The barter system is an economic institution in which goods and services are exchanged directly for other goods and services without the use of money as an intermediary, requiring what economists call a double coincidence of wants between trading parties. Barter has served as a foundational form of exchange in societies without a common medium of currency, and continues in specific modern contexts such as countertrade between businesses or nations, informal community exchange networks, and emergency exchange during currency collapse. Anthropologists have debated how central pure barter actually was to early human economies, since many documented traditional societies relied more heavily on gift exchange, redistribution or credit arrangements than on direct barter.
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