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The legislation of new metropolitan areas in Romania follows the complicated and confusing experience of previous metropolitan areas, instilling a sense of excessive caution among both public authorities and researchers. A review of the literature demonstrates the prevalence of theoretical, methodological, and sectoral approaches when dealing with this functional frame of territorial delineation. Our research proposes an exploratory analysis of the major metropolitan areas developed around county seats, in order to understand the medium and long-term dynamics affecting the development of these territorial structures that are contingent on the local governance. By using a methodology based on the harmonisation of statistical series according to the current administrative structure, as well as on the cartographic analysis of demographic trends between 1992 and 2021, the study demonstrates the uneven development trends of major metropolitan areas, increasing the risk of widening territorial gaps.

In this framing paper for the special issue, we map significant research on global production networks during the past decade in economic geography and adjacent fields. In line with the core aim of the special issue to push for new conceptual advances, the paper focuses on the central elements of GPN theory to showcase recent rethinking related to the delimiting of global production networks, underlying political-economic drivers, actor-specific strategies and regional/national development outcomes. We suggest that the analytical purchase of this recent work is greater in research that has continued to keep a tight focus on the causal links between the organizational configurations of global production networks and uneven development. Concomitantly, considerable effort in the literature has gone into expanding the remit of GPN research in different directions, and we thus engage with five domains or ‘constituent outsides’ that relate to the state, finance, labour, environment and development. We believe such cross-domain fertilisation can help realize GPN 2.0’s potential for explaining uneven development in an interconnected world economy.

This article elaborates a theory of combined and uneven development that takes the dimensions of spatiality, labour and institutions seriously. Drawing on this conceptual framework, an account is given of the way the 2007–2008 crisis was inflected in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The integration of these countries with the global economy has taken place in different ways through trade, investment and finance. This has not only been a source of unevenness within and between them, but has also determined the form and severity with which they have experienced the crisis. The combined and uneven development perspective is therefore able to provide a rich and more dynamic account of economic development and the transmission of the crisis. Further, rather than labour being treated as one among many institutions, it is privileged in its potential role of instigating deep social change.

Following a Marxist and, more specifically, a global capitalism perspective, this paper outlines the peculiar characteristics of tourism to argue that the recent developments of this sector have prominently contributed to the transnational integration and global accumulation of capital. These developments are explored by using a Marxist conceptual framework, including class and value relations, within a broader ecological context. Taking into account the particular pattern of development and rapid growth of tourism in recent decades, we examine the implications for the uneven and combined development of global capitalism. More specifically, we examine whether the growth of tourism may sufficiently counteract the global over-accumulation crisis, as well as the particular ways in which capital can extract and appropriate rent from tourism. It is broadly argued that the development of tourism tends to increase the unevenness, as well as the inequalities and the instability, of global capitalism and while it seems to apparently relax the current over-accumulation crisis, it rather tends to further exacerbate the unfolding socio-ecological crisis.

This paper develops a notion of ‘local capitalisms’. Starting from a particular, Marxist theorisation of capitalism and of the state, local capitalism is analysed as a nexus of production, reproduction of people, and the state within a locality. The latter construct, and are constructed by, specific relations of class, gender, ethnicity and age, themselves internally related. On this basis one can specify the ‘vertical difference’ of local from national capitalisms. Combined and uneven development leads to both commonalities and differentiation between localities, enabling us to understand the nature and origins of ‘horizontal’ differences between local capitalisms. Both capitalism and the state are understood as riven by contradictions, some centrally involving space, place and scale. Consequent disruptions to local capitalisms, and the bases for local struggle by the oppressed and exploited, are discussed. The paper concludes by reflecting on the differences between my theorisation and mainstream approaches to ‘comparative capitalisms’.

Wind power is expanding globally. Simultaneously, a growing number of conflicts against large-scale wind farms are emerging in multiple locations around the world. As these processes occur, new questions arise on how electricity from wind is being generated, how such energy is flowing within societies, and how these production-flows are being shaped by specific power structures. The present paper explores the expanding geography of wind energy conflicts by analyzing 20 case studies from across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe. Based on the Environmental Justice Atlas database, it reflects on how land pressures and patterns of uneven development emerge as two features of the current expansion of wind farms. Following a relational analysis, these patterns are examined to interpret the plural instances of opposition emerging throughout the rural spaces of the world. The article argues that previously unexplored forms of collective action are expanding the scope and content of the “wind energy debate”. In addition to the claims of “landscape” and “wildlife protection” addressed by the existing literature, this study sheds light on the rural/peripheral contexts where opposition emerges through the defense of indigenous territories, local livelihoods and communal development projects. The study contends that these “emerging storylines” embrace an environmental justice perspective when challenging the socially unequal and geographically uneven patterns reproduced by the ecological modernization paradigm. From this lens, cases of local opposition are not interpreted as selfish forces blocking a low-carbon transition, but instead, are understood as political instances that enable a wider discussion about the ways such transition should take place.

