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Scotland is almost entirely absent from the British Industrial Revolution literature, despite being one of the world's first industrialising economies. This absence has been partially attributed to a paucity of statistical and systematic studies of the kind that has transformed our understanding of English industrialisation. With a view to fill this gap in the literature, this thesis presents an economic geography of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland based on the *Old* and *New Statistical Accounts of Scotland* (1791-99 and 1834-42), collections of essay‐style answers by parish clergy to a 170‐question survey that include observations on the state of parishes' agriculture and industry, demographics, ecclesiastical matters and more. I used it to create a dataset describing parishes' agriculture and industry using 61 ordinal, categorical variables. Because the data is unsuited to standard multivariate statistics, I introduce a novel approach based on geometric data analysis to produce a structured, systematic descriptive and visual analysis, in contrast to the explanatory statistical approaches more common in economic history. The statistical analysis also acts as a framework for collating and synthesising extensive qualitative source material and the large, relatively inconclusive and disparate secondary literature on Scotland's industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution in Scotland is found to have differed substantially in several important regards to common depictions of the British Industrial Revolution. Scotland relatively low wages, a lack of skilled labour, distinct cultural and institutional developments, and its demographic transition was initiated by an unexplained decline in mortality, and not a rise in fertility as in England. Based on the latter I argue population growth is an under‐explored factor and potential explanation for the Industrial Revolution. The character of the Industrial Revolution differed substantially depending on location, leading to the emergence of economic regions with spatial divisions of labour and inequalities. National aggregate approaches fail to account for these differences and omit fundamental aspects of it, and when doing so the Industrial Revolution in Scotland appears as dramatic and 'revolutionary', significantly different to the now orthodox depiction of a slow, 'evolutionary' transformation of the British economy.

It is commonly argued that only a handful of technology firms control the infrastructure that underpins contemporary forms of artificial intelligence (AI). However, little is known about how this concentration of computational resources manifests in new production geographies. This thesis asks: What forces enact, and are enacted by, AI's geographies of production? In answering this question, it develops the original framework of neural production networks: geographically dispersed but computationally enveloped production arrangements powered by artificial neural networks. Due to the impacts of AI on economic, political, and cultural interactions, neural production networks already infiltrate infrastructural life. Drawing on a paradigmatic case study design that is primarily informed by document analysis, the thesis applies this new framework to answer three research questions: First, how do technology giants act as lead firms within AI's geographies of production? Second, how does state action shape, and is shaped by, AI's geographies of production? Third, what do AI's geographies of production imply for platformised cultural production? The thesis answers these questions by disassembling neural production networks into three of their mutually conditioning forces. The first force is envelopment: Acting as industry-dominating lead firms, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft decentralise the production of AI and centralise its provision, thereby enclosing users into their proprietary ecosystems. The second force is sovereignty: Although the EU's Digital Single Market Strategy attempts to push back against an infrastructural dependency on the computational resources of American lead firms, its agency to reconfigure power relations in neural production networks remains limited. The third force is hyperproduction: Underlying the penetration of cultural life with AI-generated media, new revenue streams emerge that purport to destabilise the boundary between reality and simulation. By opening out a conceptual space that probes how those forces relate to each other, the thesis expounds a new understanding of production geographies. This conceptual space contributes to cross-disciplinary scholarship at the intersection of platform studies and economic geography. Additionally, the arguments and insights of this thesis are relevant to policymakers and regulators facing the task of governing the diffusion of neural production networks into ever-more societal spheres.

This PhD investigates innovative development finance, a celebrated trend in development, arguing that, while there is potential, there are also important economic and political costs. Innovative development finance, which has emerged since the millennium, is situated at the intersection of the turn to private finance in development and the financialisation of development. This PhD develops and adopts a follow the money methodology, using critical financial analysis, to analyse three emblematic case studies of innovative development finance: the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, and The Currency Exchange. This PhD argues that innovative development finance initiatives make three core development claims: to leverage private finance, manage risk, and create markets. Conceptually, these interventions represent financial solutions to genuine development challenges. Following the money contributes a detailed empirical understanding of the economic and political consequences of the financialisation of development. In contrast to its core claims, innovative development finance fundamentally relies on public finance with no aid additionality, manages risk in a limited way and creates additional financial risks, supports existing financial markets, and is expensive with significant private profit opportunities. Politically, innovative development finance interventions represent technical financial solutions, which I suggest can be understood through the concept of 'rendering financial?', and are ruled by financial experts. The consequences are to de-politicise, financialise, and limit political control and accountability in development. The implications of these findings are significant. In the light of the economic and political costs of the financialisation of development, this PhD also touches on alternatives which deliver many of the same benefits with fewer costs.

