بسته شدن فضا و توسعه اقتصادی محلی:ما از سیستم ارزی محلی ارژانتین چه چیزی را یاد میگیریم؟

This paper discusses local currency systems as an instrument of selective spatial closure to mitigate impacts of externally induced changes and to promote endogenous local economic development. Drawing on data collected in Argentina, it was found that local currency systems provided relatively protected economic spaces, thus enabling poor households—and especially women—to launch micro-enterprises and diversify income sources. They also supported existing enterprises by offering an emergency market outlet and, when combined with other measures, by building local trading and production networks. Following recent theory on local economic development, the Argentine case represents an example of local economic regeneration.

After almost two centuries of national monopolies over the issuance of money and central banking, numerous communities and localities around the world are now issuing their own means of payment to re-organize their local exchanges.1 The phenomenon is often termed monetary localism (Blanc, 2002) or local monetary networks (North, 2006) and refers to the adoption of own means of payment at the local level to adapt the accepted national monetary system or construct an ad hoc one (Blanc, 2002).2 In this research it is referred to as local currency system (LCS) and represents an attempt of localities to re-claim control over their economies and sometimes an alternative development path (Pacione, 1999 and Seyfang, 2001b). LCS resonates with “selective spatial closure,” which in the late seventies and early eighties was put forward by Walter Stohr and Franz Todtling as a reaction against prevailing dominant trends and regional development policies toward large-scale functional integration (Stohr, 1981 and Stohr and Todtling, 1978). Globalization in the current neo-liberal era, in effect, increases the intensity and frequency of exogenously induced changes and reduces even more the ability of local regional groups to resist and/or to act endogenously. Reclaiming local control becomes all the more important. Stohr and Todtling did not consider local currency systems as an instrument to achieve selective spatial closure. But at first glance it has such an effect: by introducing and promoting the use of a local currency, import leakages are reduced, and idle resources are (re)deployed (Blanc, 2002, Blanc, 2006 and Williams, 1997). This link has not been sufficiently explored, mainly because the small scale of most LCSs worldwide makes their impact barely marginal in terms of local economic development (LED) (Aldridge, Leyshon, & Williams, 2001).

A local currency system is a means by which communities seek to re-claim local control over their economies. Very often, as in the case of Argentina, an LCS is a response to mitigate the negative effects of externally induced economic shocks. This paper has discussed the LED effects of local currency systems as a deliberate attempt to generate “selective spatial closure,” a countervailing regional policy proposal of the late seventies. As said, an important difference is that it was then seen as a countervailing public policy, while LCS is undertaken now by non-state actors—notably NGOs—that push state actors to a secondary role or to none at all. It is self-selective in the sense that agents chose voluntarily to participate in it, making LCS an instrument virtually impossible to implement through a top-down public policy. In order to examine the effects of LCS in terms of local economic development, we draw on own recent analytical work (Helmsing, 2003, Helmsing, 2006 and Helmsing and Egziabher, 2005). Local economic development was defined as a multi-actor process by which local actors (public, private, and from civil society) manage existing resources to create jobs and stimulate the economy of a well-defined territory. It emphasizes local control using the potentials of available human, institutional, and physical resources. A distinction was made between three different types of initiatives, according to their effects. First, community economic development focuses on households and seeks to facilitate the diversification of economic activity as the principal way to improve livelihood and reduce vulnerability. The second is enterprise development which is premised on specialization and overcoming access barriers to markets. A number of enterprise development policies apply differentially to SMEs. The third is locality development which refers to the overall planning and management of economic, institutional, and physical development of an area.