LuSiFunds · Securities markets, international financial centres, and regional resilience. A comparative analysis of Luxembourg and Singapore as strategic nodes in investment funds’ global production networks

Ruptures like the recent global financial crisis are inherent elements of the present “securitised financial system” (Wójcik 2011), with the asset management and investment fund industry being among the main drivers. International re-regulation challenges the competitiveness of international financial centres (IFCs) in multiple ways. By understanding ‘the local’ to better comprehend ‘the global’, a comparative study between two specialised investment fund centres, Luxembourg (EU) and Singapore (ASEAN) addresses the question, how IFCs are able to confront such discontinuities and compete by creating local resilience capacities, which go beyond regulatory arbitrages. Resilience is the consequence of the intended actions by various industrial, regulatory, or policy actors from different but linked areas of the fund ‘production’. The actors rely on localised social capital, which in a specific mode is linked to the respective global network structures in finance.The ‘geography of finance’ offers a more holistic and complementary view besides the prevalent economic manifestations on the financial sector; within this field, the global production network approach proposes a sensible heuristic to identify and analyse place-specific structures, institutions, and power relations in IFCs. Linking evolutionary and institutional economic geography concepts illuminates the dynamics of the underlying on-site inter-firm and firm-institutions’ relations, which assumingly play key roles in change processes. Consolidation processes in the maturing financial industry are having far-reaching spatial implications. The project thus aims to develop a research agenda for studying specialised IFCs and their resilience.The established and highly recognised research group in the emerging field of the geography of finance at the University of Oxford provides an ideal and inspiring academic environment to conduct my research. Aptly, their analytical focus is, among other, on the fund industry.