The focus of this thesis lies in trying to understand the spatial organisation of KIBS. Through the British advertising industry's empirical lens, this thesis seeks to contribute towards the understanding of both the spatial distribution of KIBS and their spatial relationships with their clients. Included in this thesis are three research articles that seek to address these two focal points. The first paper of the thesis contributes by mapping out the location of the top advertising outside of the largest metropolitan area - London, as well as to examine the spatial characteristics of their procurement. Through the use of a novel dyadic dataset, this paper contributes two main findings. Firstly, this paper shows that outside of Central London, advertising agencies are relatively footloose. It even identifies several top regional agencies located in unexpected places. This suggests that outside of London, agglomeration effects are not as critical as imagined within the literature. Secondly, this paper also contributes by highlighting the presence of 'reverse Christallerian' patterns of procurement behaviour which raises some questions surrounding the tradability of KIBS. While the first paper 1 outlines the patterns of KIBS procurement, paper 2 examines forces that influence clients' choice of advertising agencies. Building on the ideas of the Global City and liabilities of foreignness, this article seeks to demonstrate how the extent of internationalisation can influence clients' choice of advertising. The findings suggest that a high degree of internationalisation amongst clients increases their tendencies to fulfil their advertising needs from the most internationalised advertising agencies. Such exogenous forces pose a challenge to a line of inquiry within KIBS research that tends to assume demand for KIBS is localised. Finally, the third paper investigates the spatial consolidation of advertising agency networks that is a trend that is currently transforming the British advertising landscape. Besides, this article also investigates new hotpots of advertising far away from the British advertising sector's traditional home of Soho and Fitzrovia. This article contributes by developing propositions surrounding the rationales and limitations of such a strategy.

Oil and mineral export-dependency has been a long-standing issue for several countries, especially developing ones. Resource-rich countries not only are highly vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks, due to the volatility of international commodity prices, but also tend to under-perform economically when compared to resource-poor ones. To overcome the problems associated with the overreliance on natural resources, it has been argued that countries must diversify their productive base and significantly reduce their dependency on primary sectors. Notwithstanding the importance of this topic, surprisingly little is known about how this can be achieved. To improve our understanding about this structural dependency, this thesis argues that one of the fundamental constraints for diversification in oil exporting economies is linked with the ways in which their productive structures are configured. Understanding these productive structures could help explain the limited capacity of such economies to generate new productive activities, based on the productive knowledge they generate and accumulate, and provide insights to guide policy making and investment decisions for diversification pathways. This thesis proposes an experimental network-based methodology to understand how an oil exporting economy is configured and uses Ecuador as a study case. This methodology enables assessing the importance of different industries in a country, as measured by how connected they are with the rest of the economy and their relative importance for promoting growth. In addition, this thesis tests the impact that the 1972 oil boom had on the productive structure of Ecuador, as a way to assess the importance of the oil industry in terms of its capacity to stimulate other economic sectors. Finally, this thesis examines how the current concentration of different economic activities (and respective production networks) in specific locations influences the emergence of pioneering activities in those places, serving as key components to future productive diversification paths for Ecuador. In this research, it was observed that the industries that generate more income for Ecuador (i.e., extraction or direct use of natural resources such as agriculture, mining or oil) are the ones that have the lowest centralities. This means that the country relies mostly on industries which are relatively isolated from the rest of the economy and are not big consumers of intermediate inputs, with the lowest capacity to generate knowledge spillovers, thus potentially acting as one of the main constraints for growth in Ecuador. In line with previous findings, it was also observed that there were changes on different industrial centralities after the 1972 oil boom. However,the methodology proposed was not useful to explain if the changes observed were directly attributed to the discovery of crude oil. Finally, this study also shows that the existing productive structure of a country, the location and concentration of productivity and how production networks are linked are good predictors of the emergence of pioneering activities in a given place, which is coherent with the existing literature. A general conclusion of this thesis is that the productive structure of a country is crucial for its economic development and could limit its diversification potential. In the case of the Ecuadorian economy, it relies mostly on industries with the lowest degree of connectivity, which do not have the capacity to stimulate other sectors effectively. Furthermore, we observed that the productive configuration of an economy could limit the productive knowledge that it can acquire or develop. Its future development paths will depend on this configuration. If oil-exporting economies seek to diversify their productivity, they first need to look at how their economies are configured in-depth. Only then they are in a position to develop strategies towards their aspired development and goals. Diversification processes are heavily path- and place- dependent.

This thesis aims to understand how post-capitalist life is made possible in eco-communities and how it might travel beyond them. I do so with a view of uncovering attempts at thinking and doing differently in ways that may guide us in the Anthropocene (Clark, 2011: 162, see Gibson- Graham and Roelvink, 2009; Haraway, 2008; Povinelli, 2011; Tsing, 2015), whilst simultaneously responding to calls to study such sites in further depth as potential 'niches' with lessons to help address the excesses of capitalism and the associated climate crises (Litfin, 2014; Pickerill, 2017). I have conducted an ethnographic study of three eco-communities in Southwestern France and Catalonia in a broadly comparative vein and have drawn on the disparate body of literature around post-capitalist transformations and eco-communities on one hand, and more-than-human and non-representational geographies on the other. I have worked to address five gaps in the literature on eco-communities, namely, a lack of attention to embodiment and affect and to everyday material practices, their more-than-human constitution, their contribution to economic transformations, and finally, their endurance over time. I argue that repetitive, more-than-human affective relations along with moral-political convictions are crucial to understanding how post-capitalist transformations come about, especially when examining how affective relations and moral-political convictions emerge as motivations, how they are cultivated and passed onto to others, and how difficulties in doing so might arise over time. I have laid out this central argument in four space-times of transformation, that is, the variegated space-times of motivational experiences to move to an eco-community, the building of post-capitalist commons on site, the transformative potential of economic practices in and beyond the sites and finally, the endurance of post-capitalist practices over prolonged periods of time.

