Complementary Currency Systems (CCS) are accounting systems that define local monetary spaces created by non-bank actors to pay for exchange of goods and services inside a trading network. This article aims to investigate the capability of complementary currency systems to foster social and economic changes. The authors use an analysis of the literature to examine the nature and diversity of CCS in terms of objectives, forms, modes of governance, and degrees of connection with political authorities and economic structures. They also assess the potential of CCS to support local economies based on social and environmental values, working to combat economic vulnerability and social exclusion, and examine how CCS challenge the conventional perception of money. The article ends by summarizing the challenges facing CCS, inquiring into the potential problems and benefits that a change of this sort could entail.The authors wish to warmly thank the anonymous referees for their comments, which have enriched and significantly improved the quality and content of this text.
The market relationships are being contested. This can be seen in the increasing number of alternative social experiments in the 'North' and the 'South' which propose to think out the present market relationships in a different way, in particular in establishing exchange value and in facilitating access to trade. These practical alternatives are supported by trends in academic circles that over the past three decades have opposed neoliberal capitalism and individualism in today's commercialised society. Calling for greater solidarity and social justice in economic relationships, in particular, partisans of social and solidarity economics (SSE), identifying with these trends, demand new forms of exchange. The objective of this article is to re-examine these demands. What exactly do the SSE mean by 'solidarity' and 'solidarity-based economy'? We would like to trace the contours of this theoretical and political project and to assess the practicability of the proposed alternative to neoliberal capitalism.
At the beginning of 2000 the Argentinian monetary system was characterised by the coexistence of a plurality of currencies: the national currencyöthe pesoöwhich officially coexists with the dollar (Currency Board established by the Convertibility Law, 1991^2001); currencies issued by the provinces (2001^03); and also a community currency (ie a nonstate and nonprofit currency), used in what Argentinians called barter clubs' (this is a literal translation of the original name, given by the founders and members). The term`barter club' denotes a place of market exchange, within which goods and services are paid for using an internal paper currency, the credito, issued by the founders of these clubs. These community market spaces have appeared since 1995 (Covas et al, 1998) as a solution for a part of the population deprived of monetary resources due to the deep crisis which hit the country. In the early stages, middle and working classes who lost their jobs turned to these`clubs' in order to trade their labour for goods and services (Gonzalez Bombal and Leoni, 2003). But as the crisis intensified in 2001, the poorest social groups also joined them in search of the most basic necessitiesöfood and clothing.In this paper I am concerned with barter clubs and the specificity of their community currency. Indeed, unlike the official currencies (the dollar and provincial currencies), recognised by monetary authorities who fix the relations and conditions of their convertibility with the national currency (on a one-for-one basis for the dollar; on differentiated rates for the provincial currencies), the credito does not benefit from any legal convertibility. Such is usually the case for alternative monetary systems,
IRISSO). 1 We will concentrate on specifically economic theories of money, excluding approaches that are socioeconomic, sociological, anthropological and historical, as their use of empirical observation and methods of theorisation and analytical generalisation are appreciably different from those of economics in general.
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