This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which existing world views and economic systems give rise to particular ways of representing money. But this highly relativistic conclusion is qualified once we shift the focus from money to the system of exchange as a whole. One rather general pattern that then begins to emerge is of two separate but related transactional orders, the majority of systems making some ideological space for relatively impersonal, competitive and individual acquisitive activity. This implies that even in a non-monetary economy these features are likely to exist within a certain sphere of activity, and that it is therefore misleading to attribute them to money. By so doing, a contrast within cultures is turned into a contrast between cultures, thereby reinforcing the notion that money itself has the power to transform the nature of social relationships.

''In summary, the book is valuable as a textbook both at the advanced undergraduate level and at the graduate level. It is also very useful for the economist who wants to be brought up-to-date on theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate behaviour.'' ""Journal of International Economics""

Discusses economic issues associated with exchange rates, commodity prices, the economic size of countries and alternatives to PPP exchange rates.

Young people, hardest hit by the global economic downturn, are speaking out and demanding change. F&D looks at the need to urgently address the challenges facing youth and create opportunities for them. Harvard professor David Bloom lays out the scope of the problem and emphasizes the importance of listening to young people in "Youth in the Balance." "Making the Grade" looks at how to teach today's young people what they need to get jobs. IMF Deputy Managing Director, Nemat Shafik shares her take on the social and economic consequences of youth unemployment in our "Straight Talk" column. "Scarred Generation" looks at the effects the global economic crisis had on young workers in advanced economies, and we hear directly from young people across the globe in "Voices of Youth." Renminbi's rise, financial system regulation, and boosting GDP by empowering women. Also in the magazine, we examine the rise of the Chinese currency, look at the role of the credit rating agencies, discuss how to boost the empowerment of women, and present our primer on macroprudential regulation, seen as increasingly important to financial stability. People in economics - C. Fred Bergsten, American Globalist. Back to basics - The multi-dimensional role of banks in our financial systems.

A study of the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade.

The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but the socially-recognized capacity to make one's words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another person something and expect to be believed, and what we learn from others in this way is the basis for most of what we take ourselves to know about the world. In The Exchange of Words, Richard Moran provides a philosophical exploration of human testimony as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. The book brings together themes from literature, philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this fundamental human phenomenon. The account developed here starts from the difference between what may be revealed in one's speech (like a regional accent) and what we explicitly claim and make ourselves answerable for. Some prominent themes include: the meaning of sincerity in speech, the nature of mutuality and how it differs from 'mind-reading', the interplay between the first-person and the second-person perspectives in conversation, and the nature of the speech act of telling and related illocutions as developed by philosophers such as J. L. Austin and Paul Grice. Everyday dialogue is the locus of a kind of intersubjective understanding that is distinctive of the transmission of reasons in human testimony, and The Exchange of Words is an original and integrated account of this basic way of being informative to and in touch with one another.