Achieving net zero emissions will require an unprecedented transformation of our infrastructure system. Different economies will face varying challenges, but the transformation of the global economy to be environmentally sustainable and resilient includes decarbonising industry and transport, building smart energy systems, and increasing access to affordable, clean energy. Understanding the role of the private sector and financial markets will be crucial in achieving a decisive transition. At the same time, institutional investors such as pension funds are facing increasingly complex and challenging macro-conditions and financial markets. Investors are searching for organizational innovation and reconfiguration of their investment models to meet their long-term objectives. Following the Covid crisis with an increasing interest in sustainability among investors, there is an opportunity to scale up institutional investment in low carbon infrastructure and to protect and grow the retirement savings of fund members. Reframing finance will help to respond to the urgent need to act on energy transition while at the same time supporting the economy. Objective of this thesis is to examine the of role institutional investors and in particular pension funds in sustainable and low-carbon infrastructure, diversifying sources of finance and fostering the development of infrastructure as an asset class. To illustrate how long term investors can promote a more inclusive and sustainable financial system while contributing to the real economy I have adopted an economic geography and bottom up approach benefitting from the unique access to micro data for infrastructure analysis. Following this approach, this thesis builds on literature on financial intermediation and the theory of finance, design and governance of infrastructure, the geography of finance, pension fund research and emerging debates on "relational geometries." Beyond the lack of data, there is a lack of analysis in academia and policy institutions on the connection between policies affecting investors' portfolios strategies and political decisions for low carbon infrastructure. The institutional investor's investment strategies and the decision to invest in infrastructure are based on strategic asset allocation and asset-liability management considerations. This thesis has analyzed how the changing nature of long-term savings is shaping the current and future demand for long-term assets and the impact of demographic and financial pressure on infrastructure investment. Asset allocation analysis has shown the overall trend to diversify investment portfolios in private markets, impact of ESG investment integration and increasing interest in low carbon infrastructure investment. At the same time government choices about different types of private funding models and forms of financing of infrastructure are based on short-term political priorities and national constraints. Renewable energy investment is growing, being part of infrastructure asset allocations. However the limited overall investment in low carbon infrastructure is showing major disconnections between investors and governments expectations. As seen in the thesis, partnership models are emerging as a way to leverage traditional bank and utility finance in primary markets and share risks as well as organizational capacity and expertise in support of the financing of infrastructure projects. Well-functioning and deep capital markets, supported by pooling assets, securitization, yieldcos and new listed vehicles could widen the access to and improve transparency of infrastructure investment while diversifying risk and lowering the cost of capital.

This thesis analyses the role of the Indian Ocean in contributing to a distinctly integrated maritime region, and assesses some of the implications this has for regional trade and industrialisation in the era of high imperialism between 1870 to 1914. The thesis also presents a collection of original trade data and commodity price statistics from British, French, and Dutch colonial archives, which form the basis of analysis. First, this thesis looks at the relative factors driving market integration in the Indian Ocean. Results show that market integration was primarily driven by port city integration with other port cities across the Indian Ocean, rather than with or between cities of the colonial hinterland. It also finds that steamships connecting port cities overseas contributed more to regional integration compared to railroads connecting cities of the colonial interior over land, and that the size or political function of a port city was not as much of a factor driving regional integration as simply whether or not a city was accessible to the Indian Ocean. Second, this thesis looks at trade costs within the Indian Ocean compared to trade from the Indian Ocean to other maritime regions either within the global periphery, or from the Indian Ocean to the global core of Europe. Findings show that trade costs were low for short--distance routes within the Indian Ocean, as well as long--distance routes from the Indian Ocean to Europe. However trade costs were the highest for trade from the Indian Ocean to other regions of the global periphery such as the Eastern Mediterranean, thus establishing that the Indian Ocean was a distinctly integrated maritime region within the global periphery. However in relation to the global core of Europe, the Indian Ocean was also highly integrated as part of a larger process of globalisation taking place during the period. Third, considering previous analysis on regional market integration and trade costs within and between the Indian Ocean and other regions, this thesis looks at some of the implications that an integrated Indian Ocean market had on trade growth and the export of large-scale industrial manufactures from the primary entrepot cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Comparative analysis of the intensive and extensive margins of trade for both cities demonstrates that trade ties across the Indian Ocean served as a major destination for more highly differentiated, higher value manufactured goods from both cities. Additionally, even though the vast majority of exports from both cities went to Europe, this was primarily in staple commodities rather than in manufactured goods. Thus an integrated Indian Ocean market provided an important destination for emerging manufacturing industries at the region's primary entrepot cities.

