Suchergebnisse

This article investigates Beijing's new policy in its domestic implementations and international negotiations on climate change in the post-Paris Agreement era. As the 2015 Paris Agreement is an implementing agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), China's signature and ratification, as the country is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, are critical not only to the entry into force of the Paris Agreement, but also to its exercise of obligations and influence in climate diplomacy. Reviewing China's National Policy on climate change, this article considers that China has not only planned its strategy to incorporate "global energy interconnection" in "One Belt, One Road" Initiatives a part of China's global energy reform, but also announced its 2030 Agenda as its low-carbon road map to fight climate change, both of which echo the aims of the Paris Agreement regarding "mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, financial support, capacity-building, and technical facilitation". (China/GIGA)

'FinTech' is the digital sector of retail money and finance widely proclaimed to be transforming banking in the global North and 'banking the unbanked' in the global South. This paper develops a perspective for critically understanding FinTech as a platform political economy that is marked by three distinctive and related processes: reintermediation, consolidation, and capitalisation. Through experimentation with the platform business model and building on the digital infrastructures and data flows of the broader platform ecosystem, a constellation of organisations – including start-ups, early-career firms, BigTech companies and incumbent banks – are engaged in processes of platform reintermediation. Changing the bases of competition in retail money and financial markets and encouraging oligopoly and even monopoly, the reintermediation processes of FinTech are presently manifest in strong tendencies towards platform consolidation. The imagined potential of FinTech has also triggered intensive processes of capitalisation, with platforms receiving significant prospective investment by venture capital, private equity funds, banks and BigTech firms.

In this study, I examine how market participants respond to global uncertainty around the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, I analyze the industries most affected by the outbreak. The pandemic has created events never before seen at such a global level. Governments closed their country's borders and quarantined their residents. Business owners closed their doors. These unforeseen events put the world economy at a standstill. I find that these decisions caused the U.S. stock markets to crash by more than 30%. The industries that experienced the most negative value-weighted abnormal returns were Carry, Meals, and Books. The industries that exhibited the most positive value-weighted abnormal returns were Transportation, Healthcare, and Smoke. Perhaps policies and financial assistance can be better allocated to those industries that suffered the most. Additionally, investment managers might be able to use this information to hedge against future losses, in the case of a similar pandemic.

Assets in the fossil fuel industries are at risk of losing market value due to anticipated breakthroughs in renewable technology and governments stepping up climate policies in the light of the Paris commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Stranded assets arise due to uncertainty about the future timing of these two types of events and substantial intertemporal and intersectoral investment adjustment costs. Stranding of assets mostly affects the 20 biggest oil, gas and coal companies who have been responsible for at least a third of global warming since 1965, but also carbon-intensive industries such as steel, aluminium, cement, plastics and greenhouse horticulture. A disorderly transition to the carbon-free economy will lead to stranded assets and legal claims. Institutional investors should be aware of these financial risks. A broader definition of stranded assets also includes countries reliant on fossil fuel exports and workers with technology-specific skills.

AbstractAn increasingly important challenge in global governance, which in some issue areas has been labelled 'traceability', has been to track the cross‐border travels of objects that are associated with positive or negative effects. However, the common properties and identifiable patterns of variation of traceability across issue areas or industries have been insufficiently explored. We identify key properties of traceability systems, including the variation and interactions between the physical properties of the traced object, the positive or negative effects with which it is associated, the monitoring technology, and the institutionalized power relations that activate and constrain traceability systems. We examine and compare traceability systems for food safety, conflict minerals, pharmaceuticals, carbon emissions, money laundering and financial transactions. Understanding traceability in this way is important not only for these cases, but also for understanding interactions between objects, infrastructures, as well as monitoring and political mechanisms in global governance more generally.

Assets in the fossil fuel industries are at risk of losing market value due to anticipated breakthroughs in renewable technology and governments stepping up climate policies in the light of the Paris commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Stranded assets arise due to uncertainty about the future timing of these two types of events and substantial intertemporal and intersectoral investment adjustment costs. Stranding of assets mostly affects the 20 biggest oil, gas and coal companies who have been responsible for at least a third of global warming since 1965, but also carbon-intensive industries such as steel, aluminium, cement, plastics and greenhouse horticulture. A disorderly transition to the carbon-free economy will lead to stranded assets and legal claims. Institutional investors should be aware of these financial risks. A broader definition of stranded assets also includes countries reliant on fossil fuel exports and workers with technology-specific skills.

Burgeoning demands for mobility and private vehicle ownership undermine global efforts to reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Advanced vehicles powered by low-carbon sources of electricity or hydrogen offer an alternative to conventional fossil-fuelled technologies. Yet, despite ambitious pledges and investments by governments and automakers, it is by no means clear that these vehicles will ultimately reach mass-market consumers. Here, we develop state-of-the-art representations of consumer preferences in multiple global energy-economy models, specifically focusing on the non-financial preferences of individuals. We employ these enhanced model formulations to analyse the potential for a low-carbon vehicle revolution up to 2050. Our analysis shows that a diverse set of measures targeting vehicle buyers is necessary to drive widespread adoption of clean technologies. Carbon pricing alone is insufficient to bring low-carbon vehicles to the mass market, though it may have a supporting role in ensuring a decarbonized energy supply.

