Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Coming up, economies and how they can flourish in even the toughest of circumstances.

Prisons, refugee camps, disaster zones, and all of these places,

I found a hidden, self-built, organic economy.

Yep, we hear from an author who's taken economics to the edge

and to an ex-offender about the weird politics of trade in a US jail.

The person who's selling a cigarette may say,

hey, you know, instead of giving me cash,

you need to go to the canteen and get me three cans of fish.

That's all from Business Daily on the BBC.

When we attempt to understand anything, a new brand of car, a machine, even a hybrid material maybe,

the usual way that we test its capabilities is to take it to the extreme, to see what it is

and isn't capable of. Should we be doing the same with economics, I wonder? Most of the study of

money is about what average people do in typical situations, but do people behave and adapt

when they're outside of their comfort zones in extreme situations.

Richard Davies is an economist based at the London School of Economics.

He's also the author of a new book, Extreme Economies,

in which he's looked at a range of offbeat human situations from which he's made some fairly remarkable discoveries about economic behaviour.

Well, we thought so anyway. See what you think.

He spoke to me first about Zatari.

It's a UN refugee camp in northern Jordan, which he visited.

It was set up a few years ago in the wake of the war in Syria.

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