The buzz among economists is about how money systems are evolving into regional currencies, possibly even one global currency. Yet the more important change may be the emergence of highly localized currency systems -- alternative forms of money --that allow local people to operate independent of the official currencies. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, author of numerous books on future trends, is a political scientist and co-founder of Meridian Institute.

In the wake of the recent wave of currency crises that shook economies in Southeast Asia, Russia and Brazil, there has been much talk of how money systems are changing, and might change even more dramatically in the coming century. Some economists envision a single global currency. Others believe that the world is going to shake out into about three major currencies -- the dollar, the Euro, and a dominant Asian currency, either the Japanese Yen or the Chinese Yuan. But as these global visions are being expressed, many regions and communities are developing their own currency systems -- alternative forms of money.

There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them around the world: the Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) in several English-speaking countries, the Local Exchange Systems (SELS, for System d'echange local) in France, the Tlaloc in Mexico, and a system of health-care credits in Japan. They come in many different packages, but essentially they are all arrangements to make it easier for people in a region to exchange goods and services without depending entirely on the official currencies -- which may be in very short supply.

Local currencies are anything but new: People were inventing various methods of exchange long before there were any governments to mint or print money. In recent decades, they often emerged as responses to some kind of economic crisis. For example, in Germany after World War I, inflation grew so badly that postage stamps cost billions of marks. A coal mine owner came up with the idea of paying his workers in coal instead of money, and that evolved quickly into a form of scrip, tied to the value of coal, that became the stable local currency of the town of Schwanenkirchen and then in adjoining areas until the German central bank put a stop to it. Many other such local currency experiments have appeared all around the world with varying degrees of success and acceptance by government authorities. Several thousand of them were launched in the U. S. in the early years of the Great Depression, before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to prohibit local "emergency currencies" in favor of centralized responses to the economic crisis.

The oldest such system in the Western world is the WIR, a survivor from the Depression years and still thriving -- ironically, in Switzerland, a country whose banks become the home for so much official money from around the world. WIR is an abbreviation for Wirtschaftsring-Genossenschaft, which can be translated as "Economic Mutual Support Circle." Wir also happens to be the German world for "we." Over its 60-plus years the WIR system has at times been heavily criticized as radical and unrealistic, but it now enjoys a certain sturdy Swiss respectability, with official government recognition, six regional offices, and some 80,000 members.

These developments don't mean that the regions who adopt them are boycotting their national currencies, or even trying to isolate themselves from the global economy. Bernard Lietaer, a Belgian economist, calls them "complementary currencies." Many don't actually have any form of printed money but are merely central accounting systems to keep track of how much credit each member of the system possesses. And as Richard Key, a community activist who organized a LETS system in Coventry, England, put it in an online pamphlet, "the fact that the first LETS system started together with the availability of the cheap personal computer in 1983 is no coincidence."

There appears to be solid evidence that complementary currency systems can be effective in stimulating local initiative and cooperation, and in relieving the paralysis that often sets in when communities are hit by sudden economic setbacks such as a national currency collapse or a rise in unemployment. But beyond the practical considerations, there is a fierce idealism among many advocates, a conviction that the local currencies increase cooperation over competition, and increase sustainable development because the availability of people willing to do repair work encourages the reuse of goods rather than discarding them. Participants in the LETS system like to call their credits "green currencies."

Lietaer, who has made an extensive study of complementary currencies for a forthcoming book entitled "The Future of Money" believes that complementary currencies make both social sense and business sense, and are especially favorable in helping locally owned businesses compete against large chain distribution systems. "In this sense," he believes, "complementary currencies can also contribute to making the local economy more self-reliant, a modest but healthy counterweight to the relentless globalization of the economy."