-->>What is the relevance of the Japanese experience for the rest of the world? Japan is not
>dealing with a “Japanese crisis” as is typically described in the Western media, but rather
>with a structural world crisis that chronologically happens to have first hit Japan. In other
>words, the over-hyped “Information Age” or “Knowledge Age” also has as underbelly
>the “end of the Industrial Age”. The opening of China - which is now sucking in the bulk
>of the new investments in plant and equipment in Asia - has simply accelerated and made
>obvious a trend that was unavoidable anyway. The last time that a shift of such a
>magnitude occurred was when the Industrial Age precipitated the end of the Agrarian
>Age. Such shifts are not painless: remember what happened to the farmers when the
>agrarian age was ending; or the landed gentry that saw their values, power and traditions
>fade into irrelevancy.
>International Journal of Community Currency Research. Vol.8, pp.1-23
>22
>If this interpretation is valid, then the rest of the “industrialized world” better take notice.
>Europe has been expecting to re-launch its economy for a decade, without much success:
>unemployment there is stubbornly stuck at its highest level in the post-war period. The
>classical European recipe has been to do “a little more like the US” and hope that
>everything will return into normal gear. But after the US itself has seen the bursting of its
>own high tech bubble, those hopes look rather vain. Slowly Europeans are nowadays
>waking up that what happened in Japan may also happen in Germany and other parts of
>Europe. The specter of deflation - a systemic sign of overcapacity across the board - is
>now for the first time considered a serious possibility outside of Japanviii.
>We can expect the US to follow a similar path of denial particularly in an election year,
>repeating the mantra that the Japanese have heard for fourteen years: “next year, the
>economy will be back to normal.” It is under this light that what is going on in Japan in
>the domain of complementary currencies is relevant for the rest of the world. The second
>largest economy of the world has turned itself into a real-life laboratory for resolving a
>variety of economic and social problems from the bottom up, thanks to monetary
>innovations. Can the rest of the world afford not to learn from those experiments?

<ul> ~ Regionalwährungen</ul>