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This article develops a Foundational Economy contribution to debate about regional inequalities by presenting new calculations of household income after the costs of three essential items (housing, transport and utilities). These residual income measures illustrate the diversity of living standards within and between English and Welsh regions. The analysis shows a mosaic of variation in residual income and wealth accumulation driven by the variability of housing costs in four different tenure groups (outright owners, mortgage payers, private renters and social renters). The article argues that GVA averages and descriptors like “left behind” are a poor guide to differences within and between regions; they also misdirect policy towards “levelling up” the apparently unsuccessful places without directly addressing the quality of and access to essential services. From a foundational point of view, regional policy needs to focus on access to housing at reasonable cost for all income and tenure groups in every region.

Academics and policy makers have increasingly recognised the importance of mundane economic activities – variously termed foundational or everyday – by academics and policy makers. The foundational or everyday economy is now featuring in local industrial strategy and economic action plans, because the desirable high-tech sectors on the ‘frontier’ cannot diffuse prosperity within and between regions. This paper aims to distinguish between several different approaches to the foundational or everyday economy and argues that a constructive approach needs to break with the preoccupation about improving productivity. This argument is developed in three stages. First, we distinguish between a social approach and a more technical economic approach to delimiting this other mundane economy; the defining feature of the foundational in the social approach is contribution to wellbeing and in the technical economic approach it is low productivity. The second section presents and explores productivity evidence on output per worker hour across a range of foundational activities and by region. Drawing out the implications of observed diversity and heterogeneity, the third section develops an argument about how productivity has limited relevance as measure and target in foundational activities.

Durante la pandemia mundial por la Covid-19 y ante una inminente crisis derivada de ésta, surgen diversas preocupaciones respecto de las consecuencias económicas que la situación acarreará, así como de la suficiencia de la respuesta de los distintos gobiernos a largo plazo. De esta manera, el Colectivo de Economía Fundamental propone, para el contexto europeo en particular, una serie de puntos esenciales y lecciones para las decisiones de política económica que surjan de esta crisis con el fin de sacar adelante las economías regionales y nacionales una vez que la pandemia sea superada.

This article presents a postcolonial analysis of financial citizenship (FC) programmes in Malaysia. Drawing on secondary data and on interviews with elites and citizen investors, the paper explores the spatial and historically specific nature of financialisation in a postcolonial context. Specifically, the paper draws out the significance of FC as part of broader nation building objectives in Malaysia from an elite perspective, while also observing the reluctance of citizen investors who are engaging with the equity market to support the formal objectives of the policy. In doing so, it provides an example of the financialisation of everyday life in a distinctive and complex emerging economy context. Moreover, the paper explores these processes from both elite and citizen perspectives, allowing these layered relations within FC to be analysed. The article, therefore, contributes to the financialisation literature by bringing new understandings of elite–citizen relations in postcolonial nation-building strategies.

The chapter argues for a different kind of planning with citizen participation and different socio-economic priorities. Drawing on the example of the Greater Manchester city region, the authors outline the limits of developer led regeneration, which has encouraged rapid expansion of buy to let and other properties mainly for younger people in the centre, with almost no provision for low income households. The chapter proposes a refocus on rethinking planning as civic future, emphasising collective provision of foundational infrastructures and a different configuration of actors including citizen participation. The chapter starts with a comparison of UK post-1945 town hall planning and more recent developer led regeneration, based on 12 socio-economic drivers. These two periods are then examined, drawing some lessons from Vienna and Bologna. On this basis, we sketch a possible civic future for Manchester recognising that it is politically difficulty to break with development led regeneration.

This paper addresses the question of whether and how public action via civil society and/or government can meaningfully shape industry-wide corporate responsibility (ICR) behaviour. We explore how, in principle, ICR can come about and what conditions might be effective in promoting more ethical behaviour. We propose a framework to understand attempts to develop more responsible behaviour at an industry level through processes of negotiation and coalition building. We suggest that any attempt to meaningfully influence ICR would require stakeholders to possess both power and legitimacy; moreover, magnitude and urgency of the issue at stake may affect the ability to influence ICR. The framework is applied to the retail banking industry, focusing on post-crisis experiences in two countries—Spain and the UK—where there has been considerable pressure on the retail banking industry by civil society and/or government to change behaviours, especially to abandon unethical practices. We illustrate in this paper how corporate responsibility at the sector level in retail banking is the product of context-specific processes of negotiation between civil society and public authorities, on behalf of customers and other stakeholders, drawing on legal and other institutions to influence industry behaviour.

In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environment and infrastructure. We explore this issue in the context of state redesign of sub-national space in England and focus on Greater Manchester, as the de facto exemplar of ‘devolution’ to English city-regions. We argue that though re-scaling in Greater Manchester is a long-term historical process this has been punctuated by the UK state’s process of ‘devolution’ since 2014, this has involved a re-design and formalisation of Greater Manchester’s governing arrangements. It has also involved invoking a long dormant role for city-regional planning in articulating the future design of the material city-region over the next two decades as an attempt to formalise and continue a pre-existing, spatially selective growth trajectory by new means. Yet, the disruption of new hard governing arrangements also provides challenges to that trajectory. This produces tensions between, on the one hand, the pursuit of a continuity politics of growth through agglomeration, material transformation of the city-region and narrow forms of urban governance and, on the other hand, a more disruptive politics of the future of the city-region, its material transformation and how it is governed. These tensions are producing new political possibilities and spaces in the transformation of Greater Manchester. The implications of this are discussed.

