site.btaCentral Bank Governor: Bulgaria Meets All Nominal Eurozone Convergence Criteria

“Bulgaria is currently one of the few in the EU that meet unconditionally all nominal convergence criteria, including the price stability criterion, with which we have had problems in recent years,” Bulgarian National Bank Governor Dimitar Radev said on Thursday at the opening of the conference Money Growth: Banking, Investment, Technology, organized by the Capital daily in Sofia, the central bank said. 

“There is, indeed, one final step left. I am confident that we are able to do it with dignity and confidence,” Radev said.

Radev said that the central bank is focused both on the successful implementation of this final step and on the full readiness to work in the conditions of the shared monetary sovereignty of the euro area. He said that this involved two main sets of tasks - one related to putting the already established capacity to operate in the euro area on an operational readiness basis, including the implementation of functions that the Bank could not perform under a currency board arrangement, and the second related to the logistical and technical preparation of the exchange rate process and the functioning of the banking system in a euro area environment.

“We have been working hard on this topic and not since yesterday or today. The central bank and the banking sector are in very high readiness for joining and working in the euro area,” Radev said.