Time Bank Mechanism Design:A New Monetarist Approach

China has fully entered an aging society,which caused a series of social and economic problems need to be solved urgently.Premier Li Keqiang pointed out in the2018 Government Work Report that China should actively respond to the problems related to the aging of the population and develop home,community and mutual assistance for the elderly.An exploration model of the time bank mutual assistance pension model has been supported and widely practiced by government departments at all levels.However,there are shortcomings in the feasibility and operability of the time bank,especially in the convertibility of storage time,transaction credit,mutual aid service pricing and incentive mechanism,etc.There are logical problems,and it is difficult for time bank to operate effectively as a matching system for mutual aid service exchange.Although the study of time banks covers many disciplines such as demography,sociology,psychology,public administration,etc.,the core problem of time banks —— how to effectively organize the production and trading of community pension services —— is an economic problem in essence,and one of the root causes of the dysfunction of time banks lies in the lack of research on microeconomic logic,so we must bring the question of why time banks are possible and why they can be brought to the scope of economic research.This is of great practical significance for the effective operation of the mutual assistance pension model of China’s time bank.This is also the main content of this article.We adopt the method of mechanism design,combining the current situation of family elderly-care in China,to describe an economic environment by specifying preferences,technologies,and frictions,including imperfect commitment and monitoring.We then examined incentive-feasible and efficient outcomes,and tried to interpret these in terms of arrangements observed in actual Time Bank practice.It’s showed that some families play the role of Time Bank: they accept human resources as a deposit,they have a superior human resources storage technology,and their liabilities raise the quantity of production and trade in term of elderly care service resources.Time bank system is essential for a set of superior feasible allocations.We established a mechanism by which the Time Coin can circulate and a good outcome can be implemented.We also discussed the conditions under which a family can be endogenously transformed into a Time Bank,and under which parameter conditions a Time Bank can be Pareto essential.Finally,we use the method of theoretical analysis,combined with monetary history and philosophical data,to try to answer the question of how the "time coin" – and thus the "time bank system" – can be implemented,that is,"how can it be".This study is in line with the methodological spirit of "new monetarism" approach.