Redlining research is common practice in the US but not in other countries. Does this imply redlining does not take place elsewhere? This paper presents evidence from Rotterdam, the second largest city of the Netherlands, showing that in the 1990s it was impossible to get a home mortgage in large parts of the city. However, after Rotterdam joined the National Mortgage Guarantee (an institutional control measure) in 2000, hardly any evidence of redlining was found. This paper not only shows that redlining takes place outside of the US context, but also that a (discursive) treatment based on case study research has the possibility to gain a fuller understanding of redlining practices than a statistical/correlation analysis of mortgage data. Interviews with key actors are instrumental to unravelling how, why and when those in power make their decisions: agents are structured by the existing system while, at the same time, some of these agents have the power to re-produce as well as re-structure (transform) the system. One of the geographical outcomes of the agency-structure interaction is that credit is “redirected away from poorer to richer (and therefore “safer”) groups” as part of a strategy of risk avoidance [Leyshon and Thrift, 1997]. Thus redlining, like any other form of financial exclusion, deepens and accentuates prevailing levels of uneven development by creating geographical variations in access to the financial system [Dymski and Veitch, 1992].     

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

Recent and ongoing calls within labour geography and social and cultural geography have highlighted the importance of resistance, its spatial productions and manifestations. However, within this work, the geographical history of the factory system has been largely overlooked. Drawing upon Foucauldian theorisings in the fields of management and organisation, together with recent writings on the geographies of resistance, this paper takes Dundee’s jute industry at the turn of the twentieth century as its focus and explores how the workplace itself, and the very workplace discipline used to ensure a productive, efficient and hardworking workforce, engendered workplace protest among the industry’s working women. Writing through a number of modes and scales of protest within the workplace, within and between work groups, departments, mills and factories, and across the city, this paper adheres to an approach that carefully details the spaces and processes of resistance, paying careful attention to how union and non-union resistances operated and the geographies they worked through and created.     

Communities as the agents of commodification: The Kumbo Water Authority in Northwest Cameroon

In 1991 the people of the town of Kumbo in Northwest Cameroon expelled the national water corporation from town by force. They claimed to be retrieving a network that the community rightfully owned and they began to run the system along community lines. The paper tells the story of that water supply twice. First it reproduces the popular accounts that circulated in the 1990s that emphasize the role played by the community in the development and operation of the water supply and portray recent events as a triumph of community management. Then it retells the story using archive evidence that puts a quite different light on some of the events. It is argued that the emphasis on community management has a tendency to obscure other important aspects of the story, for example its political context and consequences. It is suggested that the widespread admiration for any initiative that is community based often results in an uncritical analysis of this form of development project. In this case the commodification of water accelerates after the community has wrested control of this public service from the state.     

Financial expansion and CO2 mitigation in top twenty emitters: Investigating the direct and moderating effects of the digital economy

The top twenty carbon-emitting nations contribute around 80% to global CO₂ emissions. The transformation of business operations, products, and services through establishing a digital economy (DGE) might help these nations to accomplish Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and carbon neutrality. However, digitalization poses certain direct and indirect effects on the environment, and also emissions and digitalization levels vary across nations. Further, the decoupling of economic growth and emissions makes it very challenging to reduce emissions without decreasing economic growth. Against this background, this research assesses the impacts of DGE and financial expansion (FE) on emissions in the top twenty emitters by considering the direct effect of DGE as well as its indirect effects through economic growth. The newly proposed method of moment quantile regressions (MM-QR) is adopted to unveil the associations between variables by accounting for distributional and heterogeneous variations in variables from 2003 to 2019. The novel findings demonstrate that DGE significantly boosts emissions. However, the indirect effects of DGE on emissions through economic growth reduce emissions and thereby, stimulate environmental quality. Interestingly, both direct and indirect effects of DGE are noticeable only from quantiles 6 to 9 and these impacts exhibit an increasing trend. FE decreases CO₂ and uplifts environmental quality in all quantiles without much variation. Economic growth (GR) augments CO₂; however, the magnitude of its effects reduces from lower to upper quantiles. Population density (PDN) alleviates environmental deterioration and its effects intensify from lower to upper quantiles. Afterward, the Driscoll-Kraay (DK) regression test confirmed the results of the MM-QR. Based on these novel results, a policy framework is proposed to reduce electronic waste and accelerate digital penetration in different sectors of the economy to enhance resource-saving and achieve carbon neutrality.     

流体包裹体组合对测温数据有效性的制约及数据表达方法

本文探讨流体包裹体组合（FIA）的原理及其对包裹体测温数据有效性的制约以及数据的表达方法。流体包裹体组合指的是一组同时被捕获的流体包裹体,其同时性的依据是岩相学关系而不是测温数据的相似性。如果根据岩相学关系建立了一个FIA,且这个FIA内的包裹体测温数据很一致,那么这些包裹体可能属于均一捕获且在捕获后未受破坏,这些包裹体的测温数据是有效的。在进行数据汇总或统计时,应取整个FIA内所有包裹体的平均值为代表,而不应将每个包裹体的数据都列入。如果同一FIA内包裹体的测温数据变化很大,那么这些包裹体可能属于非均一捕获或在捕获后遭受了显著改变（如卡脖子、拉伸）。这种情况下包裹体的测温数据是无效的,不应纳入数据汇总或统计。在很多情况下,一组包裹体是否属于同时捕获是很难确定的,因此不能严格地用FIA的方法来判定数据的有效性。但是,FIA的原理还是可以提供一些制约的。例如,如果相邻包裹体显示相似的测温数据,那么这些包裹体可能属于均一捕获且无显著捕获后变化。各个包裹体的数据都应纳入数据汇总及统计,但要注意不要将数据点过分集中在某个小区域。反之,如果相邻包裹体的测温数据相差很大,就要怀疑是不是非均一捕获、捕获后破坏,或不同期次包裹体叠加。详细的包裹体测温“填图”,结合与已知FIA数据的比较,可能可以解决这种多解性问题。     