In this thesis, I study the impact of minimum wage policy and city agglomeration on wages and employment in local labour markets. This is an important topic because having a better understanding of the determinants of regional wage differentials and employment offers insights into: the roles played by local production, consumption and city structures; the standard of living enjoyed by workers with different human capitals; and policy recommendations for the future minimum wage law and city planning regulations. I use local occupation and geographic information to assess how highly productive occupations and local consumption amenities sort workers and generate local wage differentials. I also use this information to construct instruments that enable the accurate estimation of the effects of policy interventions. After an introduction in chapter 1, chapter 2, The Impact of the Minimum Wage on the Wage Distribution: Evidence from China, provides an empirical estimation of the effects of minimum wages using a Chinese household survey. I introduce new instrumental variables, relating to transport costs and local productivity, to control for the potential median wage endogeneity. The instrument variable regressions indicate that the effective minimum wage, defined as the ratio between the minimum wage and the median wage, significantly reduces the lower tail wage inequality — measured by the wage differential between the 50th and the 10th percentiles— by up to 0.3 per cent. In chapter 3, The MinimumWage and Its Impact onWage and Employment, joint work with Coen Teulings, we propose a novel framework for estimating the effects of minimum wages by considering the neoclassical wage and labour participation equations at the same time. To estimate the non-linear censored model with correlated error terms, we provide a five-step procedure and use maximum likelihood estimation. After correcting the bias using occupation information and city size, we find that effective minimum wage correlate significantly with the proportion of workers earning below minimum wage. I study the structure of city and commuting in chapter 4, Consumer City and the Sharing Economy. Based on the international trade literature, I develop a theoretical model with multiple cities, which have different amenities and productivities. In equilibrium, the unobservable parameters are estimated using local employment, wage, and commuting information. Cities show strong agglomeration effects in both productivity and consumption amenities. A counterfactual technological improvement, providing a cheaper transportation for workers and consumers, leads to a more concentrated employment distribution, commuting pattern and higher utility. In the final chapter, Agglomeration and Sorting, joint work with Coen Teulings, we show that agglomeration externalities are strongly related to the occupational structure. At the same time, regional differences in house prices offset these externalities. We develop a multi-region model with regional heterogeneity in workers and jobs, tradable versus non-tradable commodities, consumption amenities, regional house prices, non-homothetic utility, and interregional labour mobility. The model fits the regional data on the fixed wage effects, the return and mean level of human capital, land prices, and the city-rural area distinction well. We use land values to calculate the value of agglomeration.

There is a growing awareness of, and commitment to, Responsible Investment (RI) in the institutional investment markets internationally. RI is defined as the consideration of environmental, social and/or governance (ESG) issues in long-term oriented investment decision-making. As the role of ESG in determining investment risk and opportunity becomes more evident, and as ESG data becomes more available, RI is increasingly seen as an area of potential investment innovation. This thesis applies institutional, evolutionary and relational economic geography theories to examine this trend, exploring the mainstreaming of RI through novel empirical and conceptual research. This thesis examines the investment learning processes and information channels available in Western liberal market economies of the UK, US and Australia. It adopts economic geography knowledge and innovation frames towards answering the question: 'Now that ESG information is more widely available in the investment markets, why has this not catalysed a greater shift towards RI integration in mainstream investment decisions?'. Learning, language and leadership factors within the institutional investment industry are all argued to help answer this question. This research uses a mixed method approach, with analysis based on a survey of 154 investment professions, 97 semi-structured interviews and a case of RI innovation. This thesis develops a conceptual framework of the communication channels and information sources used in investors' innovation-decision-process, drawing attention to the importance of both social and asocial learning processes in generating and sharing knowledge about climate issues within investment markets. Following this, the thesis examines the role of 'local buzz' and 'global pipelines' in facilitating access to, and uptake of, ESG information. Levels of buzz and pipelines are found to vary in different financial centres, and are facilitated by formal and informal networking linked to RI groups. Importantly, then, this thesis finds that both spatial and relational proximity influence investors' access to ESG information and RI knowledge. The second half of this thesis examines whether and how RI information, knowledge and practice can be integrated into existing individual and organisational decision-making frameworks. It highlights the need to better translate RI information into investment-relevant language, and provides an example of how environmentally-driven stranded assets can be reframed as a version of sunk costs, contributing novel spatial-temporal theorisations of this concept. Through an illustration of RI decision-making by the investment consultant Mercer and the University of Sydney endowment fund, this thesis highlights that the capacity to integrate RI through the investment chain does exist. However, willingness to do so is found to be hindered by institutional and organisational path dependent norms, reduced only in some firms by seeing RI as an innovative area of competitive advantage from growing client demand. This thesis therefore finds that RI is being adopted in increasingly more mainstream investment firms, but this is not always fully integrated throughout the firm, and that uptake is geographically varied based on exposure to networks of information and knowledge sharing, and institutional, organisational and individual norms. Ultimately, this thesis therefore contributes towards understandings of the processes underpinning the mainstreaming of RI, but also contributes to broader economic geographies of investment, knowledge sharing and innovation.

