Determinants and Implications of Euro Enlargement: The Polish Question

Abstract

Aside from the United Kingdom, which is withdrawing from the European Union, only Denmark has the option of staying outside the single European currency area. All other member states which have not adopted the euro as their currency have the right and obligation to do so under the Treaty of Accession. The condition to join the eurozone is to meet all five nominal Maastricht convergence criteria and to ensure compliance of national law with acquis communautaire, or the EU legal order. What poses special difficulties to candidate countries is the fiscal criterion related to the maximum allowed budget deficit. If it is not met, the European Commission launches the Excessive Deficit Procedure, EDP. Currently, this procedure is in place for France, Spain and the United Kingdom. In 2015, the EDP for Poland was lifted, but there is no certainty it will not be imposed again at the end of the decade due to the risk of exceeding once more the financial sector deficit threshold, which stands at 3 percent of GDP. It is to be expected that in the 2020 s the European Monetary Union will be joined by all the countries that are still using their national currencies, including Denmark, and that the EU will be extended to include new member states, leading to a further enlargement of the euro area. Although the issue is not absolutely certain, it needs to be assumed that the euro will weather the present difficulties and come out stronger, though the economically unjustified euroscepticism of some countries, especially Poland, is not helping. In the article, the authors ask the question whether Poland should join the euro zone in the coming years-in a situation where the euro area is imperfect, while seeing the positive economic reasons for such a decision. A mixed method combining the results of qualitative and quantitative research is applied to empirically verify the research question.

Keywords

• integration
• euro convergence
• maastricht criteria
• excessive deficit procedure
• public debt