Latest update: 01/01/2009 

Challenges ahead as euro turns 10
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The financial markets of the 12 European countries adopted the single currency on January 1st, 1999. Ten years on, four others have joined them. The current global financial crisis is the euro's first real test.
By FRANCE 24 (text)
Owen FAIRCLOUGH (video)

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Click here to read about the euro changeover in Slovakia

 

As 16 European countries celebrate the 10th anniversary of the euro, the widely acknowledged success of the single European currency is under threat from the global financial crisis.

 

"This is the first test for the euro," said Antoine Brunet, an economist at French consultancy AB Marchés. He remarked that the crisis has introduced wide disparities in long-term lending rates in various Eurozone countries.

 

Former European Commission president Jacques Delors, the founding father of the European economic and monetary union, also expressed caution. "The euro gives protection but not dynamism," he told the French financial newspaper La Tribune on Monday. "The euro constitutes a protection even against the mistakes we may make ourselves," he added.

 

Financial markets in 12 European Union member states switched to the euro on January 1st, 1999. The previous day, EU finance ministers had definitively fixed the exchange rates between their currencies and the euro.

 

European citizens had to wait until January 1st, 2002 for the revolution to materialise under the form of notes and coins.

 

The euro changover was the result of a long process aiming to make the economies of euro accession countries converge towards the best performing among them