Volume 62, Issue 2 - Special issue: Dynamics in an unequal world

While for a long time only regarded as subordinate factors, it is meanwhile accepted that financial systems and capital flows play a key role for economic development and growth. Against this background many countries of the Global South founded new, or liberalised existing, stock exchanges, albeit with different results. Whereas in various Asian countries these markets have attracted sizable amounts of investment capital for domestic companies, this is not the case for most stock exchanges in Africa and especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Although there is an increasing number of Sub-Saharan African stock exchanges, the majority is institutionally weak, small, illiquid and thus unattractive to most international investors, resulting in low portfolio investment inflows to Sub-Saharan Africa. Nonetheless, Africa is becoming increasingly portrayed as continent of opportunities with immense growth prospects which led to a new and growing appetite for investment in Africa in general and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular. In this situation the new UN-supported Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative (SSEI) comes into play which aims at transforming stock markets into instruments for supporting sustainable development and green growth. Based on conceptual considerations surrounding the development-through-stock-exchanges argument, this exploratory research addresses the actors involved in this initiative and takes their rationales under closer scrutiny. We argue that the initiative not only serves as a tool for sustainable development, but also as a promoter and facilitator of new international investment opportunities, specifically for international and institutional investors in their drive to enlarge and diversify their portfolios – resulting in various challenges for Sub-Saharan stock exchanges and their local stakeholders.

By dealing with the process of othering in the context of acquisitions, this paper seeks to expand the concept of othering to Economic Geography. It argues that multinational companies should not only be viewed as victims of othering in that they suffer from obstructive policies and hostile public opinion, but rather that othering also matters within such firms. As a consequence of the links they establish between different countries, employees in such companies are constantly confronted with various socio-cultural backgrounds and frequently develop rather different expectations of how their counterparts should perform. This contribution analyses how and why managers and works councils in Germany practice distancing or othering towards owners of German firms located in China and India. It shows that othering can be critical within foreign direct investments. We approach the issue of othering by focusing on the sense of superiority of the involved parties, their positions in the company organisation and their related professional ethics, as well as the dynamics of othering that are mobilised in critical situations. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews from two different research projects.

The environmental dimension and sustainability-related issues have increasingly gained momentum in Economic Geography. This paper argues that integrating the inequality perspective into Environmental Economic Geography (EEG) and trying to disentangle the manifold interrelationships between economic, social, and environmental disadvantage could be worthwhile efforts. Based on three case studies – the debate on urban environmental justice in German cities, the spread of alternative food systems and food-sharing initiatives in Germany, and the socially selective migration in hazard prone areas in rural coastal Bangladesh – we demonstrate that aspects of social inequality indeed matter for EEG thinking.

The 2018 Global Conference on Economic Geography in Cologne provides the occasion to take stock of research achievements especially of German geographers in selected fields. This paper reviews, based on a broad range of academic milestone publications, how German scholars have moved forward research frontiers in the field of knowledge, innovation and technology geographies. Which marks did this country’s economic geographers leave on the advancement of conceptual ideas, yet which topics were neglected? And how have they engaged in producing convincing empirical evidence for conceptualized developments? In which ways have German researchers ventured towards informing and supporting effective policies of innovation oriented regional or national development? Conclusively, which qualities can be discerned that specifically mark a ‘German’ approach towards economic geography research on knowledge, innovation and new technologies, telling about strengths and weaknesses with respect to being noticed internationally? Exploring these questions, the paper offers a structured review of exemplary works published in German or English language and points out some distinctive nation-specific features and topical achievements of economic geography research.