The geoeconomics of Central Banks Digital Currencies (CBDCs): the case of the European Central Bank (ECB)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital transformations and the expansion of digital finance have elicited intense debates on what ought to be the role of central banks as issuers of digital currencies (CBDCs). We ask why the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Union (EU) central bank, has taken a starring role in the introduction of a retail CBDC: the digital euro. We offer an explanation rooted in geoeconomics: the ECB has decided to be a ‘paladin’ of the digital euro to safeguard the ‘monetary sovereignty’ of the euro area and protect the ‘strategic autonomy’ of its retail payment system. As the rivalry of great powers intensifies, the ECB worries about the issuing of private digital currencies by (mostly, non-EU) private actors as well as the dominance of non-EU companies in retail payments. Currencies and payments are important public goods that can be weaponised. This explanation contributes to the emerging literature on central banks as geoeconomic actors and teases out the implications of this development for the ‘traditional’ mandate of central banks and their core tasks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".