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The agency of reformers in new European financial centres: A historically informed financial geography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Tom Hashimoto
Tom Hashimoto*
Affiliation:
ISM University of Management and Economics, Lithuania
*
Corresponding author: Tom Hashimoto, ISM University of Management and Economics, Arklių g. 18, Vilnius 01305, Lithuania. Email: tomhas@ism.lt.
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Abstract

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While institutional frameworks are the dominant approach to analysing the geography of finance, this article focuses on how individual policymakers influence the characteristics of financial institutions and set, or even alter, financial centre development. The historical narratives from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that this article presents reveal postsocialist reformers’ contrasting philosophies and approaches, despite their shared goals of market liberalisation and European integration. These reforms (or lack thereof) differentiated the securities markets in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, especially with respect to financial intermediary mechanisms. Although the legacies of such reforms continue to shape an uneven landscape of financial centres in CEE, this article proposes reformer-centred narratives as an alternative to deterministic institutional thinking. The article argues that historical narratives that foreground the actions and ideas of key policymakers need to be included in the observation framework of financial centre development, in a similar way to how scholars analyse foreign policy by focusing on the heads of governments and ministers.

Keywords

Agencypolicymakersfinancial historyCentral and Eastern Europefinancial centres
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , 2021 , pp. 57 - 75
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2021 The Author(s)

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