Sir, Your editorial “Europe gets real – not before time” (March 26), which suggests that Cyprus got the best deal it could have expected, sits oddly with its acknowledgment that, like the Greek economy before it, Cyprus’s economy could contract by 25 percent over the next few years. Were anything like that to occur, Cyprus would have the greatest of difficulties in complying with the strictures of its IMF-EU bailout package, which is