BUCHAREST, May 4 (Xinhua) -- Mugur Isarescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, the country's central bank, said on Thursday that for Romania, euro adoption is not a matter of "if" but "when," but stressed the adoption could only happen when real convergence is met.
"Romania must adopt at one point the euro currency. For Romania the problem is not if, but when," the governor told the "Good Governance Summit" organized by the local think-tank Strategikon.
Romania doesn't have the opt-out option of the economic and monetary union, Isarescu asserted.
He believed that although Romania meets the Maastricht criteria for adopting the euro, there is still a need of real convergence.
The eurozone isn't a place for economies with competitiveness problems, he stressed.
According to Isarescu, new EU member states that adopted euro, namely Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, are small countries, which have a different geopolitical situation from Romania and a different level of real convergence.
Larger states as Romania, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, with a flexible exchange rate regime, are more careful in respect to adopting the euro currency, the governor added.
Romania set, in 2014, a target date of Jan. 1, 2019 for euro adoption. However, Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu said on April 10 that swapping the Romanian leu for the euro may be possible when incomes in the country catch up with other eurozone states, meaning the government has abandoned its 2019 euro adoption target and has not set a date for entering the eurozone.
According to Eurostat, the bloc's statistics agency, Romania's GDP per capita stands at 59 percent of the EU's average per capita GDP level.
