Loss of specific human capital is often identified as a mechanism through which displaced workers might experience permanent drops in earnings after job loss. Research has shown that displaced workers who migrate out of their region of origin have lower earnings than those who do not. This paper extends the discussion on returns to migration by accounting for the type of jobs people get and how related

Social capital is an important factor explaining differences in economic growth among regions. However, the key distinction between bonding social capital, which can lead to lock-in and myopia, and bridging social capital, which promotes knowledge flows across diverse groups, has been overlooked in growth research. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by examining how bonding and bridging social

In this paper, we take the concept of ‘new urban spaces’ as our jumping off point to engage with the efforts of Alphabet/Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs to cultivate a new integrated digital and infrastructural urban space on the Toronto waterfront. We interrogate the process and politics of imagining this new, digital urban space as an urban socio-technical imaginary. The paper critically examines

While the entrepreneurialisation of local administrations is widely acknowledged, the extent and format of institutional and organisational structures that accompany market-oriented ideological shifts and transitions in urban governance often remain unnoticed. This article provides an original theoretical argument and frame of analysis to forensically study the underlying infrastructures of entrepreneurial

This paper focuses on the agency exhibited by municipal governments in modifying or resisting neoliberal policies, by investigating their efforts to manufacture favorable competitive urban identities. In particular, this paper emphasizes how national ideologies are (re)articulated at a local level by medium-sized cities placed within different national contexts and, thus, exposed to different orientations

Buenos Aires, under the city administration of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, has recently implemented an ambitious social and territorial integration project in Villa 31 and other low-income settlements within the city. The mayor and his team have circulated the project in prestigious universities and urban forums while talking about Buenos Aires as ‘a global city’. When discussing the design of this

With an estimated annual worldwide death toll of between 290 000 and 650 000, seasonal influenza remains one of the deadliest respiratory diseases. Influenza vaccines provide moderate to high protection and have been on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines since 1979. Approximately 490 million doses of influenza vaccine are produced per year, but an investigation of geographic

As global health organizations and national governments tout “breast is best,” the value of human milk is being calculated – and profited from – in increasingly diverse forms. In this paper I chart three of the major ways in which human milk is being economically valued: calculating breastfeeding as a contribution to a country’s GDP; buying and selling human milk to hospitals for profit; and manufacturing

Does living in an area characterized by high concentrations of residents of the same country-of-origin deprive ethnic minority groups, or does potential access to an extended country-of-origin-specific network stimulate their integration? This paper takes a new approach to analysing the potential of country-of-origin-specific economic capital in neighbourhoods to increase employment opportunities.

Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the

On the world stage, Australian cities have been punching above their weight in global indexes of housing prices, sparking heated debates about the causes of and remedies for, sustained house price inflation. This paper examines the evidence base underpinning such debates, and the policy claims made by key commentators and stakeholders. With reference to the wider context of Australia’s housing market

Remittances, money sent by migrants to their communities of origin, are increasingly being linked to global financial inclusion in what is being called the “financialization of remittances.” This is the most recent attempt to divert remittances from “non-productive” money to savings and investments that can be mobilized for economic development. The literature that accompanies this strategy focuses

Business angels (BAs) - high net worth individuals who provide informal risk capital to firms - are seen as important providers of entrepreneurial finance. Theory and conventional wisdom suggest that the need for face-to-face interaction will ensure angels will have a strong predilection for local investments. We empirically test this assumption using a large representative survey of UK BAs. Our results

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is

The advent of ‘connected and automated vehicles’ (C/AV) is posing substantial transformation challenges for traditional automotive regions across the world. This article seeks to examine both conceptually and empirically how automotive regions reconfigure their industrial and support structures to promote new path development in the C/AV field. Drawing on recent conceptual advances at the intersection

This paper contributes to research on short-term rentals (STRs), their suppliers and their impact on housing and the local community, focusing on Thessaloniki, a recessionary city off the tourist map until recently. Through the conduction of in-depth interviews with hosts and other key informants, and the analysis of quantitative data on Airbnb listings, I argue that: (1) far from enabling a sharing

Since late January 2020 when the first coronavirus case reached England, United Kingdom, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly and widely across all local authorities (LAs) in England. In this featured graphic, we visualise how COVID-19 severity changes nationally and locally from 30 January to 23 November 2020. The geo-visualisation shows that there have been large regional disparities

In this article, I develop a practice ontology approach to labor control regimes (LCRs) in Global Production Networks (GPNs). Thereby, I address the shortcomings of existing scalar approaches to LCRs, which have not yet produced a nuanced understanding of how labor control dynamics at different scales are interrelated. Building on Schatzki’s ‘site ontology’, I conceptualize LCRs in GPNs as emerging

This paper analyses ‘Build to Rent’ (BTR), a new form of tenure in London’s housing market. We examine the ways in which private and public sector actors have shaped the context of BTR’s emergence, and developed a model for delivery in London. We argue they relied on and constructed narratives of negativity about the private rental sector, which were juxtaposed with their product to position BTR as

