E-barter versus fiat money: will central banks survive?

F H Capie, Dimitrios Tsomocos and Geoffrey E Wood

Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: New technology in computing has led some to suggest that the ability to settle transactions electronically will develop to such an extent that money will disappear from use. Two versions of this belief exist. One maintains that there will be 'e-money', issued conceivably by many organisations, and that this will replace central bank money. The other, on which this paper focuses, suggests a further development - that the very concept of a medium of exchange may become redundant, as assets or goods can be exchanged directly for other assets or goods through use of computing. In this paper we argue that the information-economising properties that allowed money to develop will also allow it to survive, despite actual and hypothesised technical progress which reduces the cost of electronic barter.

Date: 2003-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/h ... apers/2003/wp197.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/workingpapers/2003/wp197.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/workingpapers/2003/wp197.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of England working papers from Bank of England Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Media Team ().