Private institutions in infrastructural geoeconomics: limits to the rise of emerging economies in global finance

We need an 'infrastructural geoeconomics' research programme. This programme studies the ways in which geoeconomic competition and cooperation play out in and through financial infrastructures. In the context of this research programme, the article addresses a specific observation. Whereas the BRICS (comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates) have succeeded in setting up a number of inter-governmental organisations in financial cooperation, we still are witnessing a high degree of spatial inequality with regard to global private financial infrastructures, with a powerful position for Anglo-American companies. Short case studies of payment, rating and exchange institutions demonstrate that major emerging economies see themselves disadvantaged by the spatial selectivity of these infrastructures, but were not (yet) able to come up with alternative ones. Second image international political economy explains this puzzle by the high degree of state control in the BRICS economies, particularly among their most powerful members (China, India and Russia). Accordingly, governments are not willing to give up national control over private infrastructures, and they are only willing to trust other countries with regard to their infrastructures to a very limited extent. Transnational cooperation in favour of private infrastructures thus is far more difficult than intergovernmental cooperation, where governments retain a high degree of control.