Közösségi pénzek csoportosítása = Grouping of community currencies

Absztrakt

The emergence of community currencies is one of the responses people gave to the
several global crises of our financial system. The idea that the financial crises is of a fundamental,
structural nature that cannot be cured by some “facelift” on the system becomes
increasingly accepted in the economic literature. Radical change is needed.
During the past centuries, in the wake of every major financial collapses more and
more region had tried to ease the economic difficulties by introducing their own “money”
or surrogates. According to some estimation there are about 3000–5000 community currency
systems in the world, in 35 countries.
As in the case of the 1930s, the crisis of 2008 was not about the shortage in productive
capacity but about the shortage in the (financial) connection network that could have ensured
the flow of unused resources in the production. The main priority of a community
currency is the avoidance (or complement) of such a shortage; the establishment of a new
clearing-system within a given community to provide protection against the financial turbulences
taking place outside the community. The community or local currency does not replace the national currency, only complements it. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two. Community currencies – in most cases – serve only two of the four functions of money: unit of account and medium of exchange. There are many technical possibilities to make these functions work and the aim of the current paper is to show those possibilities and the ways they have been categorized in the literature.