Transaction Economies Research Articles

Street Vendors Using Smartphones for Digital Payments: A Qualitative Study of Digital Opportunities and Inequalities From Kashmir Region in India

There are around 4.9 million street vendors in India, a large part of the country’s informal sector workforce. Linked to India’s focus on digital economy and promotion of digital transactions, there is growing popularity of mobile payment (m-payment) applications or m-wallets such as PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, Bhim, and so on. This is also the case with street vendors, and the sight of a street vendor with a QR barcode for accepting payments is not uncommon. How do street vendors make sense of smartphone-based transactions in their lives? In qualitative interviews with street vendors in Srinagar city in Kashmir region in India, a complex picture emerged. Street vendors were mostly illiterate or had limited education, but were quickly adopting m-payments. For online transactions, QR barcode stickers were mostly displayed on carts of street vendors in Kashmir. However, at the same time, vendors had little or no understanding of these m-payment apps. They had limited language skills and had to take help of literate friends or family members to check transactions or to get over difficulties in operation. The use of these m-payment apps or m-wallet smartphone applications introduced new opportunities associated with digital payments. However, gaps in digital skills are pronounced, and remained a major challenge for the street vendors. During the course of fieldwork in Srinagar (2022–2023), we also observed that m-payment companies introduced technological solutions such as speaker-based instant audio confirmations for payments such as Paytm Soundbox and PhonePe Smartspeaker. This is indicative of the continuous tracking of the informal sector usage by such companies, and clearly they are aware and receptive of such gaps. However, market-linked technological solutions only address operational gaps, and do not address the underlying causes, including illiteracy, and knowledge or skill gaps. Such observations can be helpful in planning and implementation of government policies for street vendors in India.

THE DYNAMICS OF CASHLESS SOCIETY: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

The cashless society is a collective vision of global citizens to create a faster, more flexible, automated payment system. This study aims to formulate findings on publications from 2012-2022, focusing on a cashless society. Using the Systematic Literature Review approach, this study uses sources from the Scopus database to identify common understanding, supporting factors, and challenges of a cashless society from the views of researchers. This study found that forming a cashless society is a solution to efforts to grow the economy and speed of transactions in society. Another benefit is preventing corruption, levies, and fraud where electronic payments made on record have suppressed this crime. However, the dark side of a cashless society is the potential invasion of privacy and paralysis of the economic system caused by the failure of the internet system.

Base Money

Abstract This article discusses how US military payment certificates (MPC) escaped from US military bases during the Korean War to become common currency in local economies. The MPC program was intended to control the mixing of US currency in local economies, yet the worldwide use of MPC on all overseas US bases between 1946 and 1973 facilitated black market circulation of military notes globally by allowing trading differentials among dollars, MPC, and local currencies. As soldiers, goods, and money moved through the US base network across Korea and Japan during the war, MPC were commonly used as a medium of exchange for sexual transactions between US soldiers and local women in both countries. The cross-border sexual markets were central to the everyday economies of Korea and Japan, of which black markets trading US Army supplies and currencies were major components. An analysis of this off-base monetization process of MPC offers a new perspective on the global history of war and occupation by highlighting how the sexual economy of illicit and informal transactions has been integral to US military expansion abroad since the end of World War II.

Viability of compensating employees in cryptocurrency – An exploratory study

Cryptocurrency is an emerging digital currency that revolutionized the transactional economy. It was valued at $2.2 trillion in April 2021, suggesting the widespread acceptance and usage of the currency. It penetrated numerous sectors including entertainment, infrastructure, healthcare, public sector, agriculture, financial services, travel, retail and information services. Recently these sectors started the practice of compensating employees in cryptocurrency (coins/tokens). This research explored the viability of compensating employees in crypto, across various components of compensation structure. This qualitative informative-exploratory research used the principles from the PRISMA model to screen 8,621 scholarly publications and reviewed 26 research publications and 23 companies using crypto for compensating employees. Content analysis and thematic analysis were conducted to report the findings. This research found that multinational organisations prefer to compensate global employees in crypto because of several advantages including ease of transfer, encrypted features, integration of blockchain technology, tax benefits, cost-saving and gain from crypto investments. Limiting factors such as the bartering nature of crypto, high volatility, tax regulations, limited investment avenues, resistance from employees and the market and concerns over its legality posed some doubts on its viability as a mode of payment. This study is of value to compensation and benefits experts, human resources professionals, finance professionals, scholars, and organisations who are interested in evolving technologies adding value to employees and businesses. This research added a new piece of knowledge concerning paying employees in crypto-currency that remained understudied until now.