Integrated mapping of groundwater drought risk in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region

Groundwater drought denotes the condition and hazard during a prolonged meteorological drought when groundwater resources decline and become unavailable or inaccessible for human use. Groundwater drought risk refers to the combined physical risk and human vulnerability associated with diminished groundwater availability and access during drought. An integrated management support tool, GRiMMS, is presented, for the mapping and assessment of relative groundwater drought risk in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Based on composite mapping analysis of region-wide gridded relative indices of meteorological drought risk, hydrogeological drought proneness and human groundwater drought vulnerability, the mapping results highlight consistent areas across the region with highest groundwater drought risk and populations in the order of 39 million at risk of groundwater drought at present. Projective climate-model results suggest a potentially significant negative impact of climate change on groundwater drought risk. The tool provides a means for further attention to the key, but neglected, role of groundwater in drought management in Africa.     

Genesis and Debelopment of Porosity in Carbonate Reservoirs—Fluid Inclusion Evidence

Fluid inclusions in minerals filled in pores of reservoir rocks can be used as a good indicator of pore genesis and development so as to shed light on oil generation,migration and accumulation.The relationship between pore evolution and oil generation has been established based on fluid inclusion studies on the Lower Ordovician carbonate reservoir strata in the Ordos Baisn,Northwest China.Seven stages of porosity development can be recogmized.i.e.,the penecontemporaneous,the early and middle-late diagenetic,the supergene,the early,middle and late re-burying stages.The dissolution pores an fissures formed in the supergene and middle-late reburying stage and the structural fractures formed in the late re-burying stage constitute the major traps of oil and gas.The major phase of oil migration and accumulation took place between Late Jurassic and Cretaceous,Corresponding to the middle and late re-burying stages.The generation and accumulation of oil can be closely related to Yenshanian tectonics.     

Geographies of production in 3D: Theoretical and research implications stemming from additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) is a comparatively new and evolving form of production that has the potential to transform the geographies of manufacturing. While this technology has garnered significant hype in the popular media, the topic has been virtually ignored in academic circles outside of business- and industry-specific, technology-oriented journals. Given its prospective impacts on the secondary sector and the potential for geographers to explore these transitions, this article provides a discussion of the possible opportunities for theoretical explorations and research into the place-based facets of additive manufacturing and its impacts on, or integration with, traditional manufacturing. In particular, we examine the spatial ramifications of this technology on supply, demand, innovation, global production networks, and the role of the state juxtaposed against contemporary insights pertaining to advances in additive manufacturing.     

Variations of Seismicity in the Avachinsky Gulf (Kamchatka, Russia)

Variations of seismic mode in the region of the Avachinsky Gulf (Kamchatka, Russia) are considered. Observed anomalies (seismic quiescence, the ring seismicity, reduction of the slope of the earthquake recurrence diagram) provide a basis to consider this region as a place of strong earthquake preparation. The Kamchatka regional catalogues of earthquakes between 1962–1995 were used in the analysis. A reduced seismicity rate is observed during 10 years in an area of 150 km × 60 km in size. During the last five years, in the vicinity of the area considered, earthquakes with M > 5 occurred three times more often than the average over thirty years. It is interpreted as ring seismicity. The block of 220 km × 220~km in size, including the quiescence zone, is characterized by a continuous decrease of the recurrence diagram slope, which has reached a minimum value for the last 33 years in this region.     

Palaeolithic and Quaternary research in the Trent Valley (UK): contributions by early collectors

A brief history is presented here of the activities of the three most notable collectors of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from Quaternary river terrace deposits in the Trent Valley, derived from archival material that has been largely ignored by previous research. Two, Mr. Fred W.G. Davey and Mr. George F. Turton, were local amateur collectors who did not publish the results of their work themselves and were reliant on collaboration with established archaeologists. The third, Mr. A. Leslie Armstrong, was an archaeologist best known for his work at Creswell Crags and Grimes Graves. Armstrong also made many Palaeolithic discoveries in the Trent Valley but published few details of his own material. Although such details of early Palaeolithic research in the Midlands and North of Britain are predominantly of historical interest only, they nonetheless provide a number of insights into the apparent lack of interest shown in areas north of the ‘Severn-Wash Line’ by collectors of Palaeolithic artefacts. Importantly, the dataset assembled by the Trent Valley Palaeolithic Project (TVPP) and summarized here is the only complete record of the known artefacts and archival material from the Trent, a proportion of which is now unavailable to the research community, having entered unknown private ownership since being studied. The second part of the paper relates this early research to current knowledge of the British Palaeolithic at its most northern fringes and to recent developments in reconstructing the Quaternary evolution of the River Trent.     

陕西秦岭海槽晚石炭世三里峡生物礁群落相研究

通过对发育于陕西秦岭海槽晚石炭世三里峡生物礁的生长过程、古生态特征及其造礁作用的研究,鉴定出６个门类的２３个属,主要为有孔虫、藻类、腕足类及介形类等。它们组成２个造礁群落,并形成独立的群落结构。该生物礁的造礁功能比较复杂,在礁的不同生长阶段有不同的造礁作用方式,具有以一种造礁作用为主兼有多种造礁作用共同作用的特点。其生长可分为生物定殖、障积式造礁及包粘式造礁三个阶段