Infrastructure as a traded product: A relational approach to finance in practice

As nations continue to grapple with growing infrastructure demand, financial markets will play an increasingly prominent role in the landscape for urban infrastructure. Yet existing literature tends to depict the ‘financialization’ of urban infrastructure assets as a restless move towards market eff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of economic geography 2016-07, Vol.16 (4), p.897-916
Main Authors: Knight, Eric R. W., Sharma, Rajiv
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Economic activity
Financing
Geography
Infrastructure
Securities markets
Studies
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Summary:As nations continue to grapple with growing infrastructure demand, financial markets will play an increasingly prominent role in the landscape for urban infrastructure. Yet existing literature tends to depict the ‘financialization’ of urban infrastructure assets as a restless move towards market efficiency aided by the growing transparency of financial information. This article offers a different view, showing how the spatial richness of financial data for infrastructure has progressed towards what we term a more permanent state of ‘informational translucency’. We draw on 53 interviews with participants in the market for infrastructure investment to present this more complicated picture of infrastructure finance, thereby elaborating a more granular understanding of how information flows through and shapes financial market geography. From this we propose a relational model that contributes to theoretical understandings of how financial products are intermediated over time and space.
ISSN:1468-2702
1468-2710
DOI:10.1093/jeg/lbv039