Reimagining geographies of public finance

Abstract

The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.

Cooperation Analysis of Tax-Base Sharing in the Twin Cities: School Districts, Human Resources, and Structural Justice

“…The subject of school district debt has largely flown under the radar in critical policy analyses in education, though there is a developing literature examining the role of municipal debt in United States society from a social justice perspective (August et al 2022;Jenkins 2021;Joffe 2018;Kass et al 2019;Ponder 2017). Eleni Schirmer (2021), a critical school finance researcher and organizer with the Debt Collective, has written recently for the New York Times that "debt-financing public education has not only failed to provide schools with sufficient funds, it has also imposed long-term costs.…”

“…The juxtaposition of the Floyd uprisings and tax-base sharing in the same geographical location points to a productive tension between effective school finance reform, conceptions of justice in school finance research (Fitzgerald 2015;Martínez 2021;Rolle et al 2013), and critical analyses of racial capitalist municipal finance (August et al 2022;Burden-Stelly 2019;Hall 1996;Jenkins 2021;Kelley 2017;Robinson 1983). An analysis of the Twin Cities in this light is instructive for researchers thinking about school finance, social justice, and human resources in the United States.…”

The Role of the Banking Industry in Achieving Regulatory Brilliance- Evidence from Commercial Banks in Jordan

“…The banking industry is of great importance in demonstrating the dynamic reality of the main interface of the economy through its development and interest in it in banks and financial institutions, as the bank administrations are racing to show the importance of the banking industry and its role in achieving comprehensive prosperity in banks. With its development and prosperity, the banking business develops and leads to reaching regulatory brilliance (August et al, 2022).…”

Making space for the new state capitalism, part I: Working with a troublesome category

“…They can do this by denaturalizing landscapes of state-capital interaction, by uncovering their uneven material consequences and by elucidating the roles that they play in the crisis-ridden reproduction of political orders and capitalist social relations. We foresee productive engagements with other research programs that likewise aim to repoliticize the interfaces between public and private actors for progressive social ends, such as ‘reimagining geographies of public finance’ (August et al, 2022: 529), along with connections to critical fiscal studies (Whiteside, 2021) and investigations of public property (Christophers, 2019).…”