OREANDA-NEWS. March 15, 2013. 41.2% of Latvia’s entrepreneurs support Latvia’s implementation of the euro currency, and that is a considerably higher percentage than was found last September, when only 34.6% of them did so. These data come from the Citadele Index study for the 4th quarter of 2012, as performed by the Citadele Bank and the SKDS public opinion research centre.

Among those respondents who favour the euro, more than half (59%) represents companies with revenues of more than LVL 1 million a year. Also more likely to support the euro are people from companies which employ more than 10 people (>50%).

Greater support for the euro comes from exporters (57%), as opposed to representatives of companies that only operate in the domestic market (38%).

“Of essence here is the fact that this time people are looking at the replacement of the currency not as the result of economic upheaval, but instead as a carefully considered and long-term project,” says the Citadele Bank’s chief economist, Zigurds Vaikulis. “That makes it possible better to understand and better to prepare for the introduction of the euro. We see that exporters and representatives of large companies are the greatest supporters of the euro, because the new currency will largely make their everyday operations easier.”

The percentage of euro-sceptics has diminished. 15.7% of respondents in the December study for the most part do not support the implementation of the euro (as against 18% in September), while 19.3% in December (22.1% in September) completely reject the idea.

There are still those entrepreneurs in the survey who claim to have a neutral position on the euro – 21.6% in December, as against 20.1% in September 2012. Only 2.2% (5.1% in September) have no opinion about Latvia’s membership in the euro zone.

The study was conducted by Citadele and SKDS in December 2012, surveying 750 managers at companies from various sectors and of various sizes in Latvia.