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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander.

The Canadian Mint has stopped distributing its smallest coin, the one cent piece,

because it was costing more to make than it's actually worth.

In homage, we're devoting this week's episode to small change.

From the penny in the US and Britain, the Euro cent in Europe,

to the Uzbek Tien and the Burmese Pia.

In the United States, at the moment, there's a fierce debate about whether the cent,

known as the penny and about the same value as the Canadian cent,

should be got rid of too.

Jeff Gore is the president of Citizens to Retire the US penny.

We invited him on to the More or Less podium to make the case for scrapping the penny.

I think that it's valuable to start by just asking what's the point of currency to begin with.

And that's to facilitate cash transactions.

What you want to be able to do is go to the store and give them some coins and get something in return.

Now, it used to be that the penny could serve that purpose because it was worth something,

but that's just no longer the case.

Now, despite the fact that the penny is not serving any useful purpose,

it actually does have real costs.

And the most obvious of these is that it now costs more than a penny to make a penny.

...