Estonian professor offers to refuse cash

Professor of Macroeconomics Raul Eamets spoke at the TEDxTartu conference at the University of Tartu on November 20, 2010, whose speech was dedicated to an interesting idea: the full transition to cashless payments in order to stimulate the development of the economy, IT infrastructure and the banking sector. Such a step will also strengthen the image of Estonia as one of the IT leaders in the eyes of the world community.

The article presents the main theses (Est. Iz., Automatic translation ) and video presentations.

During the speech, the professor conducted a mini-survey among those present and it turned out that every third person in his pocket has less than one euro in cash, while 100% have plastic cards.

Estonians are still very actively using cashless payments. For example, in retail in Estonia, about 60-70% of payments are made in non-cash form (for comparison, in Russia - 3.8% , in Belarus - 7.3% ).

At the same time, there are convincing calculations that the transition to cashless payments “automatically” increases the country's GDP, that is, plastic cards are useful for the economy on their own, because they provide complete transparency of all payments and reduce the share of the gray economy.

Professor Emets believes that it is convenient to refuse cash right now, since on January 1, 2011 Estonia will officially make the full transition to the euro.

However, even if cash is completely banned, loopholes for financial fraud will still remain. For example, if you want to lend your friend a large amount of money secretly from the tax office, you can buy several grams of gold and transfer it to him. Well, a law-abiding person will simply transfer money to a friend by bank payment, benefiting both the banking and IT infrastructure, and the entire economy as a whole.

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