Unbalanced regional development poses a significant challenge to global economic growth. While existing studies have primarily concentrated on disparities between provinces, there is a notable lack of research addressing regional imbalances within a single province. In this paper, we use urban-level indicators to assess the level of intra-provincial regional balanced development in China. Based on provincial panel data from 2013 to 2022, we examine the impact of digital infrastructure on balanced regional development. We find that digital infrastructure significantly promotes balanced regional development using a fixed-effect regression model. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests including instrumental variables, considering variable lag effects. Then we identify technological innovation and industrial structure upgrading as the primary mechanisms driving this relationship. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of digital infrastructure on balanced provincial development is more pronounced in regions with higher levels of urbanization, whereas the heterogeneity associated with financial development levels is statistically insignificant. Based on these findings, the paper offers policy recommendations aimed at leveraging digital infrastructure to further empower balanced development across provinces.

'Globalization' was the Zeitgeist of the 1990s. In the social sciences, it gave rise to the claim that deepening interconnectedness was fundamentally transforming the nature of human society, & was replacing the sovereign state system with a multilayered, multilateral system of 'global governance'. A decade later, however, these expectations appear already falsified by the course of world affairs. The idea of 'globalization' no longer captures the 'spirit of the times': the 'age of globalization' is unexpectedly over. Why has this happened? This article argues that 'Globalization Theory' always suffered from basic flaws: as a general social theory; as a historical sociological argument about the nature of modern international relations; & as a guide to the interpretation of empirical events. However, it also offers an alternative, 'conjunctural analysis' of the 1990s, in order both to explain the rise & fall of 'globalization' itself & to illustrate the enduring potential for International Relations of those classical approaches which Globalization Theory had sought to displace. 138 References. Adapted from the source document.

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain.

The central argument of this article is that global cities are, due to their clustering of producer service firms, critical governance nodes in global production networks. More in particular, the article scrutinises the role of producer service firms in uneven development and, especially, in the geographical transfer of value (Hadjimichalis, 1984). Because the direct as well as the indirect mechanisms through which value is transferred geographically require the intervention of producer service firms, global cities can be theorised as governance nodes for centripetal wealth transfers along global commodity chains. Moreover, and in the context of the persisting criticism that the global city concept has a bias towards Northern/Western cities, the article argues that the claim that global cities are critical places for the organisation of uneven development also holds for cities beyond ‘the usual suspects’. Referring to cases of how producer service firms in Hamburg and Mexico City erect entry barriers to protect their clients from competition and of how they shape labour relations at the expense of employees, I have maintained that governance is, as Sassen (2010: 158) has argued, indeed ‘embedded’ into the services provided. From that follows that even ‘minor’ global cities are strategic governance places from where the transfer of wealth towards the centres of the world economy is organised. 本文的中心观点是：全球城市由于聚集了生产性服务公司，是全球生产网络中的关键治理节点。更具体而言，本文审视了生产性服务公司在不均衡发展中的作用，尤其是其在价值的地理转移 (Hadjimichalis, 1984) 中所起的作用。由于价值在地理上转移的直接机制和间接机制需要生产性服务公司的介入，全球城市可在理论上表述为全球商品链上向心式财富转移的治理节点。此外，鉴于学界持续批评全球城市概念有着北半球/西方城市偏见，本文指出，全球城市是不均衡发展之组织过程的关键之地，这一论断对于“通常嫌疑”范围之外的城市也适用。本文以汉堡和墨西哥城为案例，讨论了这两座城市的生产性服务公司如何树起进入屏障来保护其客户遭遇竞争，并且如何以牺牲员工为代价塑造劳动关系，重申了 Sassen (2010: 158) 的观点：治理实际上“植入”了所提供的服务中。由此推论，即使“小型”的全球城市，也是财富向世界经济中心转移进程的战略性治理之地。