Progresses of financial geography and implications

Abstract

Financial geography is a branch of economic geography and also a crossdiscipline using the methods of geography to analyze problems in the financial field. Financial geography as a discipline has existed for more than half a century. Along with the development of financialiaztion and globalization of the financial sector, the financial industry has become an important factor affecting the global economy. In the past three decades, research in financial geography has achieved new progresses internationally. Especially, the global financial crisis originated from the United States in 2007 was an important turning point in the development of financial geography research abroad, and a large number of financial geography literature has emerged since this crisis. Partly due to the crisis, research in financial geography has entered a flourishing stage. In this article, we collect, reorganize, and analyze the results of financial geography research abroad for a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. Based on 245 articles related to financial geography extracted from 13 international geographical journals from 1980 to May 2013, this article first discusses the research progresses on several major issues in financial geography, including the locations and influencing factors of financial centers, the distribution and regional influences of banks, financial exclusion, the changes in geography of stock markets, the regional differences of pensions, the spatial agglomeration and investment proximity of venture capital, financialization, and financial crisis. Characteristics of the research of financial geography abroad are divided into three aspects: first,both the number of articles and the research topics are increasing continuously from the early 1980 s, and particularly the number of articles began to increase more rapidly since 2007; second, the research areas expand from the developed countries to the developing countries and China has been an important research area since 2005;third, the research community is diverse, including geographers and economists. Compared with the financial geography abroad, financial geography in China is far from sufficient in depth and breadth. This article aims to provide references for financial geography research in China by examining the financial geography abroad. The research of financial geography in China began to develop from the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it is still very limited and at a preliminary stage by this date. With the reform and rising influence of China's capital market, the research of financial geography in China is facing an unprecedented opportunity: first, China's financial markets are growing at a rapid speed and a multi-level capital market has been formed; second, the socioeconomic conditions in China are different from the Western countries, such as economic foundations, development patterns, cultural traditions and so on; third, along with the development of economic integration, financial linkages among all countries are enhanced greatly and the international financial markets are becoming increasingly more complicated than ever before. Therefore, there will be more challenges in the future development of research of financial geography in China and geographers in China should and could contribute more on the studies in financial geography.