There is a growing awareness of, and commitment to, Responsible Investment (RI) in the institutional investment markets internationally. RI is defined as the consideration of environmental, social and/or governance (ESG) issues in long-term oriented investment decision-making. As the role of ESG in determining investment risk and opportunity becomes more evident, and as ESG data becomes more available, RI is increasingly seen as an area of potential investment innovation. This thesis applies institutional, evolutionary and relational economic geography theories to examine this trend, exploring the mainstreaming of RI through novel empirical and conceptual research. This thesis examines the investment learning processes and information channels available in Western liberal market economies of the UK, US and Australia. It adopts economic geography knowledge and innovation frames towards answering the question: 'Now that ESG information is more widely available in the investment markets, why has this not catalysed a greater shift towards RI integration in mainstream investment decisions?'. Learning, language and leadership factors within the institutional investment industry are all argued to help answer this question. This research uses a mixed method approach, with analysis based on a survey of 154 investment professions, 97 semi-structured interviews and a case of RI innovation. This thesis develops a conceptual framework of the communication channels and information sources used in investors' innovation-decision-process, drawing attention to the importance of both social and asocial learning processes in generating and sharing knowledge about climate issues within investment markets. Following this, the thesis examines the role of 'local buzz' and 'global pipelines' in facilitating access to, and uptake of, ESG information. Levels of buzz and pipelines are found to vary in different financial centres, and are facilitated by formal and informal networking linked to RI groups. Importantly, then, this thesis finds that both spatial and relational proximity influence investors' access to ESG information and RI knowledge. The second half of this thesis examines whether and how RI information, knowledge and practice can be integrated into existing individual and organisational decision-making frameworks. It highlights the need to better translate RI information into investment-relevant language, and provides an example of how environmentally-driven stranded assets can be reframed as a version of sunk costs, contributing novel spatial-temporal theorisations of this concept. Through an illustration of RI decision-making by the investment consultant Mercer and the University of Sydney endowment fund, this thesis highlights that the capacity to integrate RI through the investment chain does exist. However, willingness to do so is found to be hindered by institutional and organisational path dependent norms, reduced only in some firms by seeing RI as an innovative area of competitive advantage from growing client demand. This thesis therefore finds that RI is being adopted in increasingly more mainstream investment firms, but this is not always fully integrated throughout the firm, and that uptake is geographically varied based on exposure to networks of information and knowledge sharing, and institutional, organisational and individual norms. Ultimately, this thesis therefore contributes towards understandings of the processes underpinning the mainstreaming of RI, but also contributes to broader economic geographies of investment, knowledge sharing and innovation.

This study examines the determinants of unemployment at the municipal level and as such aims to answer what the place-specific drivers of unemployment in South African cities and towns are. The purpose has been to test the arguments that local economies and labour markets matter for local unemployment. The empirical analysis makes use of a balanced panel data set for the period 1996 to 2012 for across 234 local and metropolitan municipalities to estimate a regression model in which the level of unemployment in a particular place is determined by a range of place-specific explanatory variables. It is found that the place-specific determinants of unemployment are a higher population growth rate and dense populations that are associated with lower unemployment rates, indicating the benefits from agglomeration economies. A large informal sector is negatively associated with unemployment, which supports the sentiments expressed in the literature that without agglomeration, economic opportunities for individuals in informal employment are limited. If people in a city or town are better educated this is associated with lower levels of unemployment on average. High inequality does not necessarily cause high unemployment; however, they do coincide. A positive association between specialisation and unemployment is found. Furthermore, the mining, manufacturing, construction and trade sectors that are locally bigger than in the national economy are associated with lower unemployment. The results support the findings that a link exists between geography and labour market outcomes and therefore the need exists for convergence of the social safety net and integration with the economic opportunities at the thriving cities and towns. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This study examines the determinants of unemployment at the municipal level and as such aims to answer what the place-specific drivers of unemployment in South African cities and towns are. The purpose has been to test the arguments that local economies and labour markets matter for local unemployment. The empirical analysis makes use of a balanced panel data set for the period 1996 to 2012 for across 234 local and metropolitan municipalities to estimate a regression model in which the level of unemployment in a particular place is determined by a range of place-specific explanatory variables. It is found that the place-specific determinants of unemployment are a higher population growth rate and dense populations that are associated with lower unemployment rates, indicating the benefits from agglomeration economies. A large informal sector is negatively associated with unemployment, which supports the sentiments expressed in the literature that without agglomeration, economic opportunities for individuals in informal employment are limited. If people in a city or town are better educated this is associated with lower levels of unemployment on average. High inequality does not necessarily cause high unemployment; however, they do coincide. A positive association between specialisation and unemployment is found. Furthermore, the mining, manufacturing, construction and trade sectors that are locally bigger than in the national economy are associated with lower unemployment. The results support the findings that a link exists between geography and labour market outcomes and therefore the need exists for convergence of the social safety net and integration with the economic opportunities at the thriving cities and towns. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

