In the foreign exchange market and international finance, a world currency or global currency refers to a currency in which the vast majority of international transactions take place and which serves as the world's primary reserve urrency. In March 2009, as a result of the global economic crisis, China and Russia have pressed for urgent consideration of a global currency and a UN panel has proposed greatly expanding the IMF's SDRs or Special Drawing Rights.

Currencies have many forms depending on several properties: type of issuance, type of issuer and type of backing. The particular configuration of those properties leads to different types of money. The pros and cons of a currency are strongly influenced by the type proposed. Consider, for example, the properties of a complementary currency.

The World Flag was created to raise global awareness of the common challenges facing the world today. As a unifying, global symbol the World Flag inspires action and support for the people and organizations pursuing the most cutting edge solutions available.

Created in 1988 by Paul Carroll, the World Flag is a powerful global image meant to resonate with the people of the world. The design of the World Flag has in the center an image of the world surrounded by 216 flags. They include every national flag, the flag of the United Nations and some flags of territories dependent in one way or other on larger countries. Because of their inherent symbolic, nationalistic, and subconscious power, individual flags offered inherent possibilities for Carroll’s vision. He wrote, “Moving individual flags into the global realm—transcending borders, race, and religions—creates unique impact from micro to macro and back.” He anticipated a quote from the New Scientist, 5 December 2007: “The power of symbols to both inspire and unite people finds it’s most relevant and meaningful perfection in the national flags and banners of the world.”

The measurement of time is so critical to the functioning of modern societies that it is coordinated at an international level. The basis for scientific time is a continuous count of seconds based on atomic clocks around the world, known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Other scientific time standards include Terrestrial Time and Barycentric Dynamical Time.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is an older standard, adopted starting with British railroads in 1847. Using telescopes instead of atomic clocks, GMT was calibrated to the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the UK. Universal Time (UT) is the modern term for the international telescope-based system, adopted to replace "Greenwich Mean Time" in 1928 by the International Astronomical Union. Observations at the Greenwich Observatory itself ceased in 1954, though the location is still used as the basis for the coordinate system. Because the rotational period of Earth is not perfectly constant, the duration of a second would vary if calibrated to a telescope-based standard like GMT or UT - in which a second was defined as a fraction of a day or year. The terms "GMT" and "Greenwich Mean Time" are sometimes used informally to refer to UT or UTC.

Inventions get out into the world in different ways. Some are sold, licensed or given away as products or services. Simply exhibiting visual art, playing music or having a performance gets many artistic inventions out into the world. Believing in the success of an invention can involve risk, so it can be difficult to obtain support and funding. Grants, inventor associations, clubs and business incubators can provide the mentoring, skills and resources some inventors need. Success at getting an invention out into the world often requires passion for it and good entrepreneural skills.

In economic theory, inventions are one of the chief examples of "positive externalities," a beneficial side-effect that falls on those outside a transaction or activity. One of the central concepts of economics is that externalities should be internalized - unless some of the benefits of this positive externality can be captured by the parties, the parties will be under-rewarded for their inventions, and systematic under-rewarding will lead to under-investment in activities that lead to inventions. The patent system captures those positive externalities for the inventor or other patent owner, so that the economy as a whole will invest a more-closely-optimum amount of resources in the process of invention.