Cash is alive and well.
This was the major finding David S. Evans, Karen Webster, Gloria Knapp Colgan and Scott R. Murray uncovered in a new white paper “Paying with Cash: A Multi-Country Analysis of the Past and Future of the Use of Cash for Payments by Consumers.”
Released in June by Boston-based consulting firm Market Platform Dynamics, the full 59-page white paper examined a range of complex economic data in its quest to determine how consumer cash use will change through 2022.
One metric they evaluated in their findings was cash-spending as a share of personal consumption.
The authors invented the methodology behind cash-spending share to showcase how total consumer cash use is influenced by payment alternatives and gross domestic product (GDP). The result, they say, is a dynamic picture of cash use, one that yields a more accurate portrait of how changes in the economy and competition among payment methods influence the share of payments that are made with cash.
As the basis for their projections, the authors analyzed historical cash-spending share rates from 10 markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Poland, Germany and Italy, from 2000 to 2011.
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The following graphic illustrates this metric in vivid detail, and gives you the controls to see new insights into how cash-spending share changed in these markets throughout the decade.
Here, you can see how in the year 2000, Turkey had the largest cash-spending share, while Spain had the smallest. By 2011, cash use in Spain had surged, while Sweden became the country least inclined to use cash for payments.
Hover your cursor over 2009 to examine how cash-spending share was affected in all countries after the financial crisis, pause at 2011 to evaluate the latest data on global cash-spending share or press play to observe the changes in this metric from 2000 to 2011.
The data is yours to explore in this PYMNTS.com Data Point.
*In cases where there was no data available for a specific year, the previous year’s cash-spending share was used as a placeholder.
However, cash-spending share is just the beginning of the story. Using this metric as part of their foundation, the authors extrapolated the findings to uncover new answers about how the payments industry will change through 2022.
For these insights, download the full report here.
