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Interesting developments in currency denomination structures

Antti Heinonen explores recent changes in currency structures and the reasons behind them

Pile of euro coins on top of banknotes

Historically, most issuing authorities regularly made inflation corrections to the currency structure. New higher denomination notes were introduced, and simultaneously low-end notes were replaced with coins.

In the 1980s, Payne and Morgan1 studied a number of currencies and observed that the transition point between coins and notes was between D/50 and D/20, while the highest denomination was 5D, where D was the average day’s pay. Their study was not based on any theory but the result of their

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