Get rid of pennies please! (and any coin worth less than 0.10 USD/GBP/EUR)

Greg Mankiw mentions a USA Today article by Don Campbell that explains why keeping pennies (US$ 0.01) in circulation is not worthwhile:

• The cost of producing the one penny is greater than $0.01. Making 1 cent costs 1.26 cents.
• Handling pennies makes each cash transaction slower (2.5 seconds). And time is money of course.

The same argument applies also for pound sterling pennies and eurocents.

I find the existance of eurocents particularly irritating. $0.01 and £0.01 coins have always been around for a long time and it’s certainly difficlut to remove them from circulation because people are so used to them.

I can’t think of a sane reason for introducing the €0.01 coin in 2002. Finland and the Netherlands showed to be more sane than the other contries and do not produce €0.01 and €0.02 coins, although they are oblged to accept coins brought in from other countries.

Business Daily on food subsidies

BBC Business Daily on 20 May explains why food subsity and the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are madness.

Listen to the podcast.