AbstractFood prices are a key signal about what is happening to food security, and two dimensions are important: their average level (and whether this is rising or falling in the long run) and their volatility. Food price instability slows down economic growth and the structural transformation that is the pathway out of rural poverty. The best approaches to improving food security depend on which global food price regime is likely to drive policy formation between now and 2050. The historical path of structural transformation with falling food prices, leading to a 'world without agriculture', is an obvious possibility. But continued financial instability, coupled with the impact of climate change, could lead to a new and uncertain path of rising real costs for food, with a reversal of structural transformation. Management of food policy, and the outlook for sustained poverty reduction, will be radically different depending on which of these global price regimes plays out.

Gross domestic product (GDP) growth in China has remained strong in 2017, exceeding market expectations. Supported by risinghousehold incomes, the growth contribution of final consumption increased further this year. At the same time, the growth contribution of fixed investment has declined notably. This was partly driven by government efforts to limit local government off-budget financing of public investment but also by weaker private investment. The recovery in global trade has been an important factor supporting economic activity in China in 2017. Net exports contributed positively to growth for three consecutive quarters, compared to a negative contribution in 2015-2016. Owing to favorable global financial conditions, as well as stricter implementation of capital controls and greater domestic market confidence, capital outflows from China declined to 47 billion US dollars in the first three quarters of 2017, from 640 billion US dollars in 2016. The Renminbi appreciated by 5.0 percent against the US dollar over January-November 2017.

The aim of this paper is to define whether the entrepreneurship policy is efficient enough and whether the Government of the Republic of Serbia has created preconditions for entrepreneurship development. The research is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis covered the indicators, such as: the share of SMEs in the basic indicators of economic activity (gross domestic product, employment and gross value added), the level of profit and profit margins of SMEs, share of SMEs in foreign trade, structure of SMEs by sectors, business demography, etc. The qualitative analysis is based on the analysis of policy implementation, which could be studied through country rating by different methodologies (Doing Business list, Global Competiveness Report, Global Entrepreneurship Index). The research results showed that the biggest problem for entrepreneurs in Serbia is still an inadequate business climate and affordability of financial services. The recommendations are defined as concrete economic measures, which have practical implications.

As the latest iteration of leveraging private resources to protect and sustain our natural resources, the environmental impact bond (EIB) reflects the growing trend in sustainable development that makes financing available to projects based on the verifiable results of an intervention. These new instruments in global environmental governance are not actually bonds but pay-for-success contracts, in which the risk of success is shouldered by the investor, and financial savings, pegged to the intervention outcome, are prioritized. This examination of EIBs through the lens of accountability aims to elicit debate on some areas of concern and consideration for the design and implementation of outcome-based financing for global environmental governance, including the prioritizing of private over public accountabilities and potential perverse incentives these instruments create. As both public and private accountability goals are evident in EIB, this governance tool runs the risk of exacerbating the paradox of increased accountability but decreased environmental gains.

Wayne Hope's book on Time, Communication and Global Capitalism highlights how capitalism depends on two central issues: communication and time. In that, Hope's analysis goes well beyond the famous quote on time by the comedian Dave Allen "we spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work-and then we retire. And what do they [fucking] give us? A clock". Hope emphasises the conflicts between two key time concepts: a) real-time and b) clock time. But the books also discuss ideas such as presentism, temporality, coevalness and allochronism. All these notions affect how capitalism communicates time to us. The book, rather convincingly, argues that all these versions of time are part of global media capitalism, financial regimes and the political economies in general. As a consequence, they also shape today's workplaces and everyday life.

First regulated as gambling, even as similar practices abroad were formalized in private exchanges and consolidated in boards of trade, vernacular futures trading in India foregrounds speculation as a problem of law and governing. This essay addresses the colonial management of vernacular speculative activities in a period of global financialization, demonstrating how market engagements with uncertainty that were previously criminalized were slowly folded into legality and governance. It illuminates a range of informal, localized practices participating in global financial flows and deploys the colonial context as an analytical lever to pose broader questions concerning the legibility and translation of speculation as both an illicit outside and a complicit inside of the market. Charting key shifts in the two decades before 1947, it maps the governmentalization of speculation by colonial authorities and vernacular capitalists, a process that informs histories of and dynamics across the colonial rule of law, the idea of informality, and neoliberal thought.

This article focuses on the presence of Latin American businesses in Elephant & Castle (E&C), a deprived area in the centre of London that is undergoing an ambitious program of urban redevelopment that will see the area developed into the new 'thriving quarter of Central London'. The purpose of this article is to uncover the circumstances under which Latin American retailers re-negotiate their place in E&C and to document and understand their involvement and engagement with the local government. The meaning of places, scales of locality and local identity are central to the argument that Elephant and Castle's location is an asset to the vision of London as a global city with desirable city dwelling near global financial and commercial districts. The article interrogates attempts to raise Elephant and Castle's position within the urban hierarchy of London and considers the impact of these changes for Latin American retailers.

This article focuses on the presence of Latin American businesses in Elephant & Castle (E&C), a deprived area in the centre of London that is undergoing an ambitious program of urban redevelopment that will see the area developed into the new 'thriving quarter of Central London'. The purpose of this article is to uncover the circumstances under which Latin American retailers re-negotiate their place in E&C and to document and understand their involvement and engagement with the local government. The meaning of places, scales of locality and local identity are central to the argument that Elephant and Castle's location is an asset to the vision of London as a global city with desirable city dwelling near global financial and commercial districts. The article interrogates attempts to raise Elephant and Castle's position within the urban hierarchy of London and considers the impact of these changes for Latin American retailers.