ABSTRACT
Financial and business services (FABS), including accounting, law, and business consulting, are crucial for understanding the world economy. Professional services, business services, producer services, advanced producer services, and knowledge-intensive business services are just examples of terms used in addition to FABS. Business services therefore serve what is conventionally regarded as ‘intermediate’ business and public sector demand, rather than consumers final demand’. As well-established in literature, FABS have a distinctly urban character. Another major conceptual and methodological challenge facing research on FABS is whether to treat FABS as a sector, or a set of occupations or functions. Finally, research in the last decade, significantly motivated by the experience of the global financial crisis, draws financial and business services closer together, looking at the processes and impacts of continued financialization through the lens of concepts such as FABS and global financial networks.
