The Bank of Ghana says it went through a thorough thinking process before arriving at the decision to introduce GH¢100, GH¢200 notes and GH¢2 coins.
The Central Bank said it consulted broadly and conducted a survey that indicated a demand for the higher denomination of banknotes.
“A lot of thinking went into the decision to introduce the higher denomination banknotes,” the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Ernest Addison said at a press conference on Friday.
“The structure of the banknotes should align well with the needs of the people who use it for their daily
transactions. We need banknotes and coins that are convenient for most people to use,” he added.
He said the introduction of the new denominations is an outcome of about two years of a probe into the state of the currency more than a decade after the re-denomination of the country’s currency in 2007.
“In March 2017, Bank of Ghana began a process of conducting a thorough review of the structure of the currency including the note, coin boundary, and acceptability and use of the individual currency series,” the BoG governor said, adding that the process involved a nationwide survey with market operators, businesses and “international stakeholders as well as some empirical exercise”.
Dr. Addison said the result of the consultations revealed that many people were concerned about “dead-weight burden issues on the economy due to significant inflation and perennial depreciation of the currency and the significant increase in the demand for higher denomination banknotes.”
He explained that the exercise to introduce new denominations is in line with international best practices where a periodic review of banknotes and coins are done to make sure that they are aligned with macroeconomic conditions and demand.
“International best practice requires them to review it at intervals of between 5 and 10 years,” he added.
