This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

This chapter sets out the fundamentals of CBDCs.

We start by defining a CBDC and comparing it to various existing near substitutes, and explain the difference between token and account CBDCs.

We explain that a CBDC could be, but will not be, anonymous, for essentially political reasons.

We then explain the difference between wholesale and retail CBDCs, observing that wholesale CBDCs raise no new policy issues that are of any particular interest to us.

Focussing then on retail CBDCs, we set out the difference between direct retail CBDCs and indirect CBDCs and explain that the central bank does not have the capability to manage direct CBDCs itself. Thus, the only practical way to deliver CBDCs is indirectly, through other financial institutions.

However, indirect retail CBDCs would pose the problem of who would pay for the costs of those institutions maintaining CBDC accounts for their customers: neither the customers nor the financial institutions have any incentive to bear those costs themselves. Such considerations suggest that retail CBDCs would be opposed by both the public and the banks and that CBDCs would need to be subsidised by the central bank if retail customers are to be induced to hold them. They also suggest that CBDCs are a more expensive payment system than one based on traditional deposits which, in turn, tells us that CBDCs are an inefficient payment system.

We then discuss the fraught, even intractable, questions relating to the payment of interest rates on CBDCs.

Finally, we discuss the various instabilities to which CBDC systems are prone.

We have here multiple compelling reasons for CBDCs to be dismissed.

This chapter deals with “digital cash.” A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a liability of the central bank toward a nonbank holder – an individual or a company. The technology, a web of interconnected computer terminals, is widely available. Central banks already host deposits from banks, so technically the CBDC would only be an extension. From an economic and financial standpoint, however, there is major difference, because the opening of the central bank balance sheet to the public would tend to lead to bank disintermediation. Banks extend the credit to households and firms; bank disintermediation therefore has a contractionary effect on credit and economy growth. This effect is stronger in financial crises, in which deposit holders tend to shift massively toward “safe assets.” A CBDC risks constituting a channel of deposit runs. Some central banks, therefore, plan to apply strict quantitative limits. There is a trade-off here: The stricter the limits, the lower the significance and usefulness of the CBDC. By and large, global central banks are still grappling with these problems, and research is ongoing. The limited experience of countries that have already launched a CBDC (China, Nigeria, Bahamas) is not positive. There has been very little demand for CBDCs because they provide very little value added over existing private means of payment. The jury is still out as to whether the most important central banks (Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, etc.) will actually go ahead and issue CBDCs.

This chapter draws on a mixed-method project that explored retail market encounters in Edinburgh during the pandemic. It borrows from Walter Benjamin’s methodological and conceptual approach in the arcades project to explore how online settings, notably Instagram, function as market spaces. Arcades, for Benjamin, work by using their architecture to create atmospheres conducive to specific actions – lingering, browsing and purchasing. Arcades and Instagram share material and technical features that are orchestrated to shape action and in this both parallel the functions of ‘market devices’. The significance of space, as an element in ‘the equipment and devices’ which give market ‘action a shape’ has long been acknowledged in market studies (Callon 1998: 22) but how retail space works to devise action has had little attention. In describing how Instagram provided ‘digital-affective premises’ during the pandemic we advance three broader propositions. First, that market spaces are necessarily market devices because they are designed to produce action. Second, that while scholarship has exposed the material and technical elements of market devices, it had said much less about their sentimental or affective elements. Finally, that market spaces showcase how technical-sentimental, digital-affective elements interact in giving action its shape.

Infrastrucutre development may provide an opportunity to generate innovatve revenues from commercial activites in, above, under and around the infrastrucutre. As projects are developed, it is important that the potential for such commercial value capture is considered in pre-feasibility studies and feasibility studies, to identify potential commercial value capture, improve the financial viability of the project, reduce the fiscal liabilities created through such projects and to improve the bankability of projects.

Much of the research that has been done in the last decades on women’s work and on the role of women in early modern economies deals with the urban context, but has all this production been able to rewrite the history of work in early modern European cities? The urban labour markets of early modern Europe combined two opposite and at the same time complementary features as they were regulated and structured by institutions. Yet they were also flexible and open, offering chances and opportunities to immigrant and non-qualified workers as well as the possibility of earning through activities at the limits of, or beyond, legality. The chapter addresses these observations and these questions first, by presenting the existing quantitative data on women’s work activities in different urban contexts and, secondly, by focusing on the problem of guilds and more generally on different aspects of work organization. The aim of the chapter is to present the state of the field but also to propose a vision of urban economies that integrates the gender dimension and maintains an approach that is as Europe-wide as possible.

Chapter 10 assesses the intervention of competition policy in the process of value chain restructuring. Russia provides a good example for explaining the possibilities and weaknesses of competition policy as a regulatory instrument in the food value chain because both the restructuring of the food sector and the development of the Russian competition law and regulatory system have been developing simultaneously since the beginning of the 21st century. The chapter focuses on the enforcement of competition law as well as industry-specific regulation centred on the retail trade. During the last quarter of the 20th century, the Russian food processing industry became highly concentrated due to numerous mergers and acquisitions. Concurrently, large retail chains emerged. Large participants at both stages of value chain have sought to gain influence in governance of the value chain. Governance in the chain at the same time presumes the redistribution of value towards the governing party. Redistribution therefore becomes an important policy issue. The history of Russian competition enforcement in the food retail chain illustrates the limitations of traditional enforcement tools to effectively correct the distributional distortions within the food value chain, and, therefore, highlights the necessity to look for alternative policy instruments.

This chapter revisits the 1940s moment of urban and national reconstruction when the modern planning system emerged out of a tumult of ideas for the reformation of state and society. The 1940s saw the production of a wave of ambitious civic reconstruction plans, and these were often inspired by collectivist visions of social renewal, but the material presented here shows that reconstruction as it was actually practised focused overwhelmingly upon repairing the most valuable commercial districts of blitzed cities—the central shopping districts. I relate this pattern to the intensely productivist vision of reconstruction planning that emanated from central government at this time, as well as an engrained liberalism and administrative economism on the part of central officials. The new Planning Ministry placed supreme emphasis upon business growth and developmental needs while making strenuous efforts to rein in local planning ambitions and public spending commitments. The upshot of these agendas was a mode of reconstruction which aimed to grow the value and enhance the performance of central shopping districts, and planners worked closely with a range of commercial experts and interests to develop planning principles and policies that would maximise the efficiency of local retail environments.