Since the introduction of the euro in 11 Member States on 1 January 1999, five additional Member States have joined the euro area. At the time of this report, 16 Member States have adopted the euro, the most recent one being Slovakia on 1 January 2009. This implies that 11 Member States are at present not full participants in EMU and have not yet adopted the euro. Two of these Member States, namely Denmark and the United Kingdom, gave notification that they would not participate in Stage Three of EMU. As a consequence, Convergence Reports for these two Member States only have to be provided if they so request. In the absence of such a request from either country, this Convergence Report examines nine countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden. All nine countries are committed by the Treaty to adopt the euro, which implies that they must strive to fulfil all the convergence criteria.
In this report, Estonia is assessed in somewhat more depth than the other countries under review. This is due to the fact that the Estonian authorities have on various occasions announced their intention to adopt the euro as of 1 January 2011.
This Convergence Report is structured as follows. Chapter 2 describes the framework used for the examination of economic and legal convergence. Chapter 3 provides a horizontal overview of the key aspects of economic convergence. Chapter 4 contains the country summaries, which provide the main results of the examination of economic and legal convergence. Chapter 5 examines the state of economic convergence in each of the nine Member States under review in more detail and provides an overview of the statistical methodology of convergence indicators. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the compatibility of these Member States’ national legislation, including the statutes of their NCB, with Articles 130 and 131 of the Treaty and with the Statute. [...]
