NOMINAL CONVERGENCE CRITERIA AND EUROPE 2020 STRATEGY: CONVERGENT OR DIVERGENT OBJECTIVES?

Sustainable development is a major subject of discussions worldwide and especially in the European Union. A lot of studies, papers, reports had analyzed the subject of sustainable development and many of the indicators of sustainable development have been transposed in public policies objectives. The Europe 2020 Strategy is such of programmatic document, which contains some of the sustainable development indicators. Though is recognised that supporting economic growth, environmental protection and employment are important, in Europe and whole around the world, fiscal disequilibria and monetary issues seem to come first, as is the case with nominal convergence criteria for the countries in acceding process to the euro area. Thus, this article tries to analyse to what extent Nominal Convergence Criteria affects the sustainable development indicators and especially Europe 2020 targets and what can be done to mitigate the possible conflict between their objectives.