Blog Post
Discretion lets Croatia in but leaves Bulgaria out of the euro area in 2023
Crucial decisions about whether a country can join the euro area depend on questionable discretionary decisions.
Blog Post
Crucial decisions about whether a country can join the euro area depend on questionable discretionary decisions.
External Publication
In-depth analysis on the banking supervision cooperation in Bulgaria and Croatia prepared for the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON).
Policy Contribution
The debate on euro adoption by central European EU countries has intensified in the last years. In this Policy Contribution the author does not review all the complex aspects of euro-area enlargement, but analyse a particularly important issue: the build-up of macroeconomic vulnerabilities and the subsequent adjustments.
Opinion
Eurozone membership (or the use of a fixed exchange rate) was not a factor determining economic success in Central Europe. There were both good and bad macroeconomic performances in both the flexible and the fixed exchange rate regimes of Central European countries. The implication is that Central European “outs” could be economically successful both with and without the euro, yet the EU is not only about economic benefits.
Blog Post
In its bid to join the single currency Bulgaria has made commitments on financial supervision but also wider structural reform which set a precedent for future applicants for participation in the exchange rate mechanism ERMII. Most conditions, though not all, are justified by the additional demands of the banking union. But the envisaged timeline seems ambitious, and verification will not be straightforward.
Blog Post
A lot of debate has recently focused on the management of the fiscal crisis in Greece and whether or not the speed of adjustment has been too fast or too slow (see for example Anders Aslund, Simon Wren-Lewis or this VoxEu piece by the German Sachverständigenrat. In this blog I want to focus instead on the pre-crisis management before turning to the crisis period.
