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Bringing the literature on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state capitalism in conversation with studies on offshore financial centers (OFCs), this paper dissects the post-2000 internationalization of Russian SOE Gazprom via the OFC of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Not adhering to the conventional financial logics of private firms, nor exclusively following political orders of the Kremlin, Gazprom is one of the exemplary state-capital hybrids of the new state capitalism. Where Gazprom steadily increased Russia’s geopolitical leverage over Europe’s energy needs prior to the 2022 military invasion of Ukraine, we stress that “it takes two to tango”, as the internationalization of Gazprom could not have occurred without active and passive help of capitalist states elsewhere. We argue that the Netherlands functions as a transnational capitalist state in the service of foreign capital, including state capital, with Amsterdam’s corporate services providers having long provided the legal stepping stones and corporate respectability enabling Gazprom to expand internationally. In this sense, the prevalent “othering” of SOEs and state capital neglects how the global ascent of state capitalism could not have happened without dedicated assistance orchestrated in leading Western OFCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been around since 1960 but have only become major players in housing markets in the last twenty years. The current and ongoing wave of residential REIT (R-REIT) expansion has attracted significant scholarly and broader public interest. This article examines how real estate, finance, and the state are configured in relation to each other through R-REITs. While much of the housing financialization literature has focused on the real estate/state axis of this relationship, we explore the underexamined connections between the real estate/finance axis and the finance/state axis of the real estate–finance–state triangle. We analyze the financial accounts of the world's fifteen largest publicly traded R-REITs and R-REIT–like funds in the two largest markets: the United States and Germany. Our findings demonstrate how the ownership of R-REIT stock is remarkably homogeneous: the largest shareholders in each of the studied R-REITs are the three largest index exchange-traded funds, which are heavily backed by pension fund capital. For these investors, it is important that R-REITs provide a healthy return on investment at the lowest possible risk. The investors require the state, in its various guises, to guarantee attractive risk-adjusted returns on R-REITs investments. We identify six dimensions of state de-risking in this context, deepening our understanding of the role of the state in housing financialization. It is the state that creates the trust in real estate investment trusts, and it thus is what generates the investment in real estate investment trusts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the installation of our seven Big Tech companies completed around the new millennium, political and economic developments like the dotcom crash and 9/11 brought forth the age of "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff [53]), igniting Big Tech's subsequent deployment period, expanding its reach throughout economy and society. Furthermore, these companies could make use of the financial environment by accumulating stocks of financial assets in response to profits outgrowing productive investments, seeing the financial assets of the seven Big Tech companies' approach US$700 billion in 2020. For example, Big Tech is at odds with the existing cross-border allocation of tax rights, seeing Big Tech companies making extensive use of offshore financial centers (Fernandez and Hendrikse [17]). Keywords: Big Tech; capitalism; digital platforms; information and communication technology; science and technology studies; socio-technical systems EN Big Tech capitalism digital platforms information and communication technology science and technology studies socio-technical systems 59 71 13 03/10/22 20220301 NES 220301 Introduction A few months into the pandemic, Naomi Klein ([30]) noted how a tech-driven "Pandemic Shock Doctrine" was shaping up under conditions of lockdown and social distancing. [Extracted from the article]

The private rental sector (PRS) is making a surprising comeback. A central argument in our paper is that we see the rise of PRS and the associated stagnation of homeownership as springing from the contradictions inherent to financialized homeowner societies. Rather than a feature of either mature or late homeowner societies, contradictions of the promotion of homeownership through the expansion of mortgage markets paved the way for a revival of the PRS. Our case is the Netherlands, but our argument has a wider remit. We sketch the dominant trends in Dutch housing policy and present an overview of the rise of PRS and Buy-To-Let in Dutch cities. We identify how housing policies and realities have driven a shift from a debt-driven to a wealth-driven model of financialization, in which the demand for PRS as an investment class and as a place to live has become central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financialization of housing in the Global South (GS) and peripheries of the Global North (GN) develops in different ways than in the GN because the mechanisms underlying and pushing financialization are fundamentally different. We argue that subordinated financialization in the GS is the contemporary form of uneven and combined development, shaped by the financialization of the GN. The recycling of GN excess liquidity in countries lower in the global money hierarchy has contributed to the growth of mortgage lending in the GS and peripheries of GN. With the macrocomparative perspective in our article we provide a framework to rethink the relations between GN and GS in shaping distinct patterns of uneven and combined financialization, but also to rethink the varieties of capitalism and residential capitalism approaches. In the GS we can distinguish between at least two additional types: state-led market economies and less-financialized market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epidemiological