160 Adopting the Euro: A Long Path towards National Consensus within the Euro Area Candidate Countries

The global financial crisis outbreak after 2007 has profoundly changed the course of the history of relations in the world economy, creating a complicated framework of political relations between countries and economic regions. In this context, it is important to depict the economic convergence stage of Euro Area candidate countries and to what extent this crisis has or has not changed the euro adoption objective for these countries. The present paper aimed to shed a light on this issue by analyzing both the state of the convergence process and the public attitude regarding euro adoption in four Euro Area candidate countries which have the same monetary policy strategy (inflation targeting). The research results show the way in which the global financial crisis “deviates” the convergence trajectory of the nominal indicators, but also the political and public sentiment against the euro adoption in the selected countries. The results represent a valuable groundwork for analyzing the way in which National Central Banks candidate to the Eurosystem are implied into the processing for euro adoption during turbulence time