El Salvador 25 Centavos 1943-44: INCREASE in silver content from earlier issues?

The other day, when I was adding an El Salvador 25 centavos 1944 coin to my collection

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I noticed that the Numista bullion value for this coin is $7.35 USD.

El Salvador had an earlier 20th century issue of 25 centavos coins between 1911 and 1914. For example:

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Those coins were smaller in size (and had a slightly lower silver purity) and Numista indicates their bullion value is $5.68 USD.

My question is: How common is it to see an older and more modern issue of the same denomination with the more modern issue being made with a HIGHER silver content/bullion value than the older dated issue?  Usually, inflation chips away at the value of coins, so later issues of the same denomination become debased, being made with ever lower actual silver content. Here is one example of the reverse situation. Can anyone explain why this happened in El Salvador?

Also, the 1943-44 25 centavos coins are much larger than the 1911-1914 25 centavos coins. If there are other examples of actual silver content going up in later issue of the same denomination, do any of them have a higher net silver content change than this one (net silver content change is 0.1678 oz silver in the 1911-1914 coins versus 0.2170 oz silver in the 1943-44 coins, so a net change of plus 0.0492 oz of silver in the more modern issue (according to the SCWC)).

Just wondering!

Hello,

I think it depends on who is manufacturing the coins along with the specifications requested by the client country.

Take a look at Fiji for instance.

Most of Fiji's silver coins were struck using the British standard alloy of 50% silver.

However, during the war when Fiji's coins were made by United States, the coins were struck in the US standard alloy of 90% silver.

So a 1943 Fiji Sixpence contains nearly twice as much silver as a 1934 Fiji Sixpence even though both coins are the same size.

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BTW,  have you ever come across the 1953 version of the El Salvador 25 centavos?

It is struck in 90% silver but it is the size of a US dime.

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The US Mint would have no say in the composition or size of these coins. I thought maybe that the price of silver was higher for the earlier coin but that wasn't true. Maybe something to due to WWII but I can't think of any reason. Good question. I'd like to know the answer, too.

So would I my friend.

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Good catch on the Fiji coins. Interesting that the change we are discussing seems to involve coins produced by one of the U.S. mints during World War II. I wonder if there are examples that do not follow that pattern.

 In the example you noted, the dimensions of the coin were not changed, so the coins would look the same and if you wanted to pull out and save the higher silver content coins from circulation, you would have to check the dates. For the El Salvador coins I mentioned, the newer 25 centavos coin is so different in size that it would be very easy to pick out from the older 25 centavos coins. 

I actually forgot that in my country (USA) we had an even more extreme example of this: our non-precious metal 5 cent coin (normally made from a 75/25 copper-nickel alloy) was changed to a 56/35/9 copper/silver/manganese alloy because the war effort needed the nickel that normally went into these coins. So, the 5 cent coin went from no silver content at all to containing 0.05626 troy oz. of silver from part of 1942 through 1945. It is interesting that in World War II, silver wasn't really needed in large quantities for the war effort; today with all of the electrical components in everything, I doubt that would be the case.

Copper was also needed in the war effort; our 1 cent coin was changed from a 95% copper alloy to zinc coated steel for the year 1943. The change in silver content in the two El Salvador coins I mentioned from 83.5% silver to 90% silver would in theory have saved some copper, but the fact that the newer 25 centavo coin is larger and heavier probably prevented any reduction in the amount of copper needed to mint those coins (compared to earlier 25 centavo coins).

I do have one specimen of the 1953 silver 25 centavos coin from El Salvador in my collection. That coin follows the trend we would expect: it has the same silver purity (90%) as the preceding 25 centavo coin, but it is much smaller (so its actual silver content per coin is much lower).

My father worked in construction for a company that built things all over the world; he had a project in El Salvador in the 1970s, and the 1953 25 centavo was one of the coins he brought back to me from his travels when I was very young and just getting interested in coin collecting. It isn't worth very much, but it has sentimental value as part of my original childhood coin collection.