transitions that have occurred in low and middle income countries (LMIC) during the past decades have led to an increased prevalence on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in these countries, where the burden of infectious diseases (IDs), especially tuberculosis (TB), remains high. Although the true dimensions of this comorbidity have not yet been fully understood, there is a growing amount of data, over the last 10 years, that suggest a clear association between NCDs and TB. In particular, there is a continuously increasing body of evidence that diabetes mellitus, chronic respiratory conditions, tobacco use, mental health illnesses and chronic kidney disease increase TB morbidity and mortality and vice versa. This bidirectional negative association between diseases may jeopardise the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) specific TB targets, thus underlying the importance of integrated public health responses towards both epidemics. Population as well as individual based approaches are required, along with both strategic and operation integration on a global scale. This year's United Nations High Level Meetings (ΗLMs) presented a rare opportunity for the political foundations of the TB and NCD responses to be dug together, thus creating a potential breakthrough in the global response to both epidemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit intermediation outside the regular banking system, or shadow banking, has increased immensely over the past decade. This paper situates this increase against the backdrop of the structural problem of overaccumulation, and thus the absence of profitable reinvestment opportunities in the production sphere, in addition to the scarcity of high-quality collaterals. Zooming in on Europe’s offshore world and Dutch conduit structures in particular, the paper illustrates, on the basis of the Amsterdam-based Lehman Brothers subsidiary (and others), how shadow banking enables regular banks to increase leverage and take on excessive debt. It will be argued that the continued expansion of debt at the systemic level,inter aliafacilitated by shadow banking, heralds the prospect of a crisis far more dramatic than the one we are currently witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microscopic traffic simulators are the most advanced tools for representing the movement of vehicles on a transport network. However, the energy spent in traffic microsimulation has been mainly oriented to cars. Little interest has been devoted to more sophisticated models for simulating transit systems. Commercial software has some options to incorporate the operation of transit vehicles, but they are insufficient to properly consider a real public transport system. This paper develops an Application Programming Interface, called MIcroscopic Simulation of TRANSIT (MISTRANSIT), using the commercial microsimulator PARAllel MICroscopic Simulation. MISTRANSIT makes advances in three ways: public transport vehicles can have new characteristics; passengers are incorporated and traced as individual objects; and specific models represent the interaction between passengers and vehicles at stops. This paper presents the modelling approach as well as various experiments to illustrate the feasibility of MISTRANSIT for studying policy operations of transit systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a "global financial village" and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the "varieties of capitalism" literature with those from the literature on "financialization studies," the article offers a first take on what may explain these different geographies on the basis of an informal comparison of the trajectories of financialization and their political repercussions in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. The article ends with some reflections on how economic geography could be enriched by combining comparative studies on institutionalism and financialization, while its distinct research focus-detailed spatial analysis endowed with a well-developed sensitivity for geographic variegation—may help overcome the methodological nationalism of much comparative institutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buses are the unrecognized champions of public transport in modern cities around the world. However, the bus system is usually bedevilled by poor design that has resulted from poor understanding of how a bus system actually works. This article examines the impacts of the interactions between buses, passengers and traffic on delays and capacity at bus stops. First, issues like the stages of bus stop operations, causes of delays, and the interaction between bus frequency and stop delays are analysed. This suggests the necessity of microscopic simulation to study stops operations. An illustration of the sort of understanding that can be achieved by means of simulation experiments regarding arrival patterns of buses and passengers, boarding times, difficulties for leaving the stop and vehicle capacity is shown. Results indicate that it is important not to underestimate the real situation found at bus stops, as designing for ideal conditions will be insufficient if the reality is different. Application of these results shows that dramatic improvements can be made to the performance of the bus system as a result of a better understanding of its operation leading to simple changes in the design of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transit capacity problem of bus-based systems. First, it defines the problem of transit operations along a route. This raises the importance of stops on transit capacity and why the analysis and design of stops should be considered in bus traffic schemes. Next, the paper explains the concept of transfer capacity and reviews the work to date on modelling the capacity of stops. Current as well as novel approaches are considered and their advantages and limitations are discussed. Special attention is devoted to a new simulation model of transfer operations at stops. From that approach, the paper concludes with some examples of capacities of various transit systems and design recommendations for bus transit stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]