Lessons from African Fintech for the Gig Economy

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to share my research on the past decade of mobile ecosystem development across the African continent with Dr. Antti Saarnio, founder of Zippie; co-founder of Jolla (developers of the Sailfish OS, among other things).

“We want to test our product first and foremost in Africa because there is an extensive and established informal economy,” he said.

That captured my attention immediately, since few think of the Africa’s vast “informal” commercial operating environment as a strength to be leveraged for competitive advantage, preferring to hope against hope that it will disappear into thin air to be replaced by the more familiar structures of the formal and organized sectors.

And, it got me thinking about the African fintech space, and the lessons it may hold for the rapidly proliferating gig economy in the ‘developed’ world. And, since at this point of time, all I know of Zippie, Dr. Saarnio’s latest venture, is that it’s a blockchain based mobile OS – not the kind of thing that you’d expect to be piloting in Africa – I asked him to elaborate on his thinking a little further.

Easy, he said. Not only does the informal economy dominate, with established norms and coping mechanisms, but its a mobile first and mobile only environment where people are already comfortable with the exchange of value in digital form, be it airtime or currency. People are already incentivized to think about boosting their productivity through newfangled digital tools on their smartphones. More often than not, the younger urban population is educated and tech-savvy, and in places like Kenya, ready to try something new.

I couldn’t argue with his assessment. In fact, I’d take it a step further, based on my own decade’s worth of research into the informal sector’s financial behaviour and cash flow management practices. The developed world economy is beginning to show signs of convergence, in pattern and in the types of challenges faced when attempting to manage in highly uncertain situations, on irregular and unpredictable income streams, often with the very same elements of seasonality – time of abundance and scarcity – as seen in rural Phillipines or India or Malawi.

For instance, Finnish farmers are being driven to use high interest payday loans to tide over the lean times because few other coping mechanisms exist in Finland’s highly formal commercial operating environment. Wedded to the land, they face the same challenges as a farmer in India, Kenya, or The Philippines. Yet no microfinance institutions catering to farmer needs would dream of showing up in rural Finland. Similarly, in the UK, lower income workers, dependant heavily on gig economy apps to generate revenue, can face significant differences in their cash flows from month to month, but again have no recourse but to use their credit cards or high interest payday loans to tide them over. The systems in their operating environment are designed for the past generations’ periodic and regular wages and paychecks, and cannot cope with the irregular cash flow patterns, as prevalent in the informal economy.

That is, the characteristics of the gig economy and the informal economy, when seen from the perspective of the end-user, are more or less the same. Ironically, however, those in the developing world have numerous solutions available to them – albeit informal, social, local – available to them to cope with shocks and volatility. These coping mechanisms have developed over decades (and centuries, in the case of India), hence the well known resilience of the local rural or informal economy.

As uncertainty increases globally, there are numerous lessons to be learnt from the mostly ignored informal economies of the developing countries which have provided incomes and employment for the vast majority of their populations, in times of conflict or peace, making sure that food reaches the urban table from the farms out in the countryside, regardless of the adequacy and availability of either systems or infrastructure. This is one situation where the formal economy’s inbuilt rigidity and dependence on predictability and periodicity are its embedded weak spot at a time when flexibility and negotiability are required to ride the shocks and volatility.

What happens when the informal economy is not criminalized? : Case of Hargeisa, Somaliland

In Hargeisa, the role of the informal economy during and after conflict has been vital to conflict prevention and peace-building.

A recently released report by Cardiff University and Somaliland research partners on their work related to the role of urban informal economies in conflict zones offers us perspective from another angle.

A little thin on insights and interpretation of their carefully gathered data, it nonetheless provides ample evidence of the value creation and economic contribution by informal sector actors in developing country contexts. In fact, I would say, it strengthens the argument for considering the informal economy as a commercial operating environment, to be taken seriously by policy makers and programme designers.

The report finds that “the IE (informal economy) became vital in replacing services and utilities destroyed by the war within Hargeisa city which both provided livelihood opportunities for the conflict-affected urban population and replaced key goods and services which had been disrupted by the conflict.”

And discovers that it was the informal economy’s acceptance by the local populace and government, characterized by extremely low levels of harassment or criminalization that was key to its ability to contribute as a trusted resource and asset during the rebuilding of society after the civil war.

