Chapter 10: Towards “Sustainable Democracy” and Common Prosperity Territories: The Legal Aspects of Central Bank Digital Currency and Its Roles in Economic Inequality Elimination

The world is marked by an extreme disparity of economic inequality, and the widening gulf of income and wealth distribution between the “rich” and the “poor” is one of the defining challenges of our time (Dabla-Norris et al., 2015). This chapter, set under the contemporary context of cascading disparities within social hierarchies and progressive innovations in financial sectors, outlines the roles of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in the elimination of economic inequality and probes three potential legal obstacles likely to be encountered during the implementation of CBDCs, by studying the correlations between the issuance of a CBDC and the reduction of economic inequality. This chapter, based on the welfare analyses on the socioeconomic manifestations of economic inequality and the roles of CBDC in the elimination of economic inequality, aims to promote common prosperity from the poorest to the people in high places, in order to construct a justified and legitimate economic system and to establish a free market welfare state, departing from poverty and inequality towards sustainable democratic states and common prosperity territories.