hello and welcome to this Tod our video where we explain the euro this video is gonna be split broadly into three sections the first will explain what the euro is and how countries might adopt it the second will deal with the history of the euro when and why it was adopted and the third we'll take a look whether or not it was a good idea before we dive in this week is your last chance to sign up for our patreon and claim your free golden EU pin badge this badge will never be available for public release and is exclusive to our $NUMBER_TOKEN and art patrons that's about nine pounds for an exclusive badge and we normally charge about six pounds for other badges anyway in fact this topic was even chosen by our patreon backers in a recent poll so to get the deal and all of the other perks of membership including voting on video topics check out our patreon it's linked down below the euro is the official currency of the EU or well at least most of it it's used by NUMBER_TOKEN of the NUMBER_TOKEN member states that's Austria Belgium Cyprus Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Ireland Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta the Netherlands Portugal Slovakia Slovenia and Spain as well as these EU nations there are also six non EU Member States using the euro these are Monaco San Marino the Vatican City and Ora Kosovo and Montenegro the first four have a monetary agreement with the EU allowing them to use the euro but Kosovo and Montenegro adopted it unilaterally which is just a fancy way of saying they made it their official currency without the --use permission the NUMBER_TOKEN new countries that use the euro are known as the eurozone the a EU countries outside of the euro zone a Denmark Sweden the Czech Republic Hungary Poland Bulgaria Croatia and Romania Denmark along with the UK opted out of joining the Euro at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in NUMBER_TOKEN Sweden had a referendum on the euro in NUMBER_TOKEN where Swedes voted to keep their national Swedish Krona according to EU rules the Czech Republic Hungary and Poland as members of the EU without any opt outs should in theory be working towards joining the euro but they've made it clear they don't want to so its realistically not going to happen the last three on that list Bulgaria Croatia and Romania occurred in the process of joining and Bulgaria is expected to join in NUMBER_TOKEN Croatia in NUMBER_TOKEN and Romania in NUMBER_TOKEN so how do you go about joining the euro well there are essentially three stages of becoming and staying a eurozone member first things first is joining the EU to do this you have to meet the Copenhagen criteria these criteria were first thought up at the European Council conference in June NUMBER_TOKEN which as you guessed it was in Copenhagen there are essentially four economic criteria and these are the government's deficit must not exceed NUMBER_PERCENTAGE_TOKEN of GDP gross government debt must not exceed NUMBER_PERCENTAGE_TOKEN of GDP the Member State must have achieved exchange rate stability for at least two years according to rules of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism currently the European Exchange Rate Mechanism allows for a plus or minus NUMBER_PERCENTAGE_TOKEN fluctuation from the pre agreed central rate the nominal long-term interest rates of applicant nations must not have exceeded by more than NUMBER_PERCENTAGE_TOKEN the average interest rates in the three member states with the best records on price stability where price stability is defined as year-on-year inflation increases of less than or near two percent according to harmonized index of consumer prices or H ICP after you've done all that you can now apply to join the eurozone to do this you need to meet the Maastricht criteria otherwise known as the convergence criteria again there are four criteria for this inflation measured against the H
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN we dive in this week is your last chance to sign up for our patreon and claim your free golden EU pin badge this badge will never be available for public release and is exclusive to our $NUMBER_TOKEN and art patrons that's about nine pounds for an exclusive badge and we normally charge about six pounds for other badges anyway in fact this topic was even chosen by our patreon backers in a recent poll so to get the deal and all of the other perks of membership including voting on video topics check out our patreon it's linked down below the END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN