Analysing the Changing Landscape of European Financial Centres: The Role of Financial Products and the Case of Amsterdam

ABSTRACT The turn of the twenty‐first century saw the re‐emergence of debates about the reconfiguration of European financial geographies and the role of stock exchange mergers in this process. There has been, however, no systematic attempt to date to analyse such changes. This paper proposes a specific conceptual framework to explore these issues. It uses a product‐based analysis to examine, in the context of recent stock exchange mergers, the factors affecting the competitiveness of a financial centre. It argues that it is important to understand three intertwined influences—product complementarities, the nature of local epistemic communities, and regulation—and their contingent effects on change. This is exemplified by a tentative application of the framework to the case of Amsterdam in order to better understand its recent decline in competitiveness as a European financial centre.     

Geographies of Housing Finance: The Mortgage Market in Milan,Italy

ABSTRACT The geography of financial exclusion has mainly focused on exclusion from retail banking. Alternatively, and following the work of David Harvey, this paper presents a geography of access to and exclusion from home mortgage finance. The case of Milan shows that capital switching to the built environment is partly a sign of economic crisis and partly a sign of the intrinsic opportunities that the built environment provides. A major factor in both is the deregulation of the mortgage market that has enabled the loosening of historically stringent lending criteria, leading to a tremendous growth of the mortgage market, while leaving the co‐evolution of family and home ownership intact. In addition, capital switches within sectors of the economy and between places. In Milan, once “unattractive” but currently gentrified nineteenth‐century districts underwent cycles of devalorisation and revalorisation. Even though access to mortgages has increased throughout Milan, geographical disparities in mortgage lending persist: at present, yellowlining (differential access, based on less favourable terms) is common in parts of the Milanese periphery. The creation of boundaries makes the realisation of class‐monopoly rent possible; while the subsequent redrawing of these boundaries creates new submarkets in which surplus value can be extracted. Based on the Milan case, one cannot explain the timing and geography of formation and reformation of submarkets in other cities, but it helps us to see how Harvey's abstract ideas of class‐monopoly rent, submarket creation, and capital switching take place in the real world.     

Financial Risk Measurement: CVaR

The precise measurement to risks is principal for the effective risk management,both major in theory and practice.Value-at-Risk,a widely accepted risk measure,has some deadly deficiencies.The authors introduce a new risk measure,Conditional-Value-at-Risk,which comes into being based on the VaR measure. They introduce CVaR's definition and the risk-measuring model on it and also its applications in portfolio management,comparatively with VaR measure.     

Spillovers and Local Growth Controls: An Alternative Perspective on Suburbanization

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, many local jurisdictions in politically fragmented metropolitan regions have enacted growth control and management measures to tackle the challenges arising from rapid suburban growth. These locally implemented growth controls have produced spillovers—the spatial shifts of homebuilding and households to nearby localities. Using data for California, this paper investigates the link between growth controls and homebuilding. The results suggest that some of the excess homebuilding can be linked to the presence or absence of growth control measures and thus be attributed to spillover effects. Moreover, generators of spillovers are nearly exclusively located in urban areas along the coast whereas the receptors of spillovers are primarily found at the metropolitan fringes and in peripherally located jurisdictions of the interior.     

Barley mildew in Europe: population biology and host resistance

Summary Isolates of the barley mildew pathogen from the air spora over a large part of Europe and from fields of variety mixtures, were tested for virulence against 12 host resistance alleles. Subsamples were tested for their response to triadimenol fungicide and analyzed for 10 DNA loci using RAPD markers and PCR. There was a large range of haplotypes spread over Europe; irregularity in the distribution was probably due mainly to non-uniform use of the corresponding host resistances and fungicides. A large range of variation was also detectable within individual fields. Positive gametic disequilibria distorted the distribution of virulence alleles among haplotypes and reduced the number of haplotypes detectable in the sample. Analysis of the spread of the newly selectedVal3 allele into different European sub-populations indicated that gene flow throughout the population may be rapid for alleles that have a selective advantage.Fungicide resistance was widespread in areas known for intensive use of fungicides for mildew control. Four classes of fungicide response were detectable and particular virulence haplotypes were found to be characteristic for each class.Variety mixtures used in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) reduced mildew infection, and thus fungicide use, during the years 1984–1991 despite the limited variation in host resistance among the mixtures. A tendency for complex pathogen races to increase in mixture crops was reversed by the large-scale re-introduction of fungicides for mildew control in 1991. The mixture strategy appeared to be more successful than using the same resistance alleles in pure monoculture or combining them in a single host genotype.     

