Faculty Research Fellow Jim Stodder Consults on Barcelona’s New Electronic “Social Currency”

Jim Stodder, a Visiting Professor in BU’s Metropolitan College and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently worked as a consultant on the Rec, a newly launched electronic “social currency” sponsored by the European Union and the City Council of Barcelona.

Barcelona’s Rec (Real Economy Currency) is a type of social or local currency complementary to the euro, which allows transactions between individuals, institutions, and businesses that accept it. Families in ten of the poorest neighborhoods in the city will receive 25 percent of their social stipend in the form of Rec, which is intended to favor local businesses while making it easier for money to remain in the area and help develop the local economy. Rec in circulation are now valued at 1.5 million euros, making it the largest social currency backed by a municipal government.

In the planning efforts for the Rec last year, its organizers brought Stodder to Barcelona as a consultant to discuss lessons learned from a large and well-established social currency, the Swiss WIR. The WIR was founded in 1934, and is now accepted by tens of thousands of Swiss firms. Stodder’s extensive empirical research on the WIR from 2009 and 2016 show that it has been highly counter-cyclical, helping Swiss businesses through downturns.

As a Faculty Research Fellow at the Pardee Center, Stodder is leading a project that aims to explore new approaches to modeling carbon prices, and to bring together scholars working on economic and climate models to look at energy markets, macroeconomic stability, climate projections, and geopolitics. During the first two years of the project, he will focus on publishing in academic journals, which will lay the groundwork for an international conference on carbon pricing in 2020.