... Basel for their valuable comments. David Bieri is the Head of Business Development at the B... more ... Basel for their valuable comments. David Bieri is the Head of Business Development at the Bank for International Settlements, CH-4002, Basel, Switzerland. E-mail:david.bieri@bis.org. Contact: Ludwig Chincarini, PhD, is ...
This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up wh... more This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up where Scott’s (2000) intellectual history of the field’s “great-half century” ends. It is part retrospective and prospective; as such, it aims beyond a historical review to outline some ideas about important factors that drove the recent developments of economic geography. Specifically, I identify three main themes: i) the “Methodenstreit” over the New Economic Geography and the alleged intellectual imperialism of geographical economics; ii) the search for engaged pluralism amid concerns of a dominance of Anglo-American economic geography; and—perhaps most strikingly—iii) the rapid (re)emergence of subfields after the Great Financial Crisis, such as the geography of money and finance and political economic geography, both with a particular focus on spatial disparities and inequality. Focusing on new developments in the geography of money and finance, I also illustrate how the three themes (economic imperialism, pluralism, and financialisation) have shaped the discipline’s most recent intellectual history. The review concludes by outlining elements of a vision for a pluralist post-crisis economic geography.
“Shadow-world cataclysmic money is filling the gap left behind conventional money.”—Jane Jacobs (... more “Shadow-world cataclysmic money is filling the gap left behind conventional money.”—Jane Jacobs ([1961] 1993, p. 302).Deep subsidies for residential housing credit constitute one of the most distin...
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for rent... more Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for renters and owner occupiers - relative to a given individual’s or household’s disposable income. While there is no universal definition for this term, housing affordability is an easy concept to grasp in general. At the same time, affordability can be hard to pin down in practice, especially in terms of defining the appropriate geographic scope for housing markets, suitable definitions of representative reference individuals and households, and their changing circumstances over time. In its most crude form, housing aff ordability simply refers to the rent-to-income ratio or house-price-to-income ratio; more sophisticated measures of housing aff ordability consider (i) how much nonhousing expenditures are limited by how much is left after paying for housing or (ii) in addition to “income a ffordability”, they distinguish between “purchase affordability” (the ability to borrow funds to purchase a house), “repayment affordability” (the ability to aff ord housing finance re-payments). Over the last three decades or so, policy makers have increasingly begun to frame discussions of the availability of adequate housing opportunities in terms housing affordability as opposed to the more traditional notion of housing need.
By raising money from a large number of people via the internet, crowdfunding offers the promise ... more By raising money from a large number of people via the internet, crowdfunding offers the promise of a “democratization of finance”. Recently, the crowdfunding of large-scale urban projects appears to have gained traction as a handful of high-profile real estate and infrastructure projects are making headlines around the globe for relying on distributed-network online financing. Instead of their purported promise, this paper argues that large-scale efforts to crowdfund the urban fabric carry all the hallmarks of what Jane Jacobs termed “cataclysmic money”. As such, crowdfunding the city might simply represent the next phase of entrepreneurialism in the financial transformation of urban governance. The main thrust of the argument developed in this paper suggests that it is precisely because of such financialising potential – and the relational importance of money and finance in an urbanised society more generally – that crowd financing might undermine, rather than fortify, the “right to the city” in the sense of Lefebvre. Indeed, the detailed workings of the modern monetary-financial system – from the technical complexity of financial engineering to the institutional architecture of money and the political economy of its regulatory governance – are still insufficiently recognised in much of the public discourse on the social consequences of finance.
A significant fraction of GDP is generated by implicit expenditures on spatially varying nonmarke... more A significant fraction of GDP is generated by implicit expenditures on spatially varying nonmarket amenities such as climate, public goods, urban infrastructure, and pollution. People pay for these amenities indirectly, through spatial variation in housing prices, wages and property taxes. In this paper we construct a new database of 75 amenities, match it to location choices made by 5 million house-holds, and estimate their amenity expenditures in a way that is consistent with prin-ciples of satellite accounting and fundamentals of spatial sorting behavior. We find that amenity expenditures were $562 billion in 2000—8 % of all U.S. personal con-sumption expenditures.