In most cities in sub-Saharan Africa, urban policy marginalises the urban informal economy (IE) and IE workers are often victimised and harassed (Lyons et al., 2012). This is not the case in Hargeisa, where informal economy workers interviewed reported very low levels of police harassment, with less than 7% of the 168 current informal economy workers interviewed stating they had experienced problems with local authority. Furthermore, there are high levels of trust and reciprocation amongst informal economy workers and in society generally, and a lack of effective municipal regulation which enables and encourages the growth of the informal economy.

The report goes on to conclude with the recommendation that recognition of the informal economy (IE) had the potential to transform the developmental trajectory of both Hargeisa, as well as greater Somaliland:

Recommendation 1: Increase national legitimacy and recognition
• Recognition: It is essential that Hargeisa’s IE workers are recognised as legitimate economic actors making significant contributions to the national and city economy.
• National Informal Economy Policy: A cross-government National Informal Economy Policy should be developed, so that the key social and economic contribution of the IE is reflected in the five-year national economic development planning and other relevant government strategies.
• National Informal Economy Standing Committee: A high-level National Informal Economy Standing Committee should be set up, with a membership of about 10 people to include high-level representatives from: the Ministries Planning and Development (chair); Commerce and Trade; Labour, Employment and
Social Affairs, Hargeisa Municipality, and SONSAF, including 3-4 representatives of umbrella IE workers’ organisations. The Standing Committee should:
o Advise on development of the National Informal Economy Policy;
o Advise on inclusion of the IE in the Five Year National Economic Development Plan;
o Recommend inclusion of the IE in other relevant government strategies;
o Undertake sector-specific analyses of different IE sectors (needs and support);
o Identify ways to extend social protection to IE workers;
o Address negative impacts of the IE (e.g. from the qat or charcoal trade);
o Assess data needs for improving understanding of the IE (e.g. through labour force surveys).
o Address lack of IE access to credit and finance

According to the Somaliland Sun, these recommendations are being wholeheartedly adopted by the local government. One not only looks forward to the developments of this groundbreaking initiative but hopes that this shift in perspective and recognition of value creation diffuses outwards with impacts on informal economies everywhere.

NB: Here’s my brief TEDTalk video on this theme from TEDGlobal 2017

Pondering India’s Cashless Future

Chhotu here accepts digital currency payments via the mobile platform on a daily basis.

His QR code is prominently displayed upfront next to the bottles of sauce, and a sticker displays the icons of all the payment apps acceptable to his Bhim app.

The Bhim system, launched by the Government of India, is a godsend to micro businesses like Chhotu’s – it allows him to accept payments from a wide ranging variety of apps and systems with the use of just one QR code.

Mr. AutoRickshaWallah on the other hand, preferred to negotiate with me in cash, agreeing to an amount upfront, based on my destination than to go through the hassle of using his digital meter.

By law, he must accept digital payments, if asked by a customer. But, he says, this is very rare; he might accept a Paytm fare once a week. The balance is all in cash.

One size does not fit all

The need for cash in hand during the course of each of these service providers drives their payment acceptance behaviour. Chhotu may not need as much cash on hand once he has set up his inventory and supplies for the day, barring the need for change whereupon he can suggest the customer move to a digital option if required. Plus, at the end of his shift at 10pm he’s happier if the bulk of his sales is in digital form for safety and security.

Mr Autorickshawallah, on the other hand, feels the need for cash available to purchase fuel, food, and pay out wherever required for parking or other purposes (like the police!). He’s on the move and the signal may or may not work when the time comes for him to accept payment.

Digital adoption is unevenly distributed

Their customers are also from different demographics. Where Chhotu is set up, the market is full of young people with disposable income, out for the evening with their friends. Hearsay has it that mobile apps are selected and used based on their marketing incentives – most offer cashback on digital payments as a driver for user acquisition, but users have gotten clever and download them all so that they can take advantage of different promotions and offers to maximize their benefits.

Mr Autorickshawallah’s customers come from a wider range of demographics, and not as likely to be as comfortable juggling digital payments as Chhotu’s youthful crowd. He’s in his vehicle and on the move, and must ensure the payment gets made, unlike Chhotu who can take the risk of waiting since he and his stall aren’t going anywhere.

Is Cashless in India’s Future?

While digital payments, cards, and mobile apps were certainly far more visible than ever before, and definitely since the demonetization of two years ago, there is a very long way to go before cashless becomes as broadly accepted and mainstream as mPesa in Kenya. Unlike mPesa, the Indian digital currency ecosystem is linked intimately to bank accounts, and thus, there’s an entire ecosystem of services and goods providers that needs to shift over to the formal economy and its financial institutions before cashless becomes seamless at the borderlands of economic strata and demographics.

