Comment on Alternative Monies and the Demand for Media of Exchange
Professors Santomero and Seater have put considerable energy into building and analyzing a carefully crafted mathematical model with a narrow microbanking focus. They explore the representative consumer's willingness to substitute electronic money (which they portray as plastic-based "smart cards" with no nontransactional informational processing or communications usages) for paper-based "traditional money." Their model concerns itself only with what we could call pocket money and "pocket electronic platforms." The question I wish to explore in my remarks is where can we go from here: How can this first-cut model be made to cast more light on the problem of persuading households to dive deeply into electronic banking?
INFLUENCIA DE LAS TARJETAS DE DEBITO SOBRE LA DEMANDA DE EFECTIVO
Within by the electronic money definition, the plastics have a significant place, both the debit cards and the new option, even in the experimental stage known as the electronic purse or prepayment. The advanced technological changes, especially the incor
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo