“I don’t think that the 2018/2019 target lacks realism, but it would be best to have some intermediary goals, because it’s not going to happen by itself,” Isarescu told a news conference.
The central bank’s chief said the target for the euro adoption can have positive effects on the population, but stressed the deadline cannot be met in the absence of a political consensus.
In February, the government said Romania would meet this year all the Maastricht criteria to converge to the euro area and set the year 2019 as a self-imposed deadline for the euro adoption.
The target date was confirmed in the government’s convergence program for 2014-2017 which was sent to Brussels recently.
Romania had hoped to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) II as of 2013 and converge to the eurozone two years later, but economic and financial difficulties both at home and in EU have made the target obsolete.