<p>Innovation Policy has been a high priority matter on the political agenda in Norway during the first half of this decade. In 2003-2004 the first two official policy-documents on innovation policy where publicised with great publicity. Based on official policy-documents, Norwegian research and analysis of public action plans for innovation, this thesis aims at finding the essence of Norwegian innovation policy. In addition, this thesis also tries to prove the relevance between contemporary theories of innovation and Norwegian innovation policy. This thesis could be seen as a critical scientific based remark to whether or not innovation should be claimed as a distinct area of politics in Norway.</p>

<p>Uppsatsen ”Östersjön – hav eller resurs?” är skriven 2008 av Amanda Haak på C-nivå med hjälp av handledaren Hele Kiimann, doktorand Kulturgeografiska institutionen Uppsala Universitet.</p><p>Gasledningsprojektet är ett av de mest debatterade projekten idag. Dagligen publiceras nya artiklar och skrifter om projektet och majoriteten av kritiken som riktas mot det är negativt. Syftet med denna uppsats är att jag skall beskriva de bakomliggande aspekterna för att därefter förklara gasledningsprojektet samt själv slutligen besluta om jag är för eller emot bygget av gasledningen. Efter att ha läst på om de om de olika argumentenoch studerat fakta är jag fortfarande mestadels negativt inställd. Detta beror på de omfattande negativa effekterna på Östersjöns marina miljön.</p><p>I min analys har jag tittat på tabeller över antalet ton landad fångst per år av ett fåtal fiskarter i Östersjön. Tanken var att jag därigenom skulle kunna se att arterna redan är under stora påfrestningar och därefter ställa en amatörmässig och spekulativ prognos om en gasledning antingen kan förvärra eller förbättra läget. Analysen visade att mängden torsk i Östersjön har minskat drastiskt de senaste åren. Detta tros bero på ökat fiske under 1980-talet i samband med en minskning av inflödet från Atlanten och därmed minskad salthalt. Gasledningen kan minska detta inflöde ytterligare vilket kan medföra att torskens reproduktion, som är beroende av en specifik salthalt, kollapsar och arten kan dö ut i Östersjön. Detta kan få konsekvenser både för fiskenäringen och för artsammansättningen i havet.</p><p>När jag började jobba med denna uppsats var det bestämt vilken väg gasledningen skulle ta genom Östersjön, men efter påtryckningar från delvis Svenskt håll har man nu börjat studera en alternativ dragning vilken även skall inkludera en förgrening till Sverige. Funderingarna kring en ny dragning uppkom på grund av att gasledningen skulle dras allt för nära Gotland och allt för långt in i den Svenska ekonomiska zonen. Den alternativa dragningen är endast på planeringsstadiet, men anses idag bli den slutgiltiga vägen förledningen. Detta kan vara intressant att följa upp och eventuellt göra en nykonsekvensanalys när den nya rutten är beslutad.</p>

