Lithuania has officially joined the eurozone on January 1, 2015. The decision taken in summer 2014 has come into effect in the first day of 2015.
In her New Year's speech, President Dalia Grybauskaite said accession to the euro area is "our opportunity to grow and develop as a modern European state, to set ourselves new goals and look firmly to the future." During the New Year's festivities in the center of Vilnius, Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius ceremoniously withdrew a first euro notes from a cash machine in the town square.
Currently, in Lithuanian ATMs 5, 10, 20 and 50 euro notes are available. Higher denominations of 100, 200, 500 euros will not be loaded into cash machines, representative of the Bank of Lithuania Giedrius Simonavičius said.
“Joining the eurozone is a very logical step in the chain of very important steps for my country,” Finance Minister Rimantas Sadzius said in an interview to Bloomberg. “Euro adoption is perhaps the final step at this stage of integrating Lithuania into the single market of Western Europe. This of course has security implications, like joining NATO and the European Union.”
This is Lithuania’s second try to join the euro area. In 2006 Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were not allowed to enter the single currency bloc. The reason was inflation which was 0.1% above the entry limit. Then, the European Commission said that prices would grow further. As a result, Lithuanian inflation reached its peak of 12.8% in 2008. After that, the country’s GDP declined by a staggering 15% in 2009.
Estonia joined the euro area on January 1, 2011, and Latvia became an official bloc’s member on January 1, 2014.