Neoliberal Transactions: Staging Prostitution in the Mexican Nation

This essay explores the theatricalization of neoliberal violence in two Mexican plays, Las Chicas del 3.5 Floppies by LEGOM and Sin/con/Fianza by H. Iván Arizmendi Galeno. These two remarkable works delve into the lives of sex workers in unnamed Mexican border towns to stage the intimacy and pervasiveness of a transactional economy and index the incorporation of violence into the body itself as a space of referentiality. More specifically, they use the aesthetics of parody to expose the gendered dyad of (female) prostitute and (male) narco that symbolize the "new" neoliberal Mexican nation. Through a sustained transgression of social and gender norms, the plays critique a neoliberal national imaginary that conceives of the body solely in transactional terms. Las Chicas del 3.5 Floppies and Sin/con/Fianza therefore advance the conversation regarding neoliberalism and performance by delving directly into the invisible forms of damage that are carried out in the name of a market-driven economy, and how that damage plays out upon the most vulnerable of bodies.

The Ethics of Financial Incentivization for Health Research Participation Among Sex Workers in a Canadian Context

Research incentivization with sex workers is common, yet limited guidance exists for ethical incentives practice. We undertook a critical qualitative inquiry into how researchers (n = 17), community services staff (n = 17), and sex workers participating in research (n = 53) perceive incentives in a Canadian context. We employed an interpretive thematic approach informed by critical perspectives of relational autonomy for analysis. Four themes illustrate how (un)ethical use of incentives is situated in transactional micro-economies among groups experiencing severe marginalization: i) transactional research economy, ii) incentive type: assumptions and effects, iii) incentive amount: too much too little?, and iv) resistance, trauma, and research-related harm. Paternalistic assumptions about capacities of sex workers to act in their own best interests conflicted with participants' rights and abilities for self-determination; with researchers maintaining ultimate decision-making authority. Power differentials create conditions of harm. Safe, equitable approaches concerning research incentive use must redress relations of power that perpetuate oppression.

Foreign ownership and corporate risk-taking: Panel threshold evidence from a transactional economy

This article scrutinizes the influence of foreign ownership on corporate risk-taking for 461 listed companies in Vietnam between 2012 and 2016. A regression method is employed for assessing whether a threshold influences foreign ownership interests. The findings show that foreign investment promotes corporate risk-taking up to a certain point; once past this threshold, there is little significant influence on foreign investment. The findings imply that a minimum level of foreign ownership is needed in order to have a significant effect on corporate risk-taking in Vietnam.

Does firm performance withstand the test of time? New evidence from a transactional economy

ABSTRACT Few studies have examined how the age of a firm can influence its economic performance over time. This study fills that gap by examining this issue from a large and unique sample of Vietnamese listed companies. Overall, we find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between firm age and firm performance (an initially negative effect of firm age on firm performance before the positive returns of firm age are realised). Our main findings are consistent with the liability of the ‘market newness’ hypothesis.

The Impact of Tourism on Economic Growth: A Panel Co-integration from the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP)

This article aims to examine the impact of tourism on economic growth, a panel co-integration from a community of Portuguese-speaking countries (CPLP). Being one of the leading sectors for economic development for most of the transaction economies, which helps bring down the unemployment rate, bring more foreign currency into the local economy, etc. Therefore, tourism is indispensable for GDP growth for any country; Thus, most of the leaders want to design the best policies as possible to boost this sector. So, the CPLP countries are not left behind when coming to an incentive more and more tourism. This work employs a Fully modified ordinary least squared (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squared (DOLS) and a co-integration technique to test whether there’s a long-term association between expenditure on tourism and growth from 2000 to 2016. The FMOLS and DOLS outcomes show that travelers’ spending exerts a great influence on development for these nations and it causes the long-running association between tourism to growth, which provides that tourism exerts a positive influence on GDP. We conclude this article with some policy recommendations.

