The eurozone, which now includes nineteen countries, will be expanded to include Croatia on January 1. This was announced by European leaders at their summit in Brussels today. The Balkan country will join next year and offer the common euro. The current national currency, the kuna, will then be scrapped.
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic called the decision “a great signal for our economy”. “We are ready,” he said in Brussels. Croatia became the 20th euro country, less than ten years after the former Yugoslav Republic joined the European Union on July 1, 2013.
The country has been working fanatically for several years to become a European country and, according to Brussels, was quickly and economically integrated into the European Union. And despite the Covid-19 epidemic and the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to experts, the government in Zagreb was able to meet all the conditions, including inflation, interest rates, budget deficit and government debt. to adopt the euro. Enter.
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committed
By agreeing to Croatia, EU leaders adopt the recommendation of the Eurozone (Eurogroup) finance ministers. At the beginning of this month, the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) already gave the green light to Croatia.
All EU countries eventually commit to adopting the euro. This does not apply to Denmark, which got an exception in 1992 because the population is strongly against the introduction of the euro. Only Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden have not yet met the conditions for taking this step.
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