The geoeconomics of Central Banks Digital Currencies (CBDCs): the case of the European Central Bank (ECB)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it