Central bank digital currencies: An introduction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2037-3643/19526Keywords:
central bank digital currency, retail CBDC, money, monetary sovereignty, heterodox monetary theory, international monetary orderAbstract
The proliferation of new forms of digital money, from cryptocurrencies and stablecoins to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), has called into question established categories in monetary thought and returned the old question of what money is to the centre of debate. This note introduces a special issue on CBDCs from a perspective that treats money as a social and political creation rather than a neutral technical device. Its focus is on retail CBDCs, that is, public digital money accessible to households and firms, as distinct from their wholesale counterparts. The note reconstructs some of the main theoretical issues in the debate on money and situates the discussion against the backdrop of an international monetary order that is visibly in flux, before introducing three contributions on the United States, the BRICS and Pakistan.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Wesley Marshall, Louis-Philippe Rochon, Jacopo Temperini
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