This thesis is structured around two primary objectives. First, to contribute to the literature on the world city network and the emerging literature on global financial networks by developing and empirically testing a new methodological approach for modelling urban networks that would aid the development of empirical research in these related streams of literature. Second, to provide empirical evidence showing the effects of positioning within global financial networks on individual financial services firms as well as financial centres. To achieve these objectives, this thesis first develops a novel modelling approach for empirical analysis of urban networks, which draws on the concept of underwriting syndicate as the primary building block of global financial networks. It also considers the consequences of the network boundary specification problem in the context of studying urban networks and compares the modelling approach it develops to the Interlocking World City Network Model (Taylor, 2001) and Alderson and Beckfield (2004) ownership ties approach. The empirical analysis that follows relies on data on investment banking deals sourced from Dealogic databases. The dataset built for the purposes of this thesis spans the 1993 - 2016 period and covers more than 1 million capital market transactions worldwide. To achieve the second objective of this thesis, I have built spatial econometric and dynamic panel data models to uncover the effects of positioning within GFNs on individual financial services firms and financial centres. The results of this thesis indicate that inter-cluster network ties that connect financial services firms located in different financial centres are particularly valuable and they benefit both the performance of individual firms and lead to higher resilience of financial centres to demand shocks. In contrast, localised network connections are not found to be statistically significant in either context. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, its methodological developments and empirical findings, it contributes to several related groups of literature, including the research on the world city network, global financial networks, underwriting syndicates and social network analysis. The implications of this thesis for public policy and corporate strategy relate primarily to the role of network connectivity in financial sector and the distinct role of syndication networks. I specifically relate this to contemporary issues including BREXIT, which as I discuss may have a material impact on the financial sector in the United Kingdom and beyond.

This dissertation builds on existing work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It addresses three central problems of the project, namely (a) the lack of geographical and temporal coverage by the project’s existing data sources before the nineteenth century, (b) the allocation of the numerous men with the indistinct denominator of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for the (presumed) ubiquity of dual employments in the early-modern world. The solutions to these problems result in a set of estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850, in twenty-year time intervals, at the level of sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary) and sub-sectors (farmers, miners, textile workers, transport workers, etcetera), at national, regional, and local geographical scales. These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the highly influential national accounts literature. Firstly, they place the structural shift from agriculture to industry firmly in the seventeenth and, to a lesser degree, even the sixteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, means that productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution must have been much higher than previously thought, and thereby also the effects of technological and organisational innovation. Secondly, it provides strong evidence that although economic developments during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century may seem to have been limited and gradual at the national scale, this surface calm hides diverging regional developments which were anything but limited and gradual, held together by a persistently growing transport sector. The result was a regionally specialised yet integrated economy, firmly in place at the eve of the Industrial Revolution which – in light of the known role of small, specialised regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation in present-day economies – may well have contributed to Britain’s precocious transition to modern economic growth.

This research project explores the rise of Chinese cross-border finance. Cross-border investment programmes have been at the heart of China's financial liberalisation. Yet, we know little about what drives the expansion of these new market entry channels and the effects they have on global finance. This thesis explores the role that formal and informal institutions play in China's financial system, by addressing three main research goals: (1) to rethink analytical frameworks of global financial networks, by shifting the focus to channels of state power; (2) to investigate how such formal institutions shape competitive hierarchies in financial markets, both inside and outside of China; (3) to demonstrate that informal institutions such as a common cultural identity are equally important to explain behaviour and outcomes in Chinese cross-border finance. The thesis pursues this agenda through four substantive papers, each with its own subset of research goals and findings. The papers follow a three-fold structure. The thesis begins with an analytical focus on agents (micro-level), by examining the evolution of state-firm relations in Chinese cross-border finance. The first paper develops a politically sensitive framework of global financial networks, which conceptualises how bargaining dynamics within China's party-state shape competitive hierarchies in Chinese capital markets. Drawing on these theoretical insights, the second paper breaks new empirical ground, by explaining the asymmetrical nature of market access criteria for foreign investors. The third paper zooms out on the global consequences that Chinese state control has for money centres (macro-level). It sheds light on how state-firm relations shaped London's development as the first Western offshore trading centre for Chinese currency. The fourth paper shifts the attention to the role of informal social institutions in Chinese equity markets. It presents the first empirical study of how a common cultural identity with Mainland China governs the behaviour of different investor categories (group-level). The thesis distils the following findings: Bargaining conflicts inside the Chinese party-state have a decisive impact on competitive outcomes and behaviour in Chinese cross-border finance, both domestically and globally. Strategic state interests form an interdependent relationship with the resources supplied by foreign investors and domestic corporate players. Domestically, these resource interdependencies explain the asymmetrical nature of market access under China's cross-border investment schemes. Globally, the shift in state-firm bargaining dynamics from strategic alignment to an increasing bifurcation of interests explains the patchy integration of RMB finance into London's financial architectures. Informal social institutions equally shape competitive outcomes in China's capital markets. Whilst the literature identifies shared cultural identity as a source of local information advantage, this thesis finds the opposite: A common cultural background with national Chinese investors reduces information asymmetries for foreign investors but it does not equate to local information advantages. Overall, the four substantive papers add up to a multifaceted yet integrated perspective on the drivers, dynamics and consequences of Chinese cross-border finance. They clarify that the intersection of formal state governance and informal social forces is essential for understanding how the spread of neoliberal market forces unfolds across Chinese capital markets. This thesis thus affirms that space and place remain central to our understanding of financial market outcomes.