Innovation Prone and Innovation Averse Societies: Economic Performance in Europe

Although it is commonly accepted that investing in technology and research and development (R&D) is a basic catalyst for the genesis of economic activity, there is less consensus on the spatial significance and returns of the R&D effort for regional and local economies. It is often argued that innovation resulting from allocating local resources to R&D is likely to spill over to other areas, especially in the framework of open national economies. Hence, the incentive to free-ride increases at the subnational level. This paper shows, however, that in the Western European regional context, regions with higher resources devoted to R&D tend to grow at a greater pace than the remaining spaces. Nevertheless, the passage from R&D to innovation and growth is not achieved in a similar way across Europe. Local social conditions play an important role in the formation of what can be defined as ‘innovation prone’ and ‘innovation averse’ societies. Innovation prone regions are those featured by a weak social filter, which facilitates the transformation of innovation into growth. Conversely, regions burdened by rigid labor markets, shortage of skills, outward migration of able individuals, and an aging of the workforce are less prone to assimilate innovation and to transform it into economic activity. They make up the innovation averse societies in Europe.     

European hemp industry: Cultivation, processing and product lines

Summary Two fibre plants are under cultivation in the European Union – flax on approximately 125,000 ha and hemp on approximately 15,500 ha in the year 2004. Seeds, hurds and especially fibres of hemp are used for further processing. The most important markets for hemp fibres produced in the EU are pulp and paper and the automotive industry. Just under 5% of the EU hemp fibres were used in the construction sector. Approximately 95% the whole production of 40,000 t of the hemp hurds are used as animal bedding and 95% of the estimated 6000 t per year hemp seeds are sold for animal feed, mainly as bird feed.     

European Regional Convergence Revisited: A Weighted Least Squares Approach

A plethora of past studies have concluded that unconditional β‐convergence is present in a broad sample of regions, implying that poor regions grow faster than rich ones. All these econometric studies tend to overlook the relative importance or size of each region in the national setting, treating all regional observations as equal. However, this assumption might lead to unrealistic or misleading results. Convergence analysis could be more meaningful if it included a weighting mechanism taking into account the size of regions. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the inclusion of a weighting mechanism in β‐convergence analysis, giving more weight to larger regions and less to smaller ones, can result in sharply different implications for the regional convergence‐divergence process. For this reason, both unweighted ordinary least squares (OLS) and weighted least squares estimators are used in the analysis of regional (intra‐national) convergence within 10 European Union (EU) countries over the period 1990–2000. The comparison between the two methods reveals that when regions are appropriately weighted for their size, intra‐national divergence, rather than convergence found with the OLS approach, seems to be the dominant experience in the EU.     

Endogenous Processes in European Regional Growth: Convergence and Policy

The traditional empirical approaches to the analysis of economic growth,cross‐section and panel data regressions are substantially uninformative withrespect to the issue of convergence. Whether national or regional economies appear to converge in terms of per capita income or productivity levels (the so‐called β‐convergence) critically depends on the way in which the empirical model is specified. Traditional specifications witness a disproportionate presence of proxies for forces leading towards divergence among the conditioning variables. It is therefore hardly surprising that these analyses find a positive and statistically significant value for the estimate of the speed of convergence. A more constructive use of cross‐section and panel data regressions is in the analysis of the determinants of growth. The present paper therefore builds on recent work on the role of different growth determinants (Cheshire and Carbonaro 1996) and analyses the growth performance of 122 Functional Urban Regions (FURs)over the period 1978–1994. This model explicitly recognizes growth as amultivariate process. In this new formulation it incorporates a spatialized adaptation of Romer's endogenous growth model (Romer 1990), developing the work of Magrini (Magrini 1997). Magrini's model originated from the view that technological knowledge has a very important tacit component that has been neglected in formal theories of endogenous growth. This tacit component, being the non‐written personal heritage of individuals or groups, is naturally concentrated in space. As a result, technological change is profoundly influenced by the interaction between firms and their local environments. The present paper reports the results of the estimation of a fully specified model of regional growth in per capita income. Particular attention is played to the role of research and development (R&D) activities, and to the influence of factors such as Universities that shape the local environments and have important policy implications. These results are then applied to quantifying the scope for policy to influence the growth process. Several simulations are presented deriving alternative growth outcomes across European regions that would have been obtained if those variables over which policy might have control—including the contribution of human capital—had had alternative values reflecting the realistic scope of policy makers' influence. The implications for convergence/divergence in regional per capita income levels are then analyzed using a Markov chain approach (Quah 1993 and 1996; Magrini 1999).     

西部地区农户金融需求与农村金融供给--菜园村与纸沟村农村金融调查报告

以西部地区两个农村社区作为案例调查对象，试图了解西部地区农户金融需求与农村金融供给的一般状况。两村调研结果表明，农户金融需求非常强烈，而农村正规金融供给存在区域差异性，资金有限，品种单一，不能充分满足广大农户的资金需求。在这种情况下．农户从非正规金融途径的融资活动就非常普遍。从用途上讲，正规金融贷款主要用于农户生产性投入．农户的生活性支出主要依靠非正规金融供给，即私人信贷。