The current formal financial ecosystem is not designed to address the needs of the informal and unorganized sectors. And this is the iron that post demonetization analysis shows was not struck while it was hot enough to enable the broader change in culture and behaviour to stick once currency was back in circulation.

Lessons from the Informal Economy: Managing on Irregular Payments in the Gig Economy

Last week, an unusual report was released in Great Britain. Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), together with the Resolution Foundation, addressed the question of earnings volatility in the UK, a first for a developed country with a formal economy. Their research and analysis made use of anonymised transaction data from over seven million LBG accounts. That is, technically speaking, the financially included in the erstwhile first world.

To their surprise, accustomed as they were to only considering income changes on an annual basis, three-quarters of all workers did not receive the same paycheck from month to month – the problem being most acute for low-paid workers in the gig economy or on zero-hours contracts.

As the Guardian, when reporting on the household financial management behaviour of gig economy workers discovers:

The Resolution Foundation found that for those on the lowest annual incomes, the average monthly fluctuation in pay was £180 – which can make the difference between paying the rent or feeding the family.

As my research over the past decade, on the financial management behaviour of the lower income demographic (also known in older publications as the Bottom or Base of the Pyramid) in the informal and rural economies of developing countries has found, irregular and unpredictable cash flows from a variety of sources is the norm.

What is different here, however, are the coping mechanisms.

Many are forced to turn to crippling payday loans or high-cost credit cards to make it through to the end of the month

In the developed country context such as the UK, gig economy and lower income workers have no recourse to customary and established coping mechanisms that can be seen across the developed world, from rural Philippines to upcountry Kenya.

Seasonality in rural regions, closely intertwined with the natural year and its direct impact on farming activities is a recognized and known fact of life. Incomes are seen to change by as much as 50% between the high and the low seasons. And, among urban traders and merchants, festivals and harvests mean peak consumer activity, and everyone prepares for the rush.

Knowing this, the informal economic ecosystem leverages social networks and trusted relationships to carry them through hard times and the low seasons; looking forward to the peak sales periods and the harvests to cover the difference. Numerous risk mitigation behaviours and coping mechanisms are established within households, customized to rural and urban contexts, as well as the context of the primary income source. These were the same coping mechanisms heard to be in use among India’s informal sector when hit by the liquidity crunch of the demonetization of 2016.

Just the way you can purchase one single cigarette or a 100 grams of shredded cabbage, depending on what you have in your pocket, you can find ways to adapt your daily lifestyle to your income in the flexible, negotiable, and reciprocal people’s economy of the Global South. The informal economy’s commercial operating environment is designed to maintain the dignity of their customer base.

These options are not available in the UK, or other developed and advanced nations of the Global North. Thus, gig economy workers forced to manage on unpredictable and irregular income streams from a variety of sources in the formal economy struggle to afford their groceries and expenses. In fact, I’d be curious to know if prepaid mobile subscribers (pay as you go) are increasing in proportion to the precariousness of employment and volatility of income discovered by the analysts at Lloyds.

If, as the researchers at the Centre for Global Development have found, the gig economy and the informal economy are the present, and the future of work in Africa, then there are lessons from the established customs and coping mechanisms which can inform beneficial solutions and tools for the developed world, for the UK, and for the Global North.

It’s time we recognized the truth about the future of work in Africa: it isn’t in the growth of full-time formal sector jobs. The future of work will be people working multiple gigs with “somewhat formal” entities. This is already true, and it will be for the foreseeable future.

This is true for the whole world now, not just Africa. And, it will change the way we think of platform design, payment plans, as well as policy frameworks, for our near and emerging future.

Chinese investments in African tech will transform the fintech landscape

A recent article brought to my attention this report on the pattern of funding experienced by fintech startups in East Africa and India with rather damning results. 90 percent of the capital invested by “Silicon Valley-style” investors went to startups, technically in East Africa, with one or more North American or European founders.

These results put an entirely different spin on more recent articles on the rise of African fintech and the millions of dollars raised by startups in Africa. Village Capital, too, has been making an effort to promote their recommendations for structural change in the ecosystem in order to enable the emergence of hundreds more fintech and DFS (digital financial services) startups deemed necessary to transform the economic landscape in Africa.