110th Anniversary: Using Data to Bridge the Time and Length Scales of Process Systems

In this paper, we review the role of data as a “bridge” connecting the different time/length scales of chemical processes in mathematical modeling and multiscale, integrated decision making. We argue that this is a fitting role of “big data” in the chemical industry, an area that comprises complicated yet deterministic physical systems. Such systems can be described using physical and chemical laws that are generally well understood. As such, data and their analysis are less likely to provide the unexpected and/or surprising insights that they have generated in other sectors (e.g., the transactional economy, social sciences). Nevertheless, historical operating data (which are often plentiful and available at little cost) can be converted to very useful information for multiscale mathematical modeling of chemical processes. Several examples of integration are provided, mapped on the continuum of time and length scales of process systems. Existing research challenges and potential directions for future work...

A great leap of faith: The cashless agenda in Digital India

This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetization and an advancing ‘cashless agenda’ around the world, I situate Narendra Modi’s Digital India programme as the putative foundation for a transactional economy. Drawing upon ethnographic studies exploring the everyday experience of India’s year of living digitally, this article raises the critical question of who must, or indeed can, bear the transaction costs of this digital utopia. In conclusion, I argue that the rapid expansion of digital money situates these concerns at the heart of social and cultural, as much as economic, analysis.

The wealth of ecosystems: How invisible hands «organism autonomy, biodiversity, connectivity» mold biological and environmental fitness in the economy of nature

Adam Smith’s classic, The Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776), laid down the foundations for free-market, and later growth, economics. Goals, resources, currencies, labor, and skills in human enterprise all have parallels in the economy of nature:▪Self-interested people have counterparts in survival-driven species;▪Opportunities and markets are reflected in resource and habitat niches;▪Division of labor is expressed in role niches and biodiversity;▪Persistence of economic growth is matched in that of biological growth;▪Growth in money-flow mirrors matter- and energy-flow in ecosystems;▪Capital accumulation as monetary profit in economics is expressed as the standing stocks of natural capital in ecology; and finally,▪Smith’s invisible hand, generating “greatest goods for the greatest many”, finds specificity in the utility theory and mathematics of ecology’s network environ analysis.These parallels, and the fact that man is a part of nature also, suggest the same laws direct both ecology and economics. This paper summarizes the Janus Hypothesis (Patten, 2016) as a candidate theory determining natural (and human) economics. The hypothesis holds that three relational “ABC”s—autonomy, biodiversity, and connectivity—self-organize to maximize biological and environmental fitness in the transactional economy of nature. Applicability to human economics is axiomatic.

Virtual exchange-based mobilities: platform economy, exchange and culture

The development of a platform economy is generating new ways of virtual exchange-based mobilities. This economy is based on the use of digital media by networked individuals, the Internet of Things and digital platforms. The characteristics of the platform economy are informed by new imaginations of mobility that are shaped by dynamic circuits of data and connectivity as well as economic and cultural desires to find new ways to distribute and use resources. Access to – and distribution of – goods and services are digitally enabled and are encountered virtually via platforms that materialize in economic and social activities. The platform economy is a new feature of mobility in that it connects and mobilizes products, services, people and data in virtually enabled exchange relationships. This paper addresses digital platforms and networked individuals as they combine to create different experiences of exchange that include transaction-based practices as well as sharing arrangements. A feature of the platform environment is its ethos of “exchange within mobility”, which materializes in two main ways: (a) as an economy of transactions and (b) as a culture of sharing. The rise of virtual exchange-based mobilities is crafted out of the social relations of digital platforms as they interact with cultures of social life and digitized imaginations, which is resulting in various types of exchange relationships.

Family firms in the Arab world: culture influences on socioemotional wealth

The Arab world is an area of growing economic significance, resulting in dynamic developing and transaction economies. In such a scenario, family firms are predominant and the backbone of the system. Due to the overlapping of the business and family logics, family firms differ from the traditional businesses, especially in terms of goal-setting and strategies. The aim of this paper is to contextualise the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective in the light of specific influences that the cultural embeddedness of the Arab culture asserts. For this purpose, 15 semi-structured interviews with Jordanian family businesses have been carried out. Through a coding analysis, four main cultural elements in the behavioural dynamics of Arab family businesses emerged: 1) favouritism and nepotism; 2) patriarchal approach; 3) public persona; 4) self-serving bias. We related all these cultural influences to the dimension of SEW to obtain a stratified framework which may help in understating family firms beyond traditional economic contexts.

