Economic Advantages of Community Currencies

摘要

Community currencies are only sometimes economically advantageous. We focus onseasonal changes in money supply and assume that community currencies stabilize the money supplyin a local community. This leads to additional transactions during seasons of insufficient supply ofnational currency. We hypothesize community currencies are therefore economically advantageous ina surrounding of seasonally insufficient money supply. We test the hypothesis qualitatively with twocase studies, the German Chiemgauer and the Kenyan Sarafu Credit. We find community currenciesare only economically advantageous in an environment of insufficient liquidity.