Fair trade
[Dave Birch] I’ve been thinking some more about the competition between cash and electronic payments. Leo Van Hove from the Free University of Brussels has been a good friend of the Digital Money Forum for many years. He made a presentation at the 7th Forum talking about the state of the e-purse in Europe, and made the point that in many ways the purse faces unfair competition from cash, because cash is cross-subsidised. If customers who wanted to use cash were made to pay the full price for it (setting aside the obvious social concern that the poor would see their transaction costs rise), then the electronic alternatives would become more attractive.
