ScripNYC: Sustainable Financing for Humanitarian Emergencies

11 Pages Posted: 7 Jan 2025 Last revised: 2 Feb 2025

Date Written: September 29, 2024

Abstract

Reclaiming value from some forms of waste through scrip issuance can reduce New York City’s budget demands by billions of dollars. User adoption and system efficiency are significantly enhanced by leveraging the existing OMNY or Metrocard systems. Limiting range of function distinguishes scrip from national money, while a pre-programmed rate of decay disincentivizes hoarding and non-productive use. Incentivizing dual-currency transactions, in which buyers and sellers use both scrip and legal tender within a single transaction, would likely result in limited deflation — lower dollar-denominated prices for goods and services — in the scrip-use region, without corresponding decreases in consumption. Fees collected from decaying scrip can sustain the ongoing maintenance of the system and, with broad usage, may even finance a commensurate expansion of humanitarian spending.

Keywords: scrip, humanitarian, dual-currency, blockchain, New York, deflation, migrant

Suggested Citation

Song, James, ScripNYC: Sustainable Financing for Humanitarian Emergencies (September 29, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5057370 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5057370

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