Was Romania right not to join the euro area?

Romania is no longer joining a monetary union that promised cheap and unified capital, but rather a structure where the cost of financing is immediately indexed to its own lack of fiscal discipline and institutional weakness.

This is the fundamental shift in context that requires an honest reassessment of the decision not to have joined the euro area yet.

Viewed strictly through the calendar, Romania appears to be lagging behind.

Croatia and Bulgaria have adopted the euro, while we systematically fail to meet the nominal accession criteria - inflation, budget deficit, fiscal stability.

This chronic failure, signaled for years by Theodor Stolojan, reflects fractured economic governance and the inability to maintain basic balances.

However, this observation does not invalidate the historical soundness of Theodor Stolojan's recommendation. On the contrary.

During the period of high globalization, when liquidity was abundant, risk was mutualized through markets, and the single interest rate effectively functioned as a convergence mechanism, adopting the euro represented a strategic opportunity for Romania.

Externally imposed nominal discipline could have accelerated integration and reduced the cost of capital. The problem was not the diagnosis, but the delay: Romania failed to capitalize on this historical window, and the structural context has meanwhile changed radically.

This difference in approach was discussed extensively in the pages of BURSA, where Theodor Stolojan's position, centered on nominal convergence as an opportunity for rapid integration, confronted Daniel Dăianu's arguments regarding the need for real convergence before adopting the single currency. The debate, carried out over several years, reflected not an ideological divergence, but two valid strategies dependent on the historical context.

Recent experiences in Croatia and Bulgaria show that adopting the euro has not proved dysfunctional, but neither does it deliver the classic promise of accelerated convergence.

In Croatia, the transition to the euro eliminated exchange rate risk in an economy already heavily informally euroized and brought financial stability, yet it did not standardize the cost of capital: interest rates remained indexed to country-specific risk, not to the eurozone core average.

In Bulgaria, the euro functions more as a mechanism of discipline and formalization, in an economy with a currency board and fixed exchange rate, without automatically generating cheaper financing.

In both cases, the single currency stabilizes but no longer converges: risk differences become more visible and are penalized more rapidly in a euro area operating under fragmentation.

But reducing the issue to a simple competition of calendars is a mistake.

Romania's classic dispute - nominal convergence versus real convergence, immediate discipline versus structural development - becomes secondary within a much broader context: declining globalization and the accelerated fragmentation of the world economy.

In a highly globalized world, the euro area project had solid logic. Liquidity circulated freely, sovereign risks were implicitly mutualized through integrated markets, and the single monetary policy transmitted relatively uniformly. The single interest rate was not merely an institutional construct, but a functional reality.

That world no longer exists.

Recent reports from the European Central Bank confirm what markets have signaled for years: geoeconomic fragmentation has become structural. Capital no longer seeks maximum efficiency, but perceived political and institutional safety.

Investors no longer buy "euro area risk,” but differentiate between states, even though all finance themselves in the same currency.

The consequence is direct and brutal: the European single interest rate is dead.

A single policy rate now produces local, divergent yield curves.

The cost of financing in the North is no longer replicable in the South or the East.

Interest rates reflect geoeconomic positioning, fiscal discipline, political stability, and shock-absorption capacity.

The single monetary policy is no longer a common shock absorber, but a factor that can produce opposite effects in different economies.

Within this framework, Romania would no longer be entering a euro area that promises automatic convergence, but one that immediately penalizes internal weakness.

Here, Daniel Dăianu's thesis is structurally validated: real convergence is not a luxury, but a survival condition.

When capital is no longer mutualized and shocks are no longer collectively absorbed, an economy with large structural gaps becomes extremely vulnerable. Without solid infrastructure, without a robust fiscal base, and without a competitive productive sector, joining the euro area means giving up the last adjustment lever - the exchange rate - at a moment when the benefit of a unified interest rate has disappeared.

In such a context, adjustment no longer occurs through currency, but through internal devaluation: cuts in real wages, compressed investment, fiscal austerity, and social tensions.

Exactly the mechanism that marked the sovereign crises of the previous decade.

The entry of Croatia and Bulgaria into the euro area shows that GDP per capita is not the decisive obstacle.

The difference is governance.

However, in a low-globalization world, this lack of discipline is sanctioned much more severely than in the past.

Romania missed the window of opportunity during the period of intense globalization and monetary easing, when risk was cheap and markets were tolerant.

Delay no longer leads to integration into a protective system, but to accession into a harsher geoeconomic environment, with expensive and selective capital.

Moreover, once the euro is adopted, the market will grant no "discount” for the existence of residual monetary sovereignty.

Chronic deficits, low fiscal revenues, and institutional weaknesses will translate directly into higher financing costs, suffocating both public and private investment.

Bulgaria's case also suggests a collateral effect: the forced formalization of part of the shadow economy, useful in the long term, but extremely painful at a time of fragmentation and capital distrust.

Viewed this way, Romania's decision not to have joined the euro area yet appears not as a sign of isolationism, but as a gain of time.

Time which, however, is not free.

In a low-globalization world, adopting the euro is no longer a development stimulus, but a formalization of the cost of inefficiency.

Weak governance is no longer offset by permissive capital flows; on the contrary, it is amplified and penalized.

Therefore, the real question is not whether Romania "wants” the euro, but whether it is prepared to bear peripheral risk interest rates in euros.

The path to the single currency, in a fragmented context, no longer runs through cosmetic deficit adjustments, but through a profound reconstruction of institutions, the fiscal base, and the productive economy.

Only then can the euro once again become an instrument of stability.

Until then, waiting remains not a failure, but a form of economic realism.