This thesis investigates to what extent coal prices differed globally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whether those differences mattered for economic development. The backbone of my empirical investigation is a new dataset of annual coal prices spanning the years 1840 to 1960 for, on average, over 30 globally distributed ports. This dataset is complemented by pithead prices for all major coal-producing countries. My analysis includes all major steam coals and I eliminate quality differences by accounting for differences in their carbon content. I construct my argument by examining two major drivers of differences in coal prices. First, I examine trade costs for Welsh steam coals, which were shipped to most regions of the world. Secondly, I estimate the effect of the spread of coal mining, for example to India, on local coal prices by initating competition between coals from different origins. While trade costs declined most during the late nineteenth century, the spread of coal mining led to continued price convergence in the interwar period. And yet, global coal price differences remained significant, especially between producing and importing countries. Arguably, my most interesting finding is on the effect of those coal price differences. More specifically, I calculate the ratio of coal prices to wages, and explore whether countries where this ratio was closer to the British ratio were in the best position to use the most advanced steam technology. My econometric results indeed show that countries with a low coal price/wage ratio experienced higher manufacturing output growth during the period 1870 to 1940. This finding of my thesis highlights one potential way in which different levels of coal prices may have contributed to varying degrees of technology adoption between countries and ultimately economic growth.

The evolutionary economic geography of climate change is concerned with the processes by which the landscapes of greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to climate change are transformed from within over time. Unlike neoclassical economics, evolutionary economic geography is interested in how economic change is driven by innovation and shaped by structural, historical, and contextual factors at different scales. This thesis articulates an evolutionary economic geography perspective on three debates: (1) What factors influence human systems’ capacity to adapt to climate change, and how can these factors be assessed? (2) What forces drive and inhibit economic change towards low-carbon economies, and how should governments induce and manage such shifts? (3) What role should climate finance play in promoting developing countries’ shifts to low-emitting and climate-resilient economies, and how should it be managed? The thesis includes five academic papers. The first reviews the literature on vulnerability and adaptation. It argues that the adaptive capacity of human systems is constrained by structural and historical factors, and that the rich data necessary to identify these factors can only be obtained through qualitative research methods. The next two papers offer case studies from the Global Islands’ Vulnerability Research Adaptation and Policy Development project, which assess the adaptive capacity of Soufriere, Saint Lucia and Whitehouse, Jamaica, respectively. The fourth paper examines the mechanics of three low-carbon shifts in Brazil: the diffusion of no-till agriculture, the decrease in the deforestation rate in the Amazon, and the growth of the ethanol biofuel industry. It found that the driving forces behind each of the shifts were far more varied and complex than the price-based market dynamics analysed in neoclassical economics. The final paper argues that climate finance will need to perform a variety of functions beyond attracting low-carbon private investment. It concludes that the institutional architecture governing climate finance should enable direct access to national governments to incentivise them to implement sustainable innovation policy regimes.

This is a dissertation about the organisational structure of the World Bank, the professional practice of evaluation, and the meaning of the concept of aid effectiveness in practice. In international development, evaluation is a professional activity that determines and then reports on the impacts of aid projects and programmes to the clients of such efforts and to the public. 'Aid effectiveness' is a concept that refers to a standard of how aid projects and organisations should operate and the results, such as economic growth and poverty alleviation, which these efforts should deliver in order to work. The concept of 'aid effectiveness' has also been used in the debate about international development as a system and its reform. Given that aid policymakers and academic researchers often use the data contained in development organisations evaluations to determine the extent to which aid projects and programmes are 'effective', it is critical to analyse what these evaluations measure and what influences their ratings and judgments. Based on a case study of the World Bank, the analysis is primarily qualitative and draws on both interviews with evaluation professionals in the World Bank and content analyses of the logical framework, indicators, and language in the World Bank's evaluations at the project- and country-level. Building on the previous theoretical work in post-structuralism that considers how international development organisations 'produce' their work through certain terms and processes (Escobar, 1995; Crush, 1995), I assess how the professional practice of evaluation in the Bank 'produces' the results of aid at the project- and country-level, specifically in the evaluation reports that it makes publically available. The World Banks data and evaluation reports are a window through which to understand the impact of aid, and several factors that influence this 'window' are assessed, including the institutional role of evaluation, the professional practice of evaluation, and the required evaluation processes within the World Bank. The study has important implications for practitioners of international development, academic researchers, and evaluation professionals who endeavour to improve the aid system and often rely on the results of the World Bank's evaluations to inform their understanding of the impact of particular development efforts. By reshaping the discussion from one which considers if aid 'works' to one about the data and the process of making a judgment about the success of aid projects and programmes, I articulate what the role of evaluation is in practice and what the World Bank's resulting evaluative data do and do not reflect about the World Bank's work. The relationship between the 'scales' of aid is also analysed by comparing and contrasting the evaluation processes at the project-level and the country-level. I challenge the notion of a 'micro-macro paradox' (Mosley, 1986) between the successful results of the World Banks projects and the economic development in its client countries by articulating the actual meaning of this data in context, the unseen institutional forces that shape this data, and the difficulty of asserting a linear relationship between the results of projects and programmes on different scales of aid.

