Romanian Central bank governor says country must stick to 2015 deadline for eurozone accession

Romanian Central Bank (BNR) governor Mugur Isarescu has recently said Romania must stick to 2015 as the deadline to enter the eurozone in order to maintain vivid the “appetite for the necessary reforms”. “To ensure sustainability to our undertaking, it is of urgent importance to ensure our reforms and policies with coherence and buoyancy, so that the accession to the eurozone should be possible as close as in 2015”, said Isarescu. In that sense, the target year must be very clearly stated, even though the date might be rescheduled, he went on. The governor also stressed the significance of staying on track with the technical criteria and the ongoing process of informing the public. Moreover, Isarescu said Romania should have a monetary policy based on stability and strictly implement the programs of fiscal consolidation. On the other hand, the Romanian presidency, compared with the unshaken accession term promoted by the BNR, favours a more cautious position, saying that Romania will adopt the European currency ‘when it will be ready’. The country needs to be close in performance to Germany in order to avoid the mistakes of the other candidate states to the eurozone. A candidate state to the eurozone needs to comply with certain criteria: low budgetary deficit, sustainable evolution of prices and an inflation rate at maximum 1.5 percent above the average inflation rate of the three EU member states with the best results in stabilizing prices. Romania must participate for at least two years at the European Exchange Rate Mechanism II, system created to improve the stability of the currencies belonging to non-eurozone states, as well as to gain an evaluation mechanism for potential eurozone members, according to Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo, member of the Executive Committee of European Central Bank( ECB). BNR founded last month a committee to prepare the transfer to eurozone. The Euro is currently used as legal payment currency by 331 million citizens from 17 EU states. The latest country to adopt the Euro as official currency was Estonia, which entered the eurozone in January this year. By Teodora Vaduva, teodora.vaduva@romania-insider.com