Israeli New Shekel Currency

Introduction

Shekel is among the oldest units of currencies in the world. ‘Shekel’ is the word derived from the word "she" referring to barley in Akkadian language. Basically, it referred to specific barley quantity and later on as a money term. Shekel is the currency and its plural version as shekels. Israel is using shekel as currency unit at present.

The currency catering the Israel state is known as Israeli new shekel and this is divisible into 100 parts as ‘agora’. In 1985, Israeli new shekel replaced old 1000 shekels to 1 new shekel.

This currency is abbreviated as NIS and the ISO regulation country code is ILS and 376 is the numeric code.

Overview

Israel is one of the highly developed economies in the Middle East industrially and financially. The prime concern is the high inflation rate that it has been battling over a long period of time and has switched to new currency, Israeli new shekels in 1985. In 2003, it was made fully convertible currency.

The Israeli shekel value is dependent on international factors such as US interest rates. The US dollar relation with the new shekel is consistent. As such there are no restrictions on the exports and imports of any currency.

Structure

The Israeli currency in 1999 was the latest with 7 denominations as coinage and 4 denominations paper currency. The central bank is performs the functions since 1954.

The banknotes are in 4 values 20, 50, 100 and 200 shekalim, whereas earlier even smaller denominations such as 1, 5 and 10 shekalims had printed bank notes. However, all the bank notes are identical in size, but vary in color patterns and helps in easy identification.

The green color is for 20 NIS, violet is 50 NIS, brown is 100 NIS and red is 200 NIS note. The front side has important people images relating to the Israel history and the reverse has symbolic images of events and places of importance.

The current Israeli New Shekel denomination coinage is in face values 5, 10, 50 agarot, 1 shekel and also in 2, 5 and 10 shekelims.

Israeli coinage basic feature is that the coins have dates as per the Hebrew calendar and the reverse sides have the date of issue and respective values. The front side is the Israel state emblem with symbolic images.