This article uses the example of public sector outsourcing to explore how elite power can be fallible. A contract between the state and private companies represents a complex interweaving of different kinds of power with uncertain outcomes: the experience of outsourcing in the UK and elsewhere is that it frequently goes wrong, with fiascos creating political embarrassment for states and financial problems for companies. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, the article explores how the contract is a political device that can be both tool and weapon but which has uncertain outcomes. In doing so, it makes a distinctive contribution by arguing that elite work is often about repair and managing the political or financial consequences of failure.

This paper introduces and applies the concept of critical business model analysis to explore dysfunctional behaviour in the UK retail banking sector and to outline possible policy approaches. The paper starts from the conventional micro-economic framing of banking as the outcome of insufficiently competitive markets, yet after two decades of policy responses the sector is not only more concentrated but also homogeneous, dominated by financialized organisations focused on sustaining high rates of return on equity. Critical business model analysis is used to reframe the banking sector as one based on mimetic behaviours, including mis-selling of financial products and opaque charging. In doing so, the paper contributes to the public debate on the reform of retail banking by highlighting the potential importance of a wider diversity of business models within the sector as a way of offering customers a different choice and limiting the scope of financialized practices.

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The paper develops an ecological approach to explore conditions for industrial renewal in the UK textiles and apparel sector and the possibilities for policy. The authors argue that the material legacy of deindustrialisation conditions the opportunities for survivor firms and creates specific, sub-sectoral, industrial ecologies. Literature from economics, business studies, development and ecological studies is used to outline a framework that allows different possible relations between firm capability and local habitat. Two sub-sectors, carpets and apparel are used to explore the notion of interaction between firm capability and ecology: though the context of deindustrialisation is similar in some respects, the specific conditions provide quite distinctive opportunities for renewal. In carpets, relatively larger firms have more successfully co-evolved with retailers through various kinds of mutuality; in apparel, a workshop sector of mainly small and micro-firms frequently struggles with predatory behaviour by much larger retailers. The implication of this analysis is that industrial policy needs to be grounded in analysis of the capabilities-habitat interplay, focusing on areas where conditions are favourable or can be improved through supporting firm capabilities and modifying supply chain behaviours. The concepts and analysis are relevant for considering other industries and contexts where industrial renewal depends on producer firms and the ecology in which they operate.

This article introduces and develops the concept of trade narrative to understand how business sectors defend against public disapproval and the threat of increased regulation or removed subsidy. Trade narrative works by accumulating lists of benefits and occluding costs, and is created by consultants for economic interests organized via trade associations. This represents an under-analysed ‘policy-based evidence machine’, the aim of which is to format the discourses of the media and political classes about the contribution of the sector in ways that frame political choice about what is thinkable and doable. In doing so it supports elite power by providing a relay for intra-elite communication. Using illustrations from privatized railways, banking and pharmaceuticals in the UK and US, the argument explores how the causal arrow runs in the opposite direction from that supposed in most discussion of discourse-economy relations in the field of cultural economy.

This article develops the concept of the ‘grounded city’ to argue that the development of cities can be analysed through specific accelerators and stabilisers. The city is grounded through its relation with a hinterland, which provides resources and revenues and thus governs city development. In modern cities, property development is an increasingly important accelerator, which shapes what is built and where. At the same time, the foundational economy—which meets the everyday needs of citizens for housing, utilities, food and mobility—is a stabiliser. It suggests a focus on controllable internal accelerators and stabilisers to improve the quality of foundational provision, rather than a view of cities competing for resources to pursue success through agglomeration.

The scandal surrounding the presence of horsemeat in UK supermarket meat products has focused public attention on the problems of complex, fragmented food supply chains. Through a study of the UK's pig meat supply chain, this paper proposes a new framing of the problem in terms of opportunistic dealing adopted by the supermarkets in vertically disintegrated supply chains, where all actors attempt to pass the risks and costs onto somebody else. This outcome is the result of cultural practices and competences in buyer-led supermarket organizations where strong supermarket chains have the power to capture processor and producer margins. One consequence is that mass-market meat production and processing is close to unviable, as evidenced here by the analysis of the VION Food Group. However, there are mainstream alternatives to the retail-led dysfunctional supply chain. This paper presents an alternative integrated supply chain model using the case of Morrisons, the UK's fourth largest supermarket chain. If fragmented supply chains are not inevitable, the important issue explored in the conclusion is how the inadequacies of government policy, which understands the problem of the sector but is stuck with a competition-based mindset, obstruct the creation of a more sustainable supply chain.

This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. Capitalist devices are not neutral tools with fixed uses and predictable results because they vary in purpose and effects from one context to another. This is the point Deleuze makes in the context of nomadic war machine when he explains how a tool can be a weapon; and it is an issue in the present-day capitalism where we can ask whether politically strong financial elite have turned tools like short-selling into weapons that may harm other stakeholders in the economy. This article also connects devices in finance and the process of innovation with the desires of ...