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in an economy broadly consistent with production capacity; in other words, to guide the ship of state between the Scylla of rampant inflation and the Charybdis of prolonged recession. If electronic money can be expected to have any impact at all on the effectiveness of policy, it will be through its influence on the linkages between central-bank decisions and private-market spending. Analysis suggests that eventual outcomes will be closer to the spirit of the predictions by Kobrin and Friedman than to the sanguine view expressed by Helleiner and others.

I begin in the first section with a basic primer on the essential characteristics of electronic money: what it is, how it operates, and what it is likely to look like in the future. The next section then provides some needed historical perspective, briefly reviewing the longer-term evolution of currency systems and norms of monetary management. The rise of electronic money, it is clear, is no anomaly in historical terms and indeed may be regarded as an entirely natural development in the context of today's rapidly globalizing world economy. The main discussion comes in the third section, where I examine the mechanics of how monetary policy works under alternative conditions of currency availability. Analysis suggests that the challenge of e-money differs significantly depending on what countries we are talking about. In the many economies around the world where central bankers are already experiencing increased difficulty in controlling monetary aggregates, owing to accelerating cross-border competition among currencies, the main impact of electronic money will be simply to add to the intensity of that competition. By contrast, in the traditional reserve centers - the United States, "Euroland" (home of the new euro), and Japan - the threat to state power appears distinctly greater and will demand real adjustments by policymakers. 

I. A Basic Primer  基本入门

Electronic money is an idea whose time, it seems, is about to come. Around the globe, entrepreneurs and institutions are racing to develop effective means of payment for the expanding realm of e-commerce. The aim is to create units of purchasing power that are fully usable and transferable electronically: "virtual" money that can be employed as easily as conventional currencies to acquire real goods and services. Soon all of us will have little choice but to learn what electronic money is and how it operates. (5)
What is it?
Electronic money (also variously labeled digital currency, computer money, or e-cash) presently comes in two basic forms, smart cards and network money. Both are based on encrypted strings of digits - information coded into series of zeros and ones -- that can be transmitted and processed electronically. Smart cards, a technological descendant of the ubiquitous credit card, have an embedded microprocessor (a chip) that is loaded with a monetary value. Versions of the smart card (or "electronic purse") range from simple debit cards, which are typically usable only for a single purpose and may require online authorization for value transfer, to more sophisticated stored-value devices that are reloadable, can be used for multiple purposes, and are off-line capable. Network money (6) stores value in computer hard drives and consists of diverse software products that allow the t本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。