2023-09-24 15:50:00
Bulgaria will introduce January 1, 2025 as the target date for the adoption of the euro, according to a project published on the Government’s website, as reported by Novinite, quoted by Agerpres.
Bulgaria is decided to enter the euro zone from 2025Photo: Rochu2008 | Dreamstime.com
The change was made in a decree of the Council of Ministers, which establishes a Coordination Council to prepare the country’s accession to the euro zone, and the deadline for sending the options expired last night.
In February, the Minister of Finance, Rossitsa Velkova, announced that Bulgaria had abandoned the target date – January 2024 – for the adoption of the euro. “We have not fulfilled our commitments for entering the euro zone and we must fulfill the inflation criteria,” Rossitsa Velkova told journalists at the time.
At the end of 2022, the harmonized index of inflation in Bulgaria rose to 14.3% at an annual rate, this being the eighth highest annual inflation rate in the EU bloc. One of the criteria for joining the euro zone, established by the Maastricht Treaty, ratified by all EU member states in 1993, refers to price stability. Concretely, the average inflation rate (calculated by the harmonized index of consumer prices) for the last 12 months must not exceed by more than 1.5 percentage points that (respectively, the arithmetic average of the inflation rates) of the best performing member states in terms of price stability. In addition, this evolution must prove to be sustainable.
The current Bulgarian Parliament is rapidly adopting the key laws that must be finalized before the introduction of the euro. Also, this week the European Central Bank (ECB) positively evaluated the new law of the National Bank of Bulgaria and the technical recommendations will be discussed with the Ministry of Finance before the final texts are submitted for adoption to the Government and the Parliament.
The law must enter into force when Bulgaria becomes a member of the euro zone.
January 1, 2025 is specified as the target date for the country’s accession to the euro zone in the Government’s program for the period June 2023 – December 2024.
Bulgaria has been a member of the European Union since 2007.
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(Photo article: © Rochu2008 | Dreamstime.com)
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