SOFIA: Bulgaria will become the next euro zone member, but it should not rush through the process, European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici said on Friday.
Arriving for an informal meeting of EU finance ministers in Sofia, Moscovici said Bulgaria should stay "cold-blooded" and work on the accession criteria.
"Bulgaria will be the next member of the euro zone, no doubt about that," he told reporters. "But we need to prepare that with method and care and we do not need to rush, because if we rush we create accession to the euro that is not perfect."
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said on Thursday he expects the country to join Europe's Exchange Rate Mechanism - an obligatory two-year precursor to adopting the euro - within a year.
Moscovici said that Bulgaria, the EU's poorest member, should work to make it economy more like those of the richer Western countries, stressing that joining the euro should be "an asset and not a shock".
Bulgaria, which has pegged its currency to the euro, meets the formal criteria to adopt the single currency, with prudent fiscal policies and moderate inflation. It is also one of the least-indebted EU members.
But its gross domestic product per capita, calculated as power purchasing parity, is 49 percent of the EU average, well below euro zone member states. Many blame that on corruption that scares away investors.
Moscovici also said that joining the EU's banking union, which will put Bulgaria's top banks under the scrutiny of the European Central Bank, was part of the process.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said Sofia was ready to join the banking union after it enters the Exchange Rate Mechanism, not before as the ECB would prefer.
In a publication for a financial conference in Sofia, the deputy governor of Bulgaria's central bank, Kalin Hristov, argued that joining the banking union before adopting the euro was not a reasonable option.
Hristov pointed out that non-euro zone members that joined still would not be part of the decision making. Nor would they have access to ECB liquidity assistance or the European Stability Mechanism to recapitalise banks.
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