Currency Internationalization: The Case of the RMB

Currency internationalization could be considered as one of the primary facets of globalization in the modern world. Today, the US dollar accounts for nearly eighty-five percent of all global transactions, both in trade and finance. However, as China’s power has risen in the past few decades, many have pondered whether the Chinese currency, the RenMinBi (RMB), can internationalize. This study examines the literature on what components create an international currency. Then, we examine the characteristics of China’s financial markets and international relations to become familiar with the scholarly discourse surrounding China’s financial markets, international influence, and monetary stability. We then collect panel data from various sources including the World Bank, Heritage Foundation, and IMF from 2008 to 2018 to determine whether the RMB can internationalize. Using this data, we compose a few separate models based on whether a country has a Bilateral Swap Agreement (BSA) with China or if it has an RMB Clearing Center – which we consider to be symbols of increasing RMB internationalization. We hypothesize that China may be more likely to target higher-risk countries (i.e. more volatility, less stability) as stepping stones towards global usage of the RMB. The results of our study display One Belt One Road Membership to be the most impactful variable within our equation, followed by China’s business freedom index and trade with China divided by a certain country’s GDP. Using these findings, we offer the use of political analysis along with economic factors in the study of the currency internationalization as well as describe the limitations our study struggled with. It is hoped that this study can offer insight for currency analysts and the common investor as to how to investigate currency internationalization and the importance of including political insights in models of currency internationalization

Growing green money? Mapping community currencies for sustainable development

Parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informed by ecological economics perspectives on development, value, economic scale and growth, and responding to the unsustainability of current global financial systems. These parallel systems of exchange (or community currencies) are designed to promote sustainable development by localising economic development, building social capital and substituting for material consumption, valuing work which is marginalised in conventional labour markets, and challenging the growth-based monetary system. However, this international movement towards community-based ecological economic practices, is under-researched. This paper presents new empirical evidence from the first international study of the scope and character of community currencies. It identifies the diversity, scale, geography and development trajectory of these initiatives, discusses the implications of these findings for efforts to achieve sustainable development, and identifies future research needs, to help harness the sustainability potential of these initiatives. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

The Future Smart-City: An Analysis of the Effects of Global and Technological Innovation on the Evolution of Economic Systems

In 21st century, the current economy is rapidly utilizing globalization to create a vastly different future. With the advent of new technology merging with entrepreneurs who effectively utilize that technology, the economic model is changing. Faster, sleeker, more effective forms of communication and information transfer drive the process of globalization. Production for a single product can happen in multiple countries, companies can operate virtually 24/7 through call centers halfway around the globe, and preliminary smart cities are beginning to emerge to give us a glimpse of the future world. A new category of businesspersons called “prosumers” is emerging and has created a new sharing and soon-to-be self-service economic structure. Analysis of the two drivers of economic change—globalization and technological innovation—will reveal how close civilization is to the city of the future

The CEPS Plan for the Balkans

In 1999, CEPS initiated the Europa South-East Policy Forum, a group of leading independent policy institutes from every country of South-East Europe, the network of Open Society Institutes. The objective was to contribute to the full integration of the whole of the region into the European Union. This report advocates accelerated political and economic reforms in these countries in the aftermath of the war, on the assumption that the European Union itself would make radical moves in its policies to support the process

Cloud service localisation

The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

Lessons from the Asian Monetary Fund for the European Monetary Fund. CEPS Policy Brief No. 208, 16 April 2010

On March 24th the members of ASEAN plus three other major Asian economies (China, Japan and Korea) began operations of a fund from which member countries can swap their national currencies for US dollars within a pre-determined limit. This so-called "Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization" or CMIM will essentially become an Asian Monetary Fund, once its institutional structure is in place. This paper draws lessons from the Asian experience for the recent debate in Europe over the feasibility and desirability of creating a European stability fund

Macroeconomic Policies: Stabilization and Transition in Former Czechoslovakia and in the Czech Republic

Paper discusses reform process in the Czech Republic (and former Czechoslovakia), which after some preparations in 1990 started in 1991 has been implemented along two major reform lines: - microeconomic restructuring including privatization, liberalization of prices and markets, and - creation of a market-typed institutional framework with the stress put on commercial banking and capital markets. The success which was achieved up till now in the field of macroeconomic stabilization is clearly visible. In spite of the price shock in the first three months of 1991 due to the price liberalization and the cuts of subsidies, the monthly consumer price increases since then until the end of 1992 did not surpass 2 percent and in 1992 annual inflation rate was 11.3 per cent, which was the lowest figure among all the ex-communist countries. The external stabilization of the economy has been reflected in the exchange rate of the Czechoslovak Koruna (CSK). This stability has been maintained in spite of the widening scope of internal convertibility. After the split the Czech Republic has kept the exchange rate of the Czech Koruna (CK) unchanged while Slovakia devalued the Slovak Koruna (SK) by 10 per cent. The price paid for the macroeconomic stabilization and the collapse of Comecon was a sharp decline in economic activity. Some progress was achieved within microeconomic restructuring. Almost one thousand big industrial enterprises were privatized through voucher privatization representing the property of more than USD 7 bn (in book value). A number of other firms have been privatized using standard privatization methods. A relatively successful macroeconomic stabilization has been accompanied by a surprisingly low unemployment - especially in the Czech Republic - where unemployment rate stayed at 3.4 in December 1993, which indicates that microeconomic restructuring has Macroeconomic Policies not yet taken place in the extent that could be compared with macroeconomic performance. This in turn means that the issue of macroeconomic stabilization will have to be addressed again in the near future.Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Transition Economics

Desperately seeking niches: Grassroots innovations and niche development in the community currency field

The sustainability transitions literature seeks to explain the conditions under which technological innovations can diffuse and disrupt existing socio-technical systems through the successful scaling up of experimental ‘niches’; but recent research on ‘grassroots innovations’ argues that civil society is a promising but under-researched site of innovation for sustainability, albeit one with very different characteristics to the market-based innovation normally considered in the literature. This paper aims to address that research gap by exploring the relevance of niche development theories in a civil society context. To do this, we examine a growing grassroots innovation – the international field of community currencies – which comprises a range of new socio-technical configurations of systems of exchange which have emerged from civil society over the last 30 years, intended to provide more environmentally and socially sustainable forms of money and finance. We draw on new empirical research from an international study of these initiatives comprising primary and secondary data and documentary sources, elite interviews and participant observation in the field. We describe the global diffusion of community currencies, and then conduct a niche analysis to evaluate the utility of niche theories for explaining the development of the community currency movement. We find that some niche-building processes identified in the existing literature are relevant in a grassroots context: the importance of building networks, managing expectations and the significance of external ‘landscape’ pressures, particularly at the level of national-type. However, our findings suggest that existing theories do not fully capture the complexity of this type of innovation: we find a diverse field addressing a range of societal systems (money, welfare, education, health, consumerism), and showing increasing fragmentation (as opposed to consolidation and standardisation); furthermore, there is little evidence of formalised learning taking place but this has not hampered movement growth. We conclude that grassroots innovations develop and diffuse in quite different ways to conventional innovations, and that niche theories require adaptation to the civil society context