Vivid Maps
What Types of People Does Each Country Celebrate on Their Currency?
A country’s banknotes and coins are almost a personality test for the country itself.
Nearly every country features a monarch or other national leader on at least some of their notes or coins. But many currencies celebrate other famous figures, from artists and athletes to social workers and spies.
So, NetCredit decided to count the faces on the world’s currencies to find the types of people each country chooses to represent on money – and even how much each celebrity type is worth.
Whose face would you put on a new banknote if the decision was yours?
Methodology
First, the NetCredit team built a list of all coins and notes currently in circulation around the world, using only currencies from countries that feature a person on the obverse or reverse side.
Then the team built them using these Wikipedia lists: people on banknotes and people on coins, excluding countries with only one coin or note that featured a person.
Later, the team researched the people on each banknote and assigned them an “honor” category (e.g., artist, monarch, politician) based on their role in society, allowing us to calculate the split of honors within each country’s currency.
To calculate the average value of honors across the world, NetCredit converted all currency into dollars and averaged the value of each currency for each honor.
The data was gathered in March 2022.
The types of people celebrated on the world’s currency
Money and power walk hand in hand. Over half of the faces on the world’s coin and banknote designs belong to monarchs or heads of government, making up 30.24% and 20.74%, respectively.
But there are other forms of power. Over 5% of the people on world currency are poets. In. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 88.89% of all ‘currency characters’ are poets – thanks to a rule that states local currency can only feature writers.
The types of people celebrated on the currency of 12 major countries
Queen Elizabeth II appears on one side of every piece of currency in England, Wales, and Australia and on all Canadian coins – so ‘monarchs’ account for nearly half of the faces on those countries’ currency. Northern Ireland shares the pound sterling with Britain, but no monarchs feature on Northern Irish notes or coins. Instead, four out of five faces are inventors and the fifth is the soccer legend George Best.
Just one U.S. coin features a monarch. Hawaii’s founder, King Kamehameha I, is on the rear of the Hawaiian quarter. Japanese money hasn’t featured the Imperial family since 1969 – today, authors occupy three of the seven banknotes to feature faces.
Who appears on the most currency?
Queen Elizabeth II leads monarchs to the front of 1/3 of the world’s currency, followed by Vajiralongkorn, King of Thailand.
The average monetary value of each type of person
Monarchs and world leaders appear more frequently than other people on world’s currency. But, since many of them appear on multiple denominations, the average value of their notes and coins is lower than that of historians, mathematicians, and singers.
There are six countries that feature historians, with Turkey’s Aydin Sayili on a note worth just U.S. $0.34. But historians have the highest currency value overall because of the presence of Jacob Burckhardt on the 1,000 Franc ($1,067.82) note – the second-most valuable note in the world.
Key Findings
- Over half of the faces on the world’s coin and banknote designs belong to monarchs or heads of government, making up 29.89% and 20.83% correspondingly.
- Over 5% of the people on world currency are poets. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, 88.89% of all ‘currency characters’ are poets – thanks to a rule that states local currency can only feature writers.
- Queen Elizabeth II appears on one side of every piece of currency in England, Wales, and Australia, and on all Canadian coins – so ‘monarchs’ account for nearly half of the faces on those countries’ currency.
- Historians have the highest currency value overall because of the presence of Jacob Burckhardt on the 1,000 Franc ($1,067.82) note–the second-most valuable note in the world
What Types of People Does Each Country Celebrate on Their Currency?
Alex
