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Cashing out: digital payments and resilience post-demonetization

Published: 04 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We explore how different segments of the population in India coped, in terms of business transactions, with the sudden decision of the government to stop accepting certain legal tender bills, popularly referred to as demonetization. The decision to demonetize was followed by a large-scale push for adoption of digital payments. Behavioral changes during such shocks do have specific nuances different from those during normal times. Using the concept of resilience, we examine the drivers of behavior change that differentiated those that were able to make the switch compared to those that weren't. Those technologically more adept were more resilient to the shock, in terms of being able to navigate through new means of exchange. Also, rural poor showed greater resilience than urban poor, a function of the level of homogeneity in those societies with respect to technology adoption and the ability to cope without changing cash practices. We also found that those who had bank accounts and relied largely on those accounts for daily transactions, without being aware of alternate modes, were impacted the most. From a policy perspective this research cautions against unintended consequences of purely access-driven incentives to behavior change, advocating instead a holistic approach.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)An Evaluation of Cashless Transactions During Pre- & Post-Demonetization Era in IndiaDigital and Sustainable Transformations in a Post-COVID World10.1007/978-3-031-16677-8_7(211-230)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Digital Payment and Economic Growth: Evidence from IndiaApplied Economics Quarterly10.3790/aeq.2022.141830168:2(79-93)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Does Demonetisation in India Achieve its Objectives?Economic and Regional Studies / Studia Ekonomiczne i Regionalne10.2478/ers-2022-002315:3(336-350)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICTD '19: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
January 2019
422 pages
ISBN:9781450361224
DOI:10.1145/3287098
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 04 January 2019

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Author Tags

  1. behavior change
  2. cash livelihoods
  3. crisis
  4. demonetization
  5. digital cash
  6. digital refugees
  7. resilience
  8. subjective well being
  9. systemic shocks
  10. technology adoption

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ICTD '19

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Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 116 submissions, 19%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)An Evaluation of Cashless Transactions During Pre- & Post-Demonetization Era in IndiaDigital and Sustainable Transformations in a Post-COVID World10.1007/978-3-031-16677-8_7(211-230)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Digital Payment and Economic Growth: Evidence from IndiaApplied Economics Quarterly10.3790/aeq.2022.141830168:2(79-93)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Does Demonetisation in India Achieve its Objectives?Economic and Regional Studies / Studia Ekonomiczne i Regionalne10.2478/ers-2022-002315:3(336-350)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2022
  • (2019)Cash, Digital Payments and AccessibilityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33591993:CSCW(1-23)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
  • (2019)Studying the discourse on economic policies in India using mass media, social media, and the parliamentary question hour dataProceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3314344.3332489(234-247)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2019
  • (2019)Present and future of the use and impact of information and communication technology in informal microenterprises: Insights from IndiaTHE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES10.1002/isd2.1209185:3Online publication date: 30-Apr-2019

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