... Basel for their valuable comments. David Bieri is the Head of Business Development at the B... more ... Basel for their valuable comments. David Bieri is the Head of Business Development at the Bank for International Settlements, CH-4002, Basel, Switzerland. E-mail:david.bieri@bis.org. Contact: Ludwig Chincarini, PhD, is ...
This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up wh... more This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up where Scott’s (2000) intellectual history of the field’s “great-half century” ends. It is part retrospective and prospective; as such, it aims beyond a historical review to outline some ideas about important factors that drove the recent developments of economic geography. Specifically, I identify three main themes: i) the “Methodenstreit” over the New Economic Geography and the alleged intellectual imperialism of geographical economics; ii) the search for engaged pluralism amid concerns of a dominance of Anglo-American economic geography; and—perhaps most strikingly—iii) the rapid (re)emergence of subfields after the Great Financial Crisis, such as the geography of money and finance and political economic geography, both with a particular focus on spatial disparities and inequality. Focusing on new developments in the geography of money and finance, I also illustrate how the three themes (economic imperialism, pluralism, and financialisation) have shaped the discipline’s most recent intellectual history. The review concludes by outlining elements of a vision for a pluralist post-crisis economic geography.
“Shadow-world cataclysmic money is filling the gap left behind conventional money.”—Jane Jacobs (... more “Shadow-world cataclysmic money is filling the gap left behind conventional money.”—Jane Jacobs ([1961] 1993, p. 302).Deep subsidies for residential housing credit constitute one of the most distin...
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for rent... more Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for renters and owner occupiers - relative to a given individual’s or household’s disposable income. While there is no universal definition for this term, housing affordability is an easy concept to grasp in general. At the same time, affordability can be hard to pin down in practice, especially in terms of defining the appropriate geographic scope for housing markets, suitable definitions of representative reference individuals and households, and their changing circumstances over time. In its most crude form, housing aff ordability simply refers to the rent-to-income ratio or house-price-to-income ratio; more sophisticated measures of housing aff ordability consider (i) how much nonhousing expenditures are limited by how much is left after paying for housing or (ii) in addition to “income a ffordability”, they distinguish between “purchase affordability” (the ability to borrow funds to purchase a house), “repayment affordability” (the ability to aff ord housing finance re-payments). Over the last three decades or so, policy makers have increasingly begun to frame discussions of the availability of adequate housing opportunities in terms housing affordability as opposed to the more traditional notion of housing need.
By raising money from a large number of people via the internet, crowdfunding offers the promise ... more By raising money from a large number of people via the internet, crowdfunding offers the promise of a “democratization of finance”. Recently, the crowdfunding of large-scale urban projects appears to have gained traction as a handful of high-profile real estate and infrastructure projects are making headlines around the globe for relying on distributed-network online financing. Instead of their purported promise, this paper argues that large-scale efforts to crowdfund the urban fabric carry all the hallmarks of what Jane Jacobs termed “cataclysmic money”. As such, crowdfunding the city might simply represent the next phase of entrepreneurialism in the financial transformation of urban governance. The main thrust of the argument developed in this paper suggests that it is precisely because of such financialising potential – and the relational importance of money and finance in an urbanised society more generally – that crowd financing might undermine, rather than fortify, the “right to the city” in the sense of Lefebvre. Indeed, the detailed workings of the modern monetary-financial system – from the technical complexity of financial engineering to the institutional architecture of money and the political economy of its regulatory governance – are still insufficiently recognised in much of the public discourse on the social consequences of finance.
A significant fraction of GDP is generated by implicit expenditures on spatially varying nonmarke... more A significant fraction of GDP is generated by implicit expenditures on spatially varying nonmarket amenities such as climate, public goods, urban infrastructure, and pollution. People pay for these amenities indirectly, through spatial variation in housing prices, wages and property taxes. In this paper we construct a new database of 75 amenities, match it to location choices made by 5 million house-holds, and estimate their amenity expenditures in a way that is consistent with prin-ciples of satellite accounting and fundamentals of spatial sorting behavior. We find that amenity expenditures were $562 billion in 2000—8 % of all U.S. personal con-sumption expenditures.
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