<p>This thesis consists of three essays in the fields of the political economy of international trade.</p><p><i>Location Equilibrium with Endogenous Rent Seeking:</i></p><p>This paper analyzes the location of manufacturing activities when regional policy is determined by endogenous rent seeking. Once lobbying for government transfers to regions is included in an economic geography framework with size asymmetries, the standard prediction that the larger region becomes the core when trade barriers are reduced no longer holds. The establishment of manufacturing production in the economically smaller region is increasing in the level of regional integration once trade becomes freer than a certain threshold value. When free trade prevails, the relocation of industry takes place up to the point where there are as many firms operating in the South as in the North. Furthermore, lobbying slows down the agglomeration process, whereas the home market magnification effect (Baldwin, 2000) becomes weaker.</p><p><i>Endogenous Tariff Formation and the Political Economy of Trade Retaliation:</i></p><p>This paper extends the notion of endogenous tariff formation under representative democracy by allowing for strategic interaction between governments. The model developed suggests that the ideological distribution in the electorate within a country affects the tariff setting behavior among its trading partners. The equilibrium tariffs in a country depend on the trade policy preferences of the ideologically neutral voters among such partners as well as on the distribution of their sector-specific factor ownership. Ideological shifts in the population which systematically alter the political power of different voter groups, or types of factor owners, in one country thus influence the tariff setting behavior in competing trading nations.</p><p><i>On the Indeterminacy of Trade Policy under Different Electoral Rules:</i></p><p>Current research has found ambiguous results with respect to the effects of the type of electoral regime on trade policy. The present paper proposes a solution to this indeterminacy. It is shown that the equilibrium level of trade protection can be relatively higher, as well as lower, under a majoritarian electoral rule compared to proportional representation. The framework developed in this paper thus includes as special cases earlier models reported in the literature. The equilibrium outcome is shown to depend on the number of voters in swing districts who own a factor specific to the exporting industry in relation to those who possess claims to the specific input employed by the import-competing sector. Using a cross section of countries, empirical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis.</p>

This is a dissertation about the organisational structure of the World Bank, the professional practice of evaluation, and the meaning of the concept of aid effectiveness in practice. In international development, evaluation is a professional activity that determines and then reports on the impacts of aid projects and programmes to the clients of such efforts and to the public. 'Aid effectiveness' is a concept that refers to a standard of how aid projects and organisations should operate and the results, such as economic growth and poverty alleviation, which these efforts should deliver in order to work. The concept of 'aid effectiveness' has also been used in the debate about international development as a system and its reform. Given that aid policymakers and academic researchers often use the data contained in development organisations evaluations to determine the extent to which aid projects and programmes are 'effective', it is critical to analyse what these evaluations measure and what influences their ratings and judgments. Based on a case study of the World Bank, the analysis is primarily qualitative and draws on both interviews with evaluation professionals in the World Bank and content analyses of the logical framework, indicators, and language in the World Bank's evaluations at the project- and country-level. Building on the previous theoretical work in post-structuralism that considers how international development organisations 'produce' their work through certain terms and processes (Escobar, 1995; Crush, 1995), I assess how the professional practice of evaluation in the Bank 'produces' the results of aid at the project- and country-level, specifically in the evaluation reports that it makes publically available. The World Banks data and evaluation reports are a window through which to understand the impact of aid, and several factors that influence this 'window' are assessed, including the institutional role of evaluation, the professional practice of evaluation, and the required evaluation processes within the World Bank. The study has important implications for practitioners of international development, academic researchers, and evaluation professionals who endeavour to improve the aid system and often rely on the results of the World Bank's evaluations to inform their understanding of the impact of particular development efforts. By reshaping the discussion from one which considers if aid 'works' to one about the data and the process of making a judgment about the success of aid projects and programmes, I articulate what the role of evaluation is in practice and what the World Bank's resulting evaluative data do and do not reflect about the World Bank's work. The relationship between the 'scales' of aid is also analysed by comparing and contrasting the evaluation processes at the project-level and the country-level. I challenge the notion of a 'micro-macro paradox' (Mosley, 1986) between the successful results of the World Banks projects and the economic development in its client countries by articulating the actual meaning of this data in context, the unseen institutional forces that shape this data, and the difficulty of asserting a linear relationship between the results of projects and programmes on different scales of aid.