But the challenge, as framed by this snippet from the report, will remain, as it “reflects deep cultural trends in American life”, of bias, stereotyping, and inbred prejudice. So called “first world” technology such as artificial intelligence is already dealing with the problem.

China’s interest in African tech, particularly trade related such as in commerce and payments, is being noticed

Simultaneously, and recently, I came across this op-ed for the WEF making the case for why the tech sector is China’s next big investment target in Africa.

Given China’s position as a leading and rapidly accelerating technological superpower in the world, making strides especially in the fields of logistics (smart cars, drones, e-commerce) and energy (solar panels, smart metering, etc), it makes sense that the most logical industry for the next stage of Sino-Africa collaboration is technology.

But that’s not fintechs and DFS startups, you say, comparing these apples to the Village Capital’s report on oranges?

Perhaps this is why Alibaba Group, the unparalleled pioneer of e-commerce and payments in China, has started to show an interest in Africa. Not only did they collaborate with UNCTAD on the eFounders programme to train over 100 African entrepreneurs in the next couple of years, they recently announced a fund of $10 million to invest on the continent over the next 10 years. Furthermore, Alibaba’s subsidiary Ant Financial has signed a partnership with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the IFC to promote digital financial inclusion. While these are preliminary steps, we are hopeful for more serious commercial involvement in Africa from a company with a $500 billion market cap.

DFS, DFI, what’s the difference between digital financial services for financial inclusion and digital financial inclusion? The target is clear. And been noticed from the other side, as this rival opinion piece in the Financial Times shows, albeit with a greater sense of urgency and panic in the tone and style. It may also explain why Village Capital woke up this week to trumpet the results of their analysis on funding patterns from over a year ago. From the FT:

The Trump administration has made a perceived global rivalry with China the centre of US foreign policy. This competitive stance has coloured the view of African countries in Washington and a tale of Chinese mercantilism in the region has come to dominate the narrative, under which China greedily demands privileged access to Africa’s natural resources in exchange for no-strings-attached infrastructure financing.

But that story is outdated and fails to capture an emergent area of true competition — that among US and Chinese tech giants.

Given what we’ve seen in the Village Capital report linked in the first paragraph, will Chinese funding patterns be any different? Two key factors are being highlighted by both sides:

Read On…

Rural Household Financial Management on Irregular Incomes

While all farms are not alike, and scale and variety and geography differs, the pattern of household financial management holds its fundamental logic across continents.

click to expand image

As we saw previously, an experienced farmer tends to fall somewhere in between a salaried employee and an odd job labourer in their ability to predict with any reasonable degree of accuracy when they might expect cash income to arrive and approximately how much. They are able to estimate the quantum of the crop, and when it will be ready to harvest. They may already have buyers or a market.

However, in practice, farmers rarely rely solely on these infrequent lump sums for managing their household finances – a big harvest once or twice a year, maybe three times depending on the crops and the local geography. Instead, they manage on sophisticated portfolio of investments, each maturing over different periods of time, as a way to mitigate risk, as well as smoothen out cash flows over the course of the natural year, and minimize the impact of uncertainty or shock. The drivers for these goals are the foundation for the variety of business practices observed across sectors in the informal economies of the developing world.

You will find even the humblest farmer, as long as he owns the patch of land on which his homestead is built, even if his fields may be further away, doing some or all of a combination of these activities to manage his income stream over the course of the natural year. I will explain the basics, and then give examples from different regions.

Managing A Portfolio of Investments based on “Time and Money”

The illustration above captures our attempt to map the various cash flow patterns from the farmer’s portfolio of investments. Consider each cluster of elements as a “deposit” with varying times of maturity for cashing out, as the need may be. For example, cows give milk which can be sold for almost daily cash returns, as can the eggs from chickens. The fresh produce from the kitchen garden matures far more quickly than staples such as maize or beans. And, if there is a cash crop such as tea or coffee, this may taken an entire year for the harvest to be monetized. At the same time, various farmyard animals are invested into when young, maturing over time for sale, as an emergency cushion or for earmarked expenses such as annual school fees.

Thus, over the course of the year, cash arrives in hand with varying degrees of frequency, and periodicity, thus ensuring the farm’s ability to manage regular household expenditure on a more or less regular basis, even though there are no predictable wages. Nor, is the farmer burdened with credit and debt over the time whilst waiting for her 2 or 3 major harvest seasons.

