Overview

Every day in your country, $100m of potential economic activity doesn’t happen. It is made up of small, complex, transactions such as: an hour’s window cleaning, an afternoon's bicycle hire between individuals, local deliveries of hired goods, 90 minutes work in a suddenly busy café, personalised services for tourists or lending of very small sums of money.

These micro resources fall into 4 categories:

There is demand for these resources. Bringing them to market could make many sectors in the economy more efficient, competitive and responsive. For example:

So why are these informal transactions barely happening? Because they are so cumbersome, risky and overhead laden to arrange. Try this test: Set out to rent a video game console from a local person just for this afternoon. After the gaming, arrange a home haircut. Then get a babysitter so you can go out for a meal. After that, find a few hour’s late evening work to fund everything you've just bought.

Assume you just want to sort all this out as quickly as you would buy a book on Amazon. It’s not going to happen. Even with many thousands of rental sites on offer, there is no one deep marketplace that can effortlessly handle requirements like this.

You don't have the markets you need. Some people do. Marketplaces have evolved beyond recognition in the last 30 years. But only for institutions at the top of the economy.

A trader in one of the global banks now buys and sells in ways that were inconceivable a few years ago. His marketplace will (a) automatically identify profitable trades (b) execute instantly even with new counterparties (c) report constantly on new opportunities. It's all so convenient, safe and low overhead.

And at the bottom of the economy? Craigslist, Gumtree, Monster and countless other sites in which we can trade our resources are little more than classified adverts. Trying to book a babysitter this evening? There are thousands of online markets and countless individual listings. How many people are you going to message before giving up?

Could we give ordinary citizens the trading opportunities Wall Street now takes for granted? Yes, but it will require new technologies and a specific legal framework for e-markets. Here's why:

The web is currently very good at helping us sell items. eBay has been doing that since 1994. But, the key unrealised assets most of us have to sell are based on periods of time. We sell our own time to employers. Most of us have possessions that could be hired out at times when we don't need them.

Time-based markets are many times more complicated than auction sites. They need to factor in hour-by-hour availability, contactability, reliability, dynamic pricing and legal compliance. Time-based markets are also hard to launch: they need a Big Bang to get to a large pool of users quickly. All this is expensive.

On top of this, complex time-based markets require supporting facilities. These include: regulation, verification processes, settlement mechanisms, sophisticated pump priming (the early stage buying that delivers critical mass) and ways to raise awareness among potential users.

Global banks control these facilities in their sector. They moved fast to focus these levers on new marketplaces for their mutual benefit. That released the investment required for launch. At the bottom of the economy, the comparable facilities are controlled by governments. No government has yet focused them on delivering state-of-the-art marketplaces for citizens.

Imagine a system of marketplaces, perhaps called NEMs (National e-Markets). They would be structured around small, local, time-based trades. Official bodies and public sector buying would underpin activity. In return, there would be exacting public service obligations imposed on operators. Transparency of operation, privacy and low charges might be mandated.

Government would not design, fund, build or operate NEMs. It simply creates the legal framework that incentivises the private sector to deliver everything required. There’s nothing radical about this model of using policy to create new systems for the public. It’s how countries create National Lotteries.

E-markets are potent. Social networking, micro-blogging and phone apps make the headlines. But the power of online technology to deliver economic change is in the transformative marketplaces it now makes possible. Of course, many of the poorest don't use computers. So budgets for increased Internet access and community training initiatives would have to be another public service obligation for NEMs' operators.

Most of us have little idea of what a Modern Marketplace can do. The 2008 Financial Crisis offered  a few clues. Those trillions in assets flying round the world every day obviously weren’t being traded by people ploughing through classified listings. New markets have transformed the financial sector.

How might that sort of impact translate to lower levels of the economy? All sorts of new resources released into the economy. Daily opportunities for legitimate economic activity across thousands of sectors for individuals. New models for public services. Opportunities to profitably invest in up-skilling local people. Perhaps a parallel currency to get transactions going. Sounds far fetched? That’s what Wall Street traditionalists were saying about projections for computerised marketplaces in the 1980's.

This site will take you through the argument for NEMs style markets. It lists some of the thousands of sectors which would be covered and the type of technologies required to release them. We will show why some emerging technologies have always required a legal framework to deliver their benefits to the public.

NEMs would not involve any constraints on alternative marketplaces. It would simply be one more choice available online. But it would be very different.

• Technology for NEMs