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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;PaddyB, post: 2507654, member: 40017&quot;]The US is probably the biggest coin collecting market in the world. Most of the next tier are Western or European nations including the UK, Germany and Australia and similar.</p><p><br /></p><p>I am sure many people will have views on why this is and I believe there is no single reason. Some of the factors:</p><p><br /></p><p>1. Wealth. Coin collecting requires disposable income, which for many parts of the world is restricted to only the most wealthy. I think many of us in the West do not begin to appreciate how poor much of the world is. (I am writing this watching a documentary on Bangladesh, which is probably why I have put this first!) Many people in this world cannot afford even to set aside the smallest coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>2. Longevity of the currency. In many parts of the world the whole basis of the currency has changed radically over the years for political or inflationary reasons. This leads to a lack of &quot;loyalty&quot; to the coinage. Even in the UK, which is one of the better coin collecting countries of the world, it is noticeable that the younger generations are mostly interested only in the decimal coinage (since 1971) and have little interest in the pre-decimal system.</p><p><br /></p><p>3. A sense of history. Coins and history are heavily intertwined - if the majority of the population have no interest or pride in their history they are less likely to be interested in their coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>4. Education. Closely linked to poverty and history - it takes a level of education to understand, identify and categorise coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>5. Culture. Coin collecting is in some ways a &quot;worship&quot; of the power of money, which is a typical aspect of western culture. In many other parts of the world religion or health and wellbeing take a higher priority.</p><p><br /></p><p>6. Design. The coinage of a country needs to be well designed to attract the interest of collectors. I believe it needs to be varied enough to be interesting but also to have sufficient consistency to be recognisably from the country it represents.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are probably more but I am distracted by the documentary![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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