The right to the city represents a critique of the city as a place and an object of capitalist accumulation, in which priority is given to exchange value over use value. This critique references an ongoing and collective struggle for urban production to be radically democratic, as the expanded participation of city users would lead to appropriation, with social movements occupying a central role. This

This paper explores the spatial differences in population aging within the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) in the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea). Korea is among the most rapidly growing countries in the world in terms of its increasing elderly population. The speed of population aging and demographic decline has been a central issue in the field of urban and regional planning because it is linked

Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban development have yet to

This paper introduces the concept of “bypass urbanism” to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of

This article engages with a global migration-development agenda that aims to harness the development potential of remittances by incorporating remittance flows and households into global finance. Drawing upon 10 months of fieldwork research with remittance recipients in Ghana and Senegal, this paper shows that any attempts to financialise and channel remittances away from so-called ‘informal’ financial

This paper introduces the concept of a Luxury Freeport to describe a novel form of offshore where art and other high-end goods can be stored indefinitely without tax and duty-payments being made. The paper makes three key contributions to our understanding of these new actors in the global political economy. First, it conceptualizes Luxury Freeports as part of what has been called the ‘offshore world’

Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute to the efforts

Guatemala City is racked by the practice of extortion: the act of obtaining goods and/or money through the threat of force. Transportation workers are a particularly vulnerable population, with a homicide rate four times the national average. While social scientists, policy experts, and asylum advocates rightly observe that extortionists control territory, lost in this literature is an appreciation

As a growing backlash against globalisation gathers momentum, internationally oriented public universities face a period of great unrest. In particular, they find themselves caught between the narrowing local agendas of their public funders and the global outlook of their researchers and students. We suggest that an economic geography lens provides a powerful perspective for how universities might

We examine regional inequalities in mortality from the 1918 pandemic in England and Wales. Crude mortality rates (per 100,000 for June 1918 to May 1919) from the Registrar General’s 1920 report were directly allocated to crude mortality rates for 306 administrative units. A custom GIS ShapeFile was constructed to map the rates first as a choropleth and then as a cartogram. The visualisations show a

The seeking of potential rents directs flows of investment into built and natural environments, suffusing volatility into urban and rural landscapes, generating gentrification and other forms of land use change, and displacing lives and livelihoods to make space for ‘improvement’, ‘highest and best use’, ‘revitalization’, or the like. In this paper we argue that potential rents are captured at the

Randomised Control Trials (RCT) are both widely used in development, reaching hundreds of millions through RCT informed policy, and highly regarded, receiving a Nobel Prize in Economics. Proponents, largely academic economists, position RCTs as a scientific and ideologically neutral way to get to the heart of ‘what works’ in development. However, this new and radical micro-experimental approach to

Some sympathetic critics have recently found trouble with the latest iteration of the global production networks theory (GPN 2.0) developed in economic geography. I term these immanent critiques “GPN trouble” and address them in this Exchanges paper in relation to GPN 2.0’s conceptualization of value and risk and its perceived “missing” elements of the state, labour, and so on. Reiterating briefly

This paper examines growth machine politics operating in shrinking cities. Instead of de-growth politics logics emerging in shrinking cities, the paper finds, through an empirical study of Zonguldak, a shrinking mining city in Turkey, a politics that is better described as another variant of growth machine politics. Invigorated by the difficulties encountered in the implementation of state-driven growth

Internal migration has significant impacts on the population structure, public services, economic and social development of local areas. In this research, we adopted the theory and methods of complex network analysis to visualise the internal migration flows across local authorities in England and Wales. The graphic prominently highlights two spatial and geographic characteristics of population mobility

How and why neoliberal policies spread across political jurisdictions is a fundamental question for economic geographers and critical policy scholars. Many accounts inspired by the policy mobility approach point to neoliberalism as having a conditioning effect on the ease and speed with which policies transverse the globe. Yet the role that social movements and transnational advocacy networks play

Spatial inequality can lead to unexpected consequences, especially in large countries like Russia. State officials’ attempts to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic led to a national lockdown, which was supposed to dramatically reduce the daily mobility of people and therefore the likelihood of infection. At the same time, the Russian government did not introduce an emergency regime, and the

This paper investigates the affective dimensions of entrepreneurial and creative work with the goal of making sense of the emergent collective identity of ‘maker.’ Relying on qualitative research in Detroit, MI, and Portland, OR, with small, entrepreneurial craft producers affiliated with the ‘maker movement,’ I forward two broad suppositions. First, as a work-related identity, ‘maker’ is emergent

This article asks whether and how local firms in low-income countries can participate, upgrade and capture value in apparel global value chains in the context of increased entry barriers and asymmetric power relations. It focuses on Madagascar, which is the top apparel exporter in Sub-Saharan Africa and one where there is a significant number of local firms. The article examines the capability-building

This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in “precarious geographies”, i.e. locations where precarity is not

The evolution of knowledge networks has recently received a lot of attention from researchers. Empirical studies have shown that different types of proximities and network structural properties play a decisive role in tie formation. The present paper contributes to this literature by arguing that while these are crucial, they do not capture the full range of localities’ influence on the evolution of