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Financial Centres (financial + centre)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	25%

Selected Abstracts

Financial Centres and the Geography of Capital Flows

INTERNATIONAL FINANCE, Issue 1 2003
Francis E. Warnock
A geographical mismatch is evident in portfolio flows data. Because the data collection system was designed to measure cross-border transactions with foreign counterparties who are often intermediaries, the majority of flows are attributed to financial centres. We quantify this geographical mismatch by using the bilateral capital flows data to estimate bilateral debt and equity positions between the USA and over 40 countries and comparing those estimates with data from benchmark surveys. Our findings have implications for researchers and policy makers who use capital flows data or flows-based positions estimates. [source]

Geography and the Future of Stock Exchanges: Between Real and Virtual Space

GROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2007
DARIUSZ WÓJCIK
ABSTRACT This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the future of stock exchanges and financial centres by focusing on two questions. First, whether, how, why, and which stock exchange activities are prone to concentration in financial centres? Second, are they prone to concentration in national or international financial centres? Through a detail-rich analysis of stock exchange activities, including trading system, as well as relationships with members, issuers, and investors, the paper suggests a framework for the geography of stock exchange activities based on two dimensions,proneness to concentration in a financial centre and proneness to international consolidation. With this framework, predictions are made about the future geography of stock exchange activities led by the argument that while significant geographical reconfigurations are likely to unfold, driven primarily by the development of international networks of stock market institutions, stock exchanges, and financial centres will remain crucially important for each other. [source]

Entry of foreign banks in Shanghai: implications for business strategies in an increasingly competitive market

MANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 6 2005
M.K. Leung
This paper uses a simple mean-variance choice model as the basis of a duration analysis of the factors determining the decision of a foreign bank to establish a branch in Shanghai, the fast developing financial centre in China. Bank attributes, namely region of origin, parent bank size, the number of international branches and their branch network in China, have a significant impact on the time to entry. A country's share of total foreign direct investment in Shanghai also significantly affects the entry decision. The attributes facilitating entry also provide the foreign bank with a competitive advantage in its foreign currency transactions in Shanghai. However, with the ensuing market liberalisations after China's WTO accession, the entrants' competitiveness may not be sustained in the local currency market, especially following the proactive business strategies of Chinese banks and the protectionist measures of the government. It is expected that only a small number of the entrants will be able to emerge as big market players in the growing domestic currency market in Shanghai. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Banking crises and the evolution of the regulatory framework in Hong Kong 1945,1970

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2003
Catherine R. Schenk
Hong Kong initially emerged relatively unscathed from the East Asian financial crisis of 1997,1998 and was able to defend the pegged exchange rate on which its status as an international financial centre depended. The soundness and transparency of the financial system is widely credited with allowing Hong Kong to avoid the worst excesses that brought down financial systems elsewhere. This article explores the evolution of the regulatory framework in the post-war period, revealing the reluctance with which the state tightened its control over the banking system. This resulted in the combination of poor supervision and constraints on competition that contributed to further instability. [source]

Norfolk Island and Its Tax Haven

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 2 2002
Anthony Van Fossen
The first Pacific Islands offshore financial centre was born in 1966 on Norfolk Island. This paper analyses the historical trajectory of Norfolk Island's tax haven in terms of its dialectical tensions with the Australian federal government , tensions between self-determination and subordination which emerge from Norfolk's anomalous status as a self-governing external territory of Australia. Promoters of Norfolk Island's tax haven have seen its potential to become a major global offshore financial centre blocked by the Australian federal government. Yet, at major critical junctures (in 1976, 1991 and 2000) the Australian federal campaigns that threatened Norfolk's residential tax haven disintegrated in the face of concerted local opposition, although the danger has never entirely disappeared. The island's political economy and external relations are likely to remain inextricably bound to its tax haven. [source]

Geography and the Future of Stock Exchanges: Between Real and Virtual Space

Financial Centres and the Geography of Capital Flows

China's WTO accession, state enterprise reform, and spatial economic restructuring

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2002
Simon Xiaobin Zhao
China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) promises to have profound effects on the development of the nation's economy and on nationwide enterprise reorganization. This paper attempts to address the relationship between China's WTO accession and state enterprise reforms, and their impacts on the performance of China's spatial economy, including the possible rise and fall of several large national financial centres, such as Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It is argued that China's new international ties will enhance current enterprise reforms and promote changes in the existing pattern of enterprise organization, with enterprise mergers, acquisitions, takeover activity and the formation of large multinational corporations (MNCs) becoming dominant trends within China's industrial development. Alongside these changes, some economic sectors, such as information technology (IT) and advanced professional services are predicted to become concentrated in several national information ,heartlands,' each having its own well-developed information infrastructure and other comparative advantages over traditional industrial centers. Meanwhile traditional industrial enterprises, while continuing to rely upon their pre-assigned resource priorities, will certainly face fierce international competition in the turbulent global market. The spatial shift of production and trade undoubtedly requires that Chinese enterprises, especially those that are state-owned, reorganize their production-trade systems according to the global ,rules of the game'. All of these changes, due to take effect imminently with China's WTO accession, will fundamentally restructure China's spatial economic landscape, including the creation of a new information heartland and hinterland that will in turn determine the life or death of the country's national financial centres. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Searching for the Mecca of finance: Islamic financial services and the world city network

AREA, Issue 1 2010
David Bassens
This paper presents an analysis of the geography of the booming ,Islamic financial services' (IFS) sector, which provides a host of financial services based on Islamic religious grounds. The relevance of such an analysis is discussed against the conceptual backdrop of the world city network literature. It is argued that a focus on the globalisation of the IFS sector may provide an alternative to hegemonic geographical imaginations of world city-formation through its focus on other forms of globalising economic processes and regions that do not commonly feature in this literature. Based on information on the location strategies of 28 leading IFS firms in 64 cities across the world, we analyse different features of this decentred global urban geography. Manama is hereby identified as the Mecca of the IFS sector, while other major Gulf cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi are also primary nodes in this urban network. Other major Middle East North Africa (MENA) cities such as Tehran follow suit, but also more traditional financial centres such as London are well connected. [source]

Geographies of the financial crisis

AREA, Issue 1 2009
Manuel Aalbers
Real estate is, by definition, local as it is spatially fixed. Mortgage lending, however, has developed from a local to a national market and is increasingly a global market today. An understanding of the financial crisis is ultimately a spatialised understanding of the linkages between local and global. This article looks at the geographies of the mortgage crisis and credit crunch and asks the question: how are different places affected by the crisis? The article looks at different states, different cities, different neighbourhoods and different financial centres. Investors in many places had invested in residential mortgage backed securities and have seen their value drop. Housing bubbles, faltering economies and regulation together have shaped the geography of the financial crisis on the state and city level in the US. Subprime and predatory lending have affected low-income and minority communities more than others and we therefore not only see a concentration of foreclosures in certain cities, but also in certain neighbourhoods. On an international level, the long-term economical and political consequences of this are still mostly unknown, but it is clear that some financial centres in Asia (including the Middle East) will become more important now that globalisation is coming full circle. This article does not present new empirical research, but brings together work from different literatures that all in some way have a specific angle on the financial crisis. The aim of this article is to make the geographical dimensions of the financial crisis understandable to geographers that are not specialists in all , or even any , of these literatures, so that they can comprehend the spatialisation of this crisis. [source]