Towards An Economic Geography of Central Bank Digital Currencies

Central banks across the globe are currently engaged in an array of experimental projects with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that intervene in the digital transformation of payments. Accounts by economists often position CBDCs as technical instruments that enhance efficiency and extend modern forms of money creation and sovereignty, whereas political science approaches emphasise the geopolitical stakes of CBDCs and security histories that attach to the ownership, governance, and operation of payment systems.
In contrast, by drawing on economic geography and political economy, the thesis develops a relational and network account of the development of CBDCs that attends to epistemic authority and community, to state power as the deliberate reconfiguration of monetary relations, and to nexus thinking that tracks how public and private actors co-produce infrastructures while contesting control over standards, risk, and operational capacity. Against the backdrop of the nationally and regionally variegated promotion of retail and wholesale CBDCs, the thesis maps emerging centres of influence and analyses CBDC development as an ongoing process of knowledge production, state-building, and market-making.
Empirically, the thesis adopts a multi-sited qualitative case study approach. It begins with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) as an understudied and agenda-shaping interstate node within financial networks, then examines The Bahamas as the first jurisdiction to launch a retail CBDC (the ‘SandDollar’) and, finally, analyses Hong Kong SAR as a global financial centre participating in the mBridge wholesale CBDC project, alongside China, Thailand, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. The BIS case study shows how the institution consolidates and extends its epistemic authority by producing surveys, taxonomies, benchmarks, and risk framings that define viable CBDC designs and delimit legitimate futures. Shaping and fast-tracking multiple CBDC projects on the ground and hard-coding interoperability between projects, the BIS is argued to be akin to an innovation accelerator, a specific type of institution typically embedded in digital startup economies. The Bahamian case explains how retail issuance of CBDCs is a site of statecraft in which a small, offshore-dependent state mobilises the payment infrastructure to pursue strategic aims that exceed narrow narratives of financial inclusion and efficiency. The Hong Kong SAR case traces how wholesale CBDC experimentation emerges from geoeconomic concerns about international trade connectivity and monetary hierarchies, while also exposing shifting alignments among technology firms as anxieties about technology sovereignty and payment security intensify.
Overall, the thesis argues that CBDCs should be analysed as state-led payment infrastructures that are strategically planned, assembled, and governed at the intersection of state-finance-technology. It therefore not only sheds light on why CBDCs are being promoted in different ways in various jurisdictions, but also how such promotion reflects and potentially transforms the roles of central banks and the architecture of global monetary governance. It also further contributes an infrastructural approach to money and payment in economic geography and allied fields, specifies payment relations as a practical site of state power that feature public-private hybridity, and encourages a more careful conceptualisation of international organisations as actors that do not merely coordinate monetary governance but actively compose its categories, benchmarks, and permissible designs.