Is the Modern Economy Heading Toward a Cashless and Checkless One? Evidence from the Payments System in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent innovations in the payments technology have resulted in considerable replacement of cash payments by non-cash ones, and of paper-based payment instruments by electronic ones. Do these innovations mean that the modern economy is heading toward one without currency and checks? This paper uses Canadian data from 1983 to 2001 to find answer to this question. It relies on Gompertz and logistic S-curve growth analyses to model the future replacement of cash payments by non-cash ones and of paper-based payment instruments by electronic ones and predict the saturation levels. Under current technology, while card payments will continue to further substitute for cash at the Point of Sale (POS), their share in total retail payments will saturate at around less than 40%. By comparison, the predicted satiation level for the replacement of checks by electronic payments is about 80%. Hence, under the current technologies, Canada will almost do away with checks, but will continue to use currency to a substantial extent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".