This paper contributes to our wider examination of the roles of financial centres in the Asia Pacific region conducted within an ARC-funded Discovery Project. The project seeks a better understanding of the practices of financial transactions in major centres and how these intersect with value production and circulation in domestic economies and involving cross border flows. The paper reports on intensive interviews with Hong Kong-based infrastructure investors. It positions these investors within a China/Hong Kong political economy as well as within a mature global infrastructure finance market. The paper draws on case studies to show how navigating the complexities of these domains requires high level professional skill, deep institutional and organisational resources and an agile presence in a very geographically-grounded financial landscape. The paper shows how an economic geography approach is capable of important insights into globalised infrastructure financing practices as well as into the ways competitive practices in financial centres are assembled.

In this paper, I use the case of a putative blue economy in the Nelson-Marlborough region of New Zealand to argue for an explicit focus on rent as a political strategy for building sustainable regional economies. By contrast with growth, the concept of geographical rent directs attention to the ownership, distribution and realisation of value in place rather than to the region as a surface for accumulation. Geographic rents, or value that can be added and extracted because activity is carried out ‘here’ rather than ‘there‘, lie at the heart of regional development. They are products of a complex social architecture of capability, endowments, rule making, qualification, connectivity, and provenance. These rents are a collective asset but are privately appropriated. Rather than dismissing rent as unearned income and negative, I ask whether rent, interpreted as a return on (and to) place, offers a more redistributive and inclusive development objective for agencies seeking to ensure that initiatives produce gains that stick in place.

The Australian economy, somewhat robust by international standards, is still affected by the aftermath of the global economic crisis. New policy initiatives are sought to boost “jobs and growth’. Among these initiatives is the Australian Government’s White Paper on Developing Northern Australia (2015) and the creation of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF). The NAIF will offer up to $5 billion over 5 years in concessional finance to encourage and complement private sector investment in infrastructure that benefits Northern Australia (e.g., developments in airports, communications, energy, ports, rail and water). Analysis of existing documentation on Northern Development shows that it is devoid of a sustainability agenda. There is a risk that environmental and sustainability policies are being deliberately neglected and perceived as undermining productivity growth, and should therefore not be prioritised. OCED evidence, however, shows that environmentally stringent policies are not in opposition to productivity. Rather, efforts to improve economic growth and still achieve environmental goals must go together, and be stepped up. This review identifies shortcomings in the NAIF approach and recommends green economy considerations based on geographic reasoning on how to measure longer term progress on sustainable development.

In the past two decades the number of places involved in the production of a car has drastically increased. The geographical extension of the automobile supply chain is see as the consequence of geographical mismatch characterized by production overcapacity at mature markets and production under capacity in the emerging economies. To address this situation without substantially increasing production costs, car manufacturers adopt different sourcing strategies. One of them is the development of massive flows of parts from developed countries to emerging ones, consolidated in warehouses in which the parts from different suppliers are consolidated in containers for maritime transport. But this strategy requires substantial stocks and the supply chain extension is not without risks for manufacturers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this situation in order to understand if long distance sourcing strategies are bound to last, or if they are just an intermediate stage before the development of supplier networks in overseas countries. To shed some light into this issue two series of semi-structured interviews have been carried out with car manufacturers, suppliers, and logistics companies in France (2016) and in Japan (spring 2015). Our results show that distant sourcing strategies adopted by car manufacturers can vary considerably not only between firms, but also within a single firm located in several regions. Finally, the logistics strategies of car manufacturers strongly depend on the priorities they give to cost reduction, quality improvement, and to the reinforcement of their negotiation power vis-à-vis their suppliers.