Introduction The United Kingdom opted out of the European Union Monetary and Economic Union (herein referred to as EMU) for several reasons, specifically what came to be referred to as the five economic tests. In retrospect, the “opt out” was not a good decision for the British business given the fact that businesses in this country effectively became outsiders to the Eurozone, and will be affected by policies made by this union just like any other foreign country. Verdun (1999) provides a working conceptualisation of the term monetary union. This is the definition that will be adopted throughout this essay. According to this author, a monetary union can be viewed as an agreement between several nations to use a common currency amongst themselves (Verdun 1999: Stauffer n.d). The nations may go as far as establishing a single central bank and other centralised agencies that are tasked with the role of regulating the financial aspects of the nations. The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is such an example of a monetary union as defined by Verdun (1999). According to Adiong (2008), this union was to be implemented in three stages over a period of several years. Adiong (2008) refers to these steps as discrete but evolutionary, meaning that a step builds on its predecessor. It is not all European Union nations that joined the EMU and this can be attributed to several reasons. There are those, specifically Greece and Sweden, that failed to meet some of the criteria put down to qualify member states to be part of the monetary union. Others, like the United Kingdom, negotiated for what Willis (2010) refer to as opt outs. This means that these nations are exempted from the provisions and regulations of the monetary union, and they can join whenever they feel like, provided of course they meet all the necessary conditions. This essay is going to look at the case of United Kingdom’s opt out from the European Monetary and Economic Union. The author is going to look at the reasons why this country opted out this union among other issues. The author will especially critically appraise whether the decision to opt out was the best or not for British businesses. The European Economic and Monetary Union: Overview Before looking at the reasons why the United Kingdom opted out of the monetary union and analysis of the impacts of this decision to the British business, it is important to provide a brief overview of this union. According to Stauffer (n.d), the European Economic and Monetary Union’s idea can be traced back to the year 1979. This is the year that the European Council ratified the decision to adopt the European Monetary System [herein referred to as the EMS] (Stauffer n.d). This system was mostly concerned with the regulation of the union’s currency exchange rates. However, the European monetary and economic union was not to be formed until the year 1992. This was the year that saw the signing of the famous Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that led to the founding of the European Union (Stauffer n.d). In this treaty, provisions, referred to as the convergence criteria (Adiong 2008), that were to be met by each of the European union member states before they could be allowed to j