Does corporate governance influence firm performance? Quantile regression evidence from a transactional economy

ABSTRACTThis study examines the impact of corporate governance structures on firm performance using a unique sample of 478 non-financial companies listed on the two main Vietnamese stock exchanges. Given the contrasting existing empirical results, we adopt the method of quantile regression (QR) and report some robust and significant negative relationship between board independence/Chief Executive Officer duality and firm performance. These findings seem rather corroborate the agency theory. Furthermore, the use of QR may be more insightful than estimating the mean effect of the response variable.

Succesfull International Negotiations

Abstract Today’s concept of economic globalization is predicated and centered around a sustainable development various economic systems which focus on their ability to achieve the best possible results today without jeopardizing the ability of national economies to meet their needs in the future. Beginning with the fact that globalization has become a pre-requisite for most companies today, regardless of its size or scope of operations, I will, in this paper talk about the theoretical issues that surround globalization of an economy, different types and stages of international transactions and the business communications that go on within these internationalization stages.

Migrant infrastructure: Transaction economies in Birmingham and Leicester, UK

Infrastructure convenes social relations, thereby revealing how city dwellers access shared resources in the context of growing inequality. Our exploration of migrant infrastructure engages with how highly variegated migrant groups develop a ‘transaction economy’ (Simone, 2004) within marginalised city streets, exchanging goods and services, and information and care. In the context of ethnically diverse and deprived urban places, where state resources are increasingly diminished, we explore how a precarious yet skilled resourcefulness emerges through the street. Our empirical exploration of migrant infrastructure is located on Rookery Road in Birmingham and on Narborough Road in Leicester, and draws on qualitative surveys with 195 self-employed proprietors from many countries of origin. The streets reveal transaction economies that intersect local and migratory resources, eluding the categorisation of cities associated with either a global North or a global South. Further, the lively nature of street transactions decentres western-centric measures of economic value. From the street, we develop a postcolonial analysis of infrastructure that relates properties of historic depth (power), socio-spatial texture (materiality) and locality (place).

Organizational boundaries of medical practice: the case of physician ownership of ancillary services.

Physician ownership of in-office ancillary services (IOASs) has come under increasing scrutiny. Advocates of argue that IOASs allow physicians to supervise the quality and coordination of care. Critics have argued that IOASs create financial incentives for physicians to increase ancillary service volume. In this paper we develop a conceptual framework to evaluate the tradeoffs associated with physician ownership of IOASs. There is some evidence supporting the existence of scope and transaction economies in IOASs. Improvement in flow and continuity of care are likely to generate scope economies and improvements in quality monitoring and reductions in consumer transaction costs are likely to generate transaction economies. Other factors include the capture of upstream and downstream profits, but these incentives are likely to be small compared to scope and transaction economies. Policy debates on the merits of IOASs should include an explicit assessment of these tradeoffs.This research was supported in part by funding from the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

From reproductive work to regenerative labour

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity.

Thuyul Stories: Notes on the Moral and Political Economy of Transactions with the Spirit World in Java Centre

À partir d’enquêtes de terrain menées dans la ville de Jogjakarta (Java Centre) de 1997 à 2001, au plus fort de la crise politique et économique indonésienne, cet article revient sur les usages politiques concrets de certains motifs de croyance. Les histoires de thuyul et de « Singe Blanc » recueillies dans le quartier de Karangkajen permettent d’entrevoir la manière dont certains acteurs sociaux mobilisent la référence au « monde invisible » pour mettre en accusation des notables arrogants et disqualifier des styles de vie jugés incompatibles avec l’ordonnancement rituel de la sociabilité intra‑communautaire. Les thuyul sont de petits esprits chapar­deurs qui, sur ordre d’un propriétaire mal intentionné, dérobent de l’argent dans les maisonnées du voisinage : ce sont des créatures liées aux soucis de fortune, dont la mention permet de mettre en dispute, plus ou moins publi­quement, les inégalités supposées de richesse entre habitants d’un même village ou d’un même quartier. Le « Singe Blanc » est une créature maléfi­que qui apporte la richesse à son commanditaire en échange du sang ou de l’esprit de victimes désignées : les récits qui l’évoquent, et qui appartien­nent à des cycles populaires javanais englobants, permettent l’énonciation d’un jugement moral sur les modes « illégitimes » d’accumulation. De façon générale, l’accusation de recours aux magies (maléfiques) d’enrichissement (pasugihan), qui se solde fréquemment par l’ostracisation et le lynchage, provoque la mise en débat des critères de la bienséance sociale, et donc de l’appartenance à l’espace « ordonné » de la vie collec­tive.