This thesis examines the conditions under which democratically elected policymakers are more likely to provide policies that compensate individuals that lose from international trade. It develops and empirically tests a theoretical framework of compensation in open economies that accounts for differences in the degree to which governments benefit losers from trade. It first develops a theory of preference formation based on economic geography, and then argues that electoral and legislative institutions jointly condition the supply of compensation. The theoretical analysis provides three sets of observable implications evaluated using micro- and macro-level data in Europe and Latin America. First, exposure to international competition increases demand for policy that compensates for the costs of trade, but this effect is more pronounced among those individuals in economically specialised and uncompetitive contexts where reemployment in the event of a shock is difficult. Second, policymakers in proportional electoral systems face weak incentives to target trade losers in geographically concentrated and uncompetitive regions. In contrast, majoritarian institutions generate incentives to increase compensation when trade losers are geographically concentrated. Another implication is that under some conditions, the presence of a strong upper house that represents regional interests dampens the provision of compensation, and the relative effect of electoral rules. The empirical implications of the argument are tested using a multi-method research strategy that combines cross-national and case study analyses and draws on quantitative and qualitative techniques. Chapter 3 tests the micro-level implications of the model using survey data for European regions over 2002-2006. The findings indicate that regional economic specialization and regional competitiveness jointly condition the impact of trade on preferences for compensation. Chapter 4 systematically tests the extent to which the geographical concentration of trade losers conditions the effect of electoral institutions on levels of compensation. It uses panel data from 14 European countries from 1980 to 2010. The findings indicate that where trade losers are concentrated, lower district magnitude leads to more compensation. Chapters 5 and 6 conduct case studies of compensation in Spain and Argentina, both countries that underwent deep liberalisation and offer significant variation at the regional and institutional level. Chapter 5 explores preferences over compensation in selected regions in Spain and Argentina, and shows that regional specialisation and competitiveness were important in shaping levels of support for compensation. Chapter 6 examines the role of electoral institutions and legislative veto bargaining in shaping the politics of compensation in Spain and Argentina.

In this collection of essays, I explore three topics where space and distance plays a fundamental role in international economics. Not only do spatial considerations affect the pattern of trade, the frictions that arise from distance also determine where and how goods are produced and where people live. In Chapter 1, I show that human made locational characteristics can determine the spatial allocation of economic activity. I take the standard core-periphery model and add endogenous housing to its forward-looking dynamic adjustment process. By introducing a model of adjustment with an extra state variable, which I interpret as housing, I show that the distribution of housing allows the model to converge to a unique spatial equilibrium. This explains the observed persistence and robustness of economic agglomerations in the data. Chapter 2 is a theory of task assignment in the production of final goods and across countries. By allowing for tasks to differ in their suitability of being used in the production of multiple goods, my model endogenizes the allocation of tasks in the production of goods that use them. The resulting equilibrium task allocation defines the pattern of off-shoring. Tasks that are used in only one good concentrate in the country with a specialization in production of that good. Tasks used in many goods are allocated across countries, with the more substitutable tasks located in the country with the larger overall output. Gains from off-shoring are derived from a better mix of allocation of tasks into goods as well as larger scale of production. Finally in Chapter 3, I study how real exchange rate fluctuations determine the size and composition of the export sector. Using the methodology set out in Dixit and Pindyck (1994) in a heterogeneous firms model, I determine the set of trigger real exchange rates for entry and exit into exporting. My primary result of this chapter is that exchange rate uncertainty coupled with sunk cost of entry causes hysteresis in the number and productivity of exporting firms. I then extend the model to allow free entry of firms. This explains the stylized fact of the existence of non-exporting firms with higher productivity than some exporting firms.