Part I: Approaches to the study of the ancient Greek countryside. Chapter 1: The ancient Greek countryside in classical scholarship. The Introduction locates the present study within the wider historiography of research into the ancient Greek countryside, assessing the contribution of geographical, archaeological and anthropological studies to the history of the ancient countryside, and analysing the methods which have tended to place the subject on the margins of traditional, text-based studies of the ancient world. Chapter 2: The context of the case study. Ch. 2 justifies the choice of the island of Siphnos as a case study to reassess the archaeology of the ancient Greek countryside in the light of the Ch. 1. The regional context, and the physical environment of this particular polis, are briefly described. Chapter 3: The archaeological record of rural sites. More than fifty rural sites exhibiting monumental masonry construction (towers and associated structures) have been recorded throughout the chora of Late Classical-Hellenistic Siphnos. Problems in identifying and dating occupation at rural sites are discussed within the context of the island's topography and long-term settlement history. Historical, epigraphic, ethnographic and archaeological evidence is considered with regard to the interpretation of monumental rural sites. The sites are then re-examined with regard to their architectural construction (Ch.4), their location and distribution (Ch.5), local land use (Ch.6), and the regional context of the countryside (Ch.7), in order to examine the economic geography of the polis. Part II: Monumental rural sites in the chora of ancient siphnos. Chapter 4: Social archaeology of the countryside - architecture of rural sites. The rural sites are analysed according to their architectural plan, construction, orientation, and the presence of adjoining and adjacent structures, walls, courtyards, buildings and water collection devices. Chapter 5: Social archaeology of the countryside - location and distribution of rural sites. The location of rural sites is examined according to aspect, elevation, coastal distance, intervisibility and nearest neighbour analysis in order to examine hypotheses concerning their functions. It is argued that the majority of rural sites on Siphnos fulfilled an agrarian, rather than strategic function. Chapter 6: Social archaeology of the countryside - land use at rural sites. Many monumental rural buildings were built on steep sloped uplands (eschatiai). Strategies of land use (including extractive activities, agriculture, animal husbandry) are considered in relation to the architecture and location of rural site complexes. Chapter 7; Conclusion - rural sites and the polis. The Conclusion evaluates the findings of the case study according to patterns of rural building and land use in the ancient Greek countryside and discusses future opportunities for research in the subject. Volume II contains Appendices and Plates relevant to the case study in Volume I.

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Denna studies syfte är att undersöka förhållandena och utmaningarna för import av matvaror av ett företag som heter La Collina. Där förhållanden mellan exportörer, kunder och konkurrenter studeras. Studien genomsyras av sitt geografiska förhållningsätt där jag sökt förklaringar till La Collinas förhållning till sin verksamma miljö. Via ett kvalitativt metodval där jag byggt studien på basis av intervjumaterial har jag sökt och besvarat min frågeställning med hjälp av teoretiska begrepp som jag ansett vara passande för att undersöka min frågeställning. De resultat jag kommit fram till i studien är av olika art. Där både svårigheter att hitta goda samarbetspartners av transporteringen av varor, som var en av de huvudsakliga utmaningarna, liksom att hitta passande personal att anställa var en annan svårighet företaget stötte på. Det starka behovet av att etablera sig i närhet till en utvecklad infrastruktur och liksom kontakten till kunder var faktorer som avgör var La Collina valt att lokalisera sig och även var de väljer att utveckla sin verksamhet.