The Centre

As it prepares to celebrate its tenth birthday, the euro can boast a growing role as a global reserve currency. It has driven budgetary consolidation and boosted intra-EU trade. Yet being part of a currency union has been a very diverse experience for different eurozone members. Italy and Portugal have stagnated while Ireland and Spain have boomed – at least until this year.

This discussion begins by comparing the experience of Spain, where euro membership contributed to macroeconomic stabilisation and a surge in investment but also to a construction-fuelled boom, with that of Portugal, which has suffered from sluggish growth for most of this decade. It then turns to the challenges facing the growing number of countries aspiring to enter the eurozone, in particular Slovakia, which joins on January 1, 2009, and Poland, where the government has recently set an ambitious target entry date of January 1, 2012.

With Carlos Martínez Mongay, DG ECFIN, European Commission; Ricardo Martínez-Rico, former Spanish Deputy Finance Minister and President-CEO of Equipo Económico;

Maroš Šefčovič, Permanent Representative of Slovakia to the EU; and Dariusz Rosati, MEP and former Foreign Minister of Poland. Chaired by Paul Adamson