Urban infrastructure is the key physical asset for successful functioning of modern cities. Yet the building and maintaining infrastructure networks require robust institutions, either expressed explicitly in rules and regulations or implicitly in social norms and mutual expectations, which are crucial for governing the complex relationships among all stakeholders including governments, regulators, investors, utilities and consumers that underpin the production of infrastructure services. Although there are more and more studies focusing on infrastructure, the underlying institutions that sustain the 'sink' of long-term accumulation of finance, technology, organisational and geopolitical power for shaping urban landscape have often been neglected. In particular, few studies have investigated the uneven geographical phenomenon of urban infrastructure investment and governance. As such, this thesis compares and explores how and why political, institutional and governance frameworks in Beijing and London influence urban water infrastructure investment and service delivery differently. The findings from the comparative study of the thesis should assist better understanding of 'variegated capitalism', especially state capitalism versus liberal capitalism. Through case study and close dialogue methodology, this thesis compares and investigates the investment models, governance frameworks, pricing systems and infrastructure contracts for urban water infrastructure in Beijing and London from the perspective of economic geography. Based on the theories of institutional and relational economic geography, this thesis organizes the study into four substantive chapters: Chapter Three compares the investment models employed in Beijing and London for water infrastructure investment and the underlying institutions; Chapter Four explores the effects of different governance frameworks on urban water infrastructure investment and service delivery in Beijing and London; Chapter Five investigates the effects of different pricing systems in the two cities for coordinating the intrinsic, market and investment value of urban water infrastructure; Chapter Six analyses different infrastructure contracts for financing large-scale water infrastructure projects in the two cities. The thesis finds that institutions are embedded in time and space for harnessing the flows of capital and producing the configurations of infrastructure provision, thus shaping the heterogeneous landscape of the material, economic, social and geopolitical fabric of contemporary cities. Therefore, in contrast to the statement 'form follows function', this thesis argues that infrastructure functions are inherently geographical in nature. The thesis has made the following contributions: firstly, it has compared the various trajectories of urban water infrastructure investment and governance in different political economic contexts, especially the dialogue between Global North and South, making original contribution in the 'geography of infrastructure'; secondly, the thesis employs cases studies to compare and investigate institutions empirically - issues that have been neglected for much too long in mainstream economic geography, contributing to 'variegated capitalism'; finally, in practical terms this research provides information for governments, regulators, investors, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders on in-depth understanding of urban water infrastructure investment and governance in different institutional and relational contexts.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as an important component of the contemporary knowledge based economy and crucial to the attainment of economic growth and development. However, entrepreneurial activity varies significantly across space within countries. This thesis makes an original contribution by examining the determinants of spatial variations in entrepreneurship across sub-regions of Great Britain from 2008-2010. Through utilising newly available data on firm births and applying exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial econometric techniques, two prominent theories of entrepreneurship are examined. First, the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship posits that underutilised knowledge by incumbent firms creates entrepreneurial opportunities. The appropriation of these opportunities through entrepreneurial activity, in the form of a new firm, leads to dynamic knowledge spillovers, which generate economic growth. The empirical analysis presented in this thesis concludes that more knowledge intensive regions exhibit significantly higher firm birth rates; however the composition of the regional knowledge stock is critical, as a diverse knowledge stock generates more entrepreneurial opportunities. Second, several theories emphasise the importance of idiosyncratic knowledge and human capital, in the form of entrepreneurial ability, on the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. The results of this thesis suggest that human capital is vital to the entrepreneurial process, and that university education is a greater source of entrepreneurial ability than labour market experience. Furthermore, the results also suggest that the regulatory burden of the public sector, financial constraints, regional unemployment, and the absence of a local entrepreneurial culture can significantly detract from regional entrepreneurial activity. In light of these results, there are several implications for policy which include: emphasising the importance of effective policy towards intellectual property rights, targeting entrepreneurial education initiatives towards university students and graduates, and reducing unnecessary public sector regulation that can act as a ‘barrier’ to entrepreneurship.

This thesis develops a relational geography perspective on creative work and practice, with a specific focus on the recording studio sector. Drawing on an extensive social network analysis, a questionnaire survey, and nineteen semi-structured interviews with recording studio engineers and producers in London (UK), the thesis reveals how recording studios are constituted by a number of types of relations. Firstly, studios are spaces that involve a material and technological relationality between studio workers and varied means of production. Studios are material and technological spaces that influence and shape human actions and social inter-actions. Secondly, studios are sites of relationality between social actors, including engineers, musicians and artists. The thesis reveals how the ability to construct and maintain social relations, and perform emotional labour , is of particular importance to the management of the creative process of producing and recording music, and to building the individual social capital of studio workers. Finally, the thesis argues that studios are sites of changing employment relations between studio workers and studio as employer. In the recording studio sector, a complex and changing set of employment practices have re-defined the relationship between employee and employer and resulted in a set of employment relations characterised by constant employment uncertainty for freelance studio workers. It is argued that the three types of relations revealed in this thesis, manifest at a multiplicity of geographical scales, construct recording studios as distinctive social and economic creative spaces. In conclusion, it is argued that a relational perspective is central to progressing geographical accounts of creative work and of project-based industries in general.