CELLPHONE MINUTES AS MONEY.

CELLPHONE MINUTES AS MONEY. Meyer Burstein began MONEY with the sentence: “Money belongs to the class of things performing monetary functions.” The Sarah Corbett article describes how Ugandans are using prepaid cellphone minutes to transfer money to places where there are no banks. (I posted here on the importance of remittances to poor countries.) A worker in a developed country will purchase a phone card and provide the code to the village phone lady, who will provide money to the worker’s mother minus a commission. She, of course, can then sell the minutes on the phone card to another customer. Companies in South Africa and the Philippines are doing the same kind of thing, which will “bring huge numbers of excluded people into the formal economy quickly.”