This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting three variables in how GWCs are articulated and change according to: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) regulatory liability, and (3) innovation capacities among suppliers of products used in wealth chains. We then differentiate five types of GWC governance -Market, Modular, Relational, Captive, and Hierarchy -which range from simple 'off shelf' products shielded from regulators by advantageous international tax laws to highly complex and flexible innovative financial products produced by large financial institutions and corporations. This article highlights how GWCs intersect with value chains, and provides brief case examples of wealth chains and how they interact.

This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, large global accountancy firms and non-governmental organizations have been active. The point of contention here is what form of financial reporting multinational corporations should provide to ensure they pay their fair share of tax. Ideas powered by expertise contain shared causal beliefs, as well as principled beliefs about value systems. We demonstrate that professionals can contest the established order when demonstrations of expertise can be fused with claims to moral authority. Such a constellation is more likely when political conditions are favourable.

The growing production and sale of intangible commodities and services, along with their enabling intangible assets is one of the key historical developments of our epoch. Yet many current analyses of production and trade remain rooted in industrial modes of organisation. This paper builds an analysis of intangible assets that engages with the emergent Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) concept. The rise of intangible assets and other forms of abstract capital has been significant, but has occurred in ways that have confounded extant measures and regulatory concepts of accumulation and wealth. The expanded spatial and jurisdictional deployment of these forms of capital by multinational corporations in GWCs has been central to widespread recognition of a growing disjuncture between the locations of value creation and the spatial and jurisdictional appropriation of wealth. The unbundling of attributes of activity and value from corporations and nation-states has also been facilitated by innovations in finance and jurisdictional forms, coalescing notably in the rise of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs). The offshore world has a history of pioneering new forms of economic and financial organisation, and changing political and regulatory spaces and temporalities. A large and growing proportion of the world's intangible capital now resides in or passes through OFCs. This article explores the longer-term implications of accumulation of internationalised capital in intangible and abstract forms, and the prominent role of finance and offshore finance in giving mobility and fluidity to these forms of capital. The analysis suggests that limited regulatory traction on the labour, environmental and fiscal activities occurring in Global Value Chains (GVCs) is not simply due to a lack of political will, but also a function of conceptual and regulatory ambiguity in the face of historic transformations in accumulation. While the GVC approach has helped us to better follow increasingly fragmented and fluid networks of commodity production, and distribution, there is also a need to better follow the global double life of internationalised abstract and intangible wealth, and the parallel way state forms are being reorganised in response to those transformations.

This paper accords derivatives a central role in defining the character and dynamics of financialised accumulation. Under the guise of financial precision and a progressive innovation spiral, financial derivatives have instrumentalised risk so that ownership and property take a novel form. The advent of limited liability and absentee ownership in the second half of the nineteenth century marked the start of this process of transformation. At that stage, ownership became fleeting and its relationship to the underlying technical process uncertain, loose and complex. Risk management through derivatives takes this a stage further. Derivatives imply that ownership can take a form wherein there are no direct ties to a particular asset, and therefore no possibility of a conceptual link between property and stewardship. Instead, ownership proceeds on the basis of disengagement and financialisation proceeds via the construction of indifference to the exigencies of ‘real’ economic competition.

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting three variables in how GWCs are articulated and change according to: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) regulatory liability, and (3) innovation capacities among suppliers of products used in wealth chains. We then differentiate five types of GWC governance -Market, Modular, Relational, Captive, and Hierarchy -which range from simple 'off shelf' products shielded from regulators by advantageous international tax laws to highly complex and flexible innovative financial products produced by large financial institutions and corporations. This article highlights how GWCs intersect with value chains, and provides brief case examples of wealth chains and how they interact.