Variance in regional seasonality influences coping mechanisms

While the foundational framework of the farmstead’s domestic financial managment remains the same, regional differences due to geography, and thus seasonality, influence crop choices, number of harvests, and the details of the coping mechanisms selected by the farmer to manage her financial portfolio.

For instance, in rural Philippines, in the rice growing Visayas islands, only well situated farms benefit from three rain fed rice harvests a year whilst the majority must manage on two. Thus, farmers invest in piglets, calves, or even cull chicks for nurturing into fighting cockerels which sell for more than 10 times the price of a regular chicken. They stock firewood, coconut husk, and supplement their cash money needs through petty retail during the low season.

In rural Malawi, outside of Blantyre, the farmwife who is a member of beekeeper’s cooperative, distills traditional wine for sales 2 to 3 times a week, boosting her cash flow frequency instead of waiting for the annual honey harvest.

Minimizing volatility to enable financial planning

Thus, we can see that even under conditions of uncertainty, farmers have established the means to manage their household expenses, including periodic ones such as school fees or loan repayments, on irregular and unpredictable cash flows from a variety of sources. Their sophisticated portfolio of investments contain “deposits” that mature over varying times, for different amounts, and their planning, thus, goes into ensuring that the volatility between income and outgoing expenses is kept to a minimum.

Next, we will see how less agriculturally dependent sectors of the informal economy base their financial management patterns on the rural economy’s foundation of portfolio management.

Collected Works
Work in Progress: An Introduction to the Informal Economy’s Commercial Environment – Links to organized series of articles on the topic

Primer on African Fintech: Myths, Misconceptions, Opportunities, Hotspots and Roadblocks

As we prepare to start work for our third African fintech client, I thought it was time to quickly and briefly introduce the opportunity space and clear up some misunderstandings around fintech in Africa.

The first point is the common confusion between Fintech and financial inclusion. Investopedia’s definition of Fintech says financial inclusion, that is, affordable and accessible financial services to the underserved and unbanked is only one of the many areas fintech is actively addressing. While technology helps provide cheaper solutions for emerging markets such as those on the African continent, all fintech cannot be said to be equivalent to financial inclusion.
This leads us to a clarification on what exactly is Fintech. I prefer to quote Investopedia since the entry in Wikipedia defines it as the industry itself. “Fintech is a portmanteau of financial technology that describes an emerging financial services sector in the 21st century. Originally, the term applied to technology applied to the back-end of established consumer and trade financial institutions. Since the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the term has expanded to include any technological innovation in the financial sector, including innovations in financial literacy and education, retail banking, investment and even crypto-currencies.“
Thus, while financial inclusion is a key untapped opportunity space for fintech innovation of all kinds, there are numerous other opportunities along the entire value chain of financial service provision both B2B and B2C, including intermediary services, which are ripe for disruption in the African context.
Beyond the conventional preference for disruption of the existing context, there are as many if not more opportunities for meeting the unmet needs of African businesses and consumers. History, geography, economics and conventional wisdom have together combined to create a vacuum of solutions and services that address the unique circumstances of the African operating environment which still tends to be heavily cash dependent and is described commonly as “informal”. And this commercial environment has lagged in custom designed tools and services for small business productivity or household enterprise management.
Hotspots: Kenya overwhelming leads in mindshare as the leading fintech innovation market on the continent, and grabs the lion’s share of investments in East Africa. However, the GSMA’s latest report implies West Africa is rapidly catching up, and may outspend East Africa. The WAEMU region is a hidden hotspot, and Ghana leads the anglophone countries.
The largest market opportunity, by population, remains a challenge however, for a variety of reasons including policy and regulation. Nigeria’s payments innovators have made a name for themselves but their domestic market has not felt the impact of their efforts. Even mobile money, introduced more than 5 years ago, has only achieved 1% penetration. On the other hand, it took India years and years before digital payments reached visibly transformational critical mass. There’s hope.
Lastly, Chinese investment has just entered the African fintech space, talking up financial inclusion – a clear sign of its economic importance for the future development of trade and industry.

The African Informal Sector: GDP Contribution vs Scale of Human Impact

The informal economy in sub Saharan Africa (SSA) tends to be measured as a share of GDP, counting its contribution to the national economy. By this metric, Nigeria has the most economically empowered informal sector, contributing over 60% to the GDP. On the other extreme, South Africa, has one of the smallest contributions to the GDP from the informal sector, but the highest unemployment rate.

