Finance, Geography of

Financial geography is a recent subdiscipline within economic geography that is increasingly being recognized as an autonomous research field. While initially the field merely replicated the research objectives of economic geography more generally and aimed to answer questions related to the spatial distribution of finance, more recent contributions to the literature claim that the current rise of financial markets presents important meta-theoretical challenges to the discipline as a whole. In that regard, the fate of the discipline is clearly linked to recent economic transformations, in particular the coming about of a truly transnational financial system that has proven to [Page 1116]be highly prone to booms and busts. This entry briefly discusses the economic preconditions for the rise of financial geography. It then sketches the main ...