Financing regional endogenous development: The role of proximity capital in the age of globalization

Today, financial activities become more and more integrated at a global scale. Nevertheless, SMEs have no access to these circuits. Consequently, one can ask how do they find their equity capital? This paper presents the concept of ‘proximity capital’ which articulates informal capital and proximity relations between demander and supplier of capital. A typology of spatial forms of financial circuits of industrial activities is built by contrasting proximity capital and financial cores which link the largest firms and banks together.