Professor Ron Martin - Capitalism Divided? London, Financialisation and the UK’s Spatially Unbalanced Economy

Date: 3 June 2024
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Professor Ron Martin 
Talk Title: 'Capitalism Divided? London, Financialisation and the UK’s Spatially Unbalanced Economy'
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College

The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Talk Overview:
The UK economy is one of the most geographically unequal among OECD countries. London has long dominated the economy, in terms of both prosperity and the centralisation and concentration of economic, financial, political and institutional power there. This has been a recurring issue of debate for the past century, if not longer.  Over the past four decades or so, London has pulled even further ahead of other regions, and its financial nexus (‘the City’) has ‘captured’ national policy making, both lobbying for and benefiting from the UK’s financialised, neoliberal-globalised growth model.  Indeed, politically, London is seen as the UK’s ‘growth engine’ that delivers benefits to all regions through ‘trickle down’ effects. This seminar argues that these claims are exaggerated, and that much less is known about London’s negative impacts on other regions and cities, about the geographical dimensions of what some have labelled the ‘finance curse’.  Such negative effects are integral to the growth of regional inequality in the UK.   The limited devolution of certain economic powers to the few new mayoral city-regions, and  the  policies  included under the Government’s new programme of ‘levelling up’, though innovative in some ways, are of themselves unlikely to achieve the much-needed decentering of the UK economy away from London

Speaker Overview::
Ron Martin is Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography in the University of Cambridge.  Although retired from teaching, Ron is still highly research active.   His main research interests include regional economic development, productivity and competitiveness; the geographies of money and finance; evolutionary economic geography; the economic resilience of cities and regions; and spatial economic policy. He has published some 25 books and more than 275 articles on these and related themes. He was President of the Regional Studies Association between 2015-2020. In 2016 he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Gold Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Economic Geography. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. He is listed as a Highly Cited Researcher (among the top 1 percent of most cited social scientists worldwide) by the Web of Science,  and has 50,000 Google Scholar citations. He holds ‘Best Paper Awards’ from the journals Spatial Economic Analysis and Territory, Politics and Governance. He was a member of the Lead Expert Group on the UK Government Office for Science Foresight Future Cities Project (2013-2016), and Expert Advisor to the European Union’s (Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy) programme on the Economic Resilience of Regions and Cities (2017-2019). He has held editorial positions on several journals, including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Environmental and Planning, and Progress in Economic Geography, and in 2008 co-founded, and is co-editor on, the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.  Ron has held visiting professorial positions at the University of California, Los Angeles; Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Ancona University, Italy; and University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.  He has undertaken advisory and consultancy work for the European Commission; the OECD; the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; HM Treasury; the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities; and the consultancies Cambridge Econometrics and Segal Quince Wicksteed, among others.