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The pattern of financial cycles in the European Union has direct impacts on financial stability and economic sustainability in view of adoption of the euro. The purpose of the article is to identify the degree of coherence of credit cycles in the countries potentially seeking to adopt the euro with the credit cycle inside the Eurozone. We first estimate the credit cycles in the selected countries and in the euro area (at the aggregate level) and filter the series with the Hodrick–Prescott filter for the period 1999Q1–2020Q4. Based on these values, we compute the indicators that define the credit cycle similarity and synchronicity in the selected countries and a set of entropy measures (block entropy, entropy rate, Bayesian entropy) to show the high degree of heterogeneity, noting that the manifestation of the global financial crisis has changed the credit cycle patterns in some countries. Our novel approach provides analytical tools to cope with euro adoption decisions, showing how the coherence of credit cycles can be increased among European countries and how the national macroprudential policies can be better coordinated, especially in light of changes caused by the pandemic crisis.

Concerns to setting an appropriate overall macroprudential policy framework have taken shape at local, regional, and global level since the onset of the global financial crisis. At regional level, a particular case is that of the European Union, given the national-supranational relationship specific to this economic region. The article aims to identify the macroprudential policy condition of the Euro Area candidate countries, by using an index built on some criteria that describe on the one hand, the capacity of macroprudential policy governance and the “activism” of macroprudential authority, and, on the other hand, the degree of compliance with the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) recommendations for national macroprudential authorities, given that the countries under review are member states of the European Union. Our findings show that the Euro Area candidate countries have quite different macroprudential policy features, both in terms of its governance and in terms of the “convergence” towards ESRB recommendations. Although the analysis should be extended by adding other relevant criteria, we can assert that it offers an overview of the potential role of the national macroprudential policy as a shock-absorber instrument in the perspective of a future accession to the Euro Area.

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