Balance of trade is the difference between the monetary value of a nation's exports and imports over a certain time period. Sometimes a distinction is made between a balance of trade for goods versus one for services. The balance of trade measures a flow variable of exports and imports over a given period of time. The notion of the balance of trade does not mean that exports and imports are "in balance" with each other.
In economics, a local currency is a currency that can be spent in a particular geographical locality at participating organisations. A regional currency is a form of local currency encompassing a larger geographical area, while a community currency might be local or be used for exchange within an online community. A local currency acts as a complementary currency to a national currency, rather than replacing it, and aims to encourage spending within a local community, especially with locally owned businesses. Such currencies may not be backed by a national government nor be legal tender. About 300 complementary currencies, including local currencies, are listed in the Complementary Currency Resource Center worldwide database.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989, is a business and self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. The book goes over his ideas on how to spur and nurture personal change, such as his thinking about effectiveness as a relationship between desired results and caring for that which produces results, his argument for the character ethic rather than the personality ethic, or his articulation of principles versus values. As named, his book is laid out through seven habits he has identified as conducive to personal growth.
A store of value is any commodity or asset that would normally retain purchasing power into the future and is the function of the asset that can be saved, retrieved and exchanged at a later time, and be predictably useful when retrieved.
In economics, a time-based currency is an alternative currency or exchange system where the unit of account is the person-hour or some other time unit. Some time-based currencies value everyone's contributions equally: one hour equals one service credit. In these systems, one person volunteers to work for an hour for another person; thus, they are credited with one hour, which they can redeem for an hour of service from another volunteer. Others use time units that might be fractions of an hour. While most time-based exchange systems are service exchanges in that most exchange involves the provision of services that can be measured in a time unit, it is also possible to exchange goods by 'pricing' them in terms of the average national hourly wage rate.
Bernard Lietaer was a Belgian civil engineer, economist, author, and educator. He studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.
A complementary currency is a currency or medium of exchange that is not necessarily a national currency, but that is thought of as supplementing or complementing national currencies. Complementary currencies are usually not legal tender and their use is based on agreement between the parties exchanging the currency. According to Jérôme Blanc of Laboratoire d'Économie de la Firme et des Institutions, complementary currencies aim to protect, stimulate or orientate the economy. They may also be used to advance particular social, environmental, or political goals.
Chiemgauer is a regional local currency started in 2003 in Prien am Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany. Named after the Chiemgau, a region around the Chiemsee lake, it is intended to increase local employment, supporting local culture, and make the local food supply more resilient. The Chiemgauer operates with a fixed exchange rate, tied to the value of the euro: 1 Chiemgauer = €1.
The coincidence of wants is an economic phenomenon where two parties each hold an item that the other wants, so they exchange these items directly. Within economics, this has often been presented as the foundation of a bartering economy.
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
Demurrage is the cost associated with owning or holding currency over a given period. It is sometimes referred to as a carrying cost of money. For commodity money such as gold, demurrage is the cost of storing and securing the gold. For paper currency, it can take the form of a periodic tax, such as a stamp tax, on currency holdings. Demurrage is sometimes cited as economically advantageous, usually in the context of complementary currency systems.
"Mutual credit" is a term mostly used in the field of complementary currencies to describe a common, usually small-scale, endogenous money system.
What Has Government Done to Our Money? is a 1963 book by Murray N. Rothbard that details the history of money, from early barter systems, to the gold standard, to present day systems of paper money.
Principles of Political Economy (1848) by John Stuart Mill was one of the most important economics or political economy textbooks of the mid-nineteenth century. It was revised until its seventh edition in 1871, shortly before Mill's death in 1873, and republished in numerous other editions. Beside discussing descriptive issues such as which nations tended to benefit more in a system of trade based on comparative advantage, the work also discussed normative issues such as ideal systems of political economy, critiquing proposed systems such as communism and socialism. Along with A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy established Mill's reputation as a leading public intellectual. Mill's sympathetic attitude in this work and in other essays toward contemporary socialism, particularly Fourierism, earned him esteem from the working class as one of their intellectual champions.
Thomas Henry Greco Jr. is a community economist, who writes and consults on monetary exchange alternatives, including private credit clearing systems, complementary currencies and local currencies.
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's account of the value-form is differently adopted in later forms of Marxism, in the Frankfurt School and in post-Marxism. When social labor is split up into independent enterprises and organized capitalistically, its products take the form of an ensemble of commodities of diverse types, which face one another on the market.
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World is a nonfiction social sciences and sociology book by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson. The authors introduced the term "Cultural Creatives" to describe a large segment in Western society who since about 1985 have developed beyond the standard paradigm of modernists or progressives versus traditionalists or conservatives. Ray and Anderson claim to have found 50 million adult Americans can now be identified as belonging to this group. They estimated an additional 80–90 million "Cultural Creatives" exist in Europe as of 2000.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry is a 1984 book by Albert Borgmann, an American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana.
Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek is a 2016 book by French economist Manu Saadia. The book deals with the topic of the scarcity in the economy by looking at it in reverse. The author describes the 24th-century Star Trek universe in which scarcity does not exist at all. The book explores a post-scarcity age and how our society would need to change to adapt itself to such an environment. It looks at the expectations regarding automation and artificial intelligence and takes readers through a journey of the fictional, moneyless world of Star Trek. It also looks at the challenges to the Star Trek economy.
