currency, sustainability, self-sufficiency, globalizationI’m surprised by the number of existing local currencies like theChiemgauer and its success. Can these local currencies coexist in the long term with worldwide key currencies, are they complementary or competing. Or are they a phenomeon of irrational temporary agent behaviour. The main idea seems to bind consumer and companies to a located market area and increase self-sufficiency, substantiality and give incentive for long term investments in these market area. Globalization currently doesn’t guarentee these factors for local market areas.
So my question here is: Can such movements persist in the long term, have economic studies observed such local closed market areas and their interaction with superiour competing national markets for longer time? What are the conclusions? Please link some good papers to start with.
There is an interesting idea by Paul Grignon proposing a so called "Digital Coin", which is quite relevant to your question. It advocates strongly for local currencies.
The idea is to let anyone issue their own currency, which would be redeemable in full by the goods and services they provide. All those currencies would be exchangeable between one another, and also exchangeable to a "digital coin", a sort of standard of value. The incentive behind the exchange is that the currency issues by a particular person or company would get a discount when using it to purchase that particular product. So for example, Coke could issue Coke$$ and pay their employees with it. They could spend those C$ to pay for anything needed, just like normal dollars would. They could for example buy 1$ worth of bread with their 1C$, but if they decided they wanted coke, they could get 1.2$ worth of coke with their 1C$.
Generally, the point is that there is always enough local money in existence to facilitate all trade necessary, regardless of the abundance or lack thereof of a central currency. It is a paradigm shift, but it appears to be a possible alternative to current view of economy.
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