Yet both Nigeria and South Africa are neck to neck when it comes to the title of “largest economy on the African continent”, or place in the top 3. So what does this tell us about these IMF metrics being used to measure the informal sector?

The human impact story is missing from the equations

South Africa might have one of the smallest informal sectors in terms of contribution to their GDP, but the number of people generating their income from the informal sector is almost as large as Tanzania, whose informal sector contribution is more than double, second only to Nigeria.

WIEGO’s research, from which the above employment figures are drawn, highlights the social impact and scale of the informal sector in human terms. Already, the informal sector’s employment opportunities are growing faster than the much smaller formal sectors in most major African economies. New graduates and working age adults still need to find a way to put food on the table.

Its not enough to simply look at GDP contribution when it comes to the complex value embedded (and untapped) in the informal economies of these nations. Where social safety nets are scarce, and systems variable in their functioning, the human and social impact of the informal cannot be ignored in development planning and policy design.

Why the African Consumer Market is NOT the same as the African Middle Class

Consumer goods store, Kilgoris, Kenya (March 2012)

The biggest challenge faced by consumer facing companies looking at the African Consumer Market is the age old positioning of the “middle class” as the ideal target audience. This middle class is segmented by the same attributes as the original middle classes who formed the consumer markets of the developed world.

This is the outside of the same store. Its located in a town called Kilgoris, situated at the edge of densely populated Kisii in western Kenya, and the sparse land of the nomadic Maasai pastoralists.

When you consider the range, the variety, and the price of the products displayed for sale, and compare it to the small dusty town with just one modern building, you wouldn’t imagine that solar panels worth USD 200 or Sony Bravia flatscreen TVs would be selling like hotcakes. But they do.

No dealer in a heavily cash based consumer market such as upcountry Kenya would tie up his working capital in expensive consumer electronics if there wasn’t a demand for it that meant the products sold quickly enough to keep the cash flowing in. My assumptions were completely upturned by this shopkeeper’s insights – it was the Maasai making purchases after attending the weekly livestock market.

A maasai manyatta Source: https://bushsnobinafrica.wordpress.com/tag/maasai-mara-game-reserve/

They’d pack 6 foot long solar panels, flat screen TVs, and satellite dishes onto the tops of hired trucks and take them off to their thornbush and mud manyattas. Yet neither you nor I would classify them by any of the traditional marketing department’s attributes as being part of the “middle class” consumer segment.

On the other hand, they were undeniably part of the African consumer market, and as the shopkeeper informed us, they were not only willing to spend on their homes, regardless of what they looked like from the outside, they could afford the best that he had to offer. He showed us his entire stock of kitchen appliances, water filters, jugs, mugs, and even children’s toys and fake flowers from Dubai! It is dealers like this who know best what their customers want and they range as far away as Nairobi to obtain the products in demand.

But I wonder if the marketers and the analysts still seeking the middle class have a clue about this huge market invisible to their eyes? And, whether, they’re looking in the right places?

Trading economics: a new theoretical system

From the Financial Times, a snippet from a guest post by Wang Zhenying, director-general of the research and statistics department at the PBoC’s Shanghai head office and vice chairman of the Shanghai Financial Studies Association, summarising the arguments in his new Chinese-language textbook on economics.

“Trading economics” is one new theory emerging against this backdrop. Mainstream economics deduces the macro whole by extrapolating from the behavior of individual “representative agents”. Trading economics replaces this with a systematic and comprehensive analysis approach. It stresses that in an interconnected world, the interaction between trading subjects is the fundamental driving force behind the operation, development, and evolution of economic systems.

Trading economics first analyses the actions of trading subjects, then builds a dynamic trading network among trading subjects through trading relations, and finally reveals the operational rules of the economic system. The rules could be examined from two perspectives: short-term and long-term. The business cycle and price changes are examined in the short-term perspective. The long-term perspective would focus on the rules of economic evolution as well as changes in technology, knowledge, system, and network.

Throughout the history of economics, trading economics is the first and foremost theory to incorporate all economic phenomena into an all-encompassing logical system. It changes the long-standing scenario in the economics field, that is, the macro was separated from the micro, and the short-term from the long-term. Trading economics is a revolution of mainstream economic theories and is bound to exert a great and profound impact on all areas, including economic theoretical research and practical application.

NB: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this summary and expect to contextualize future research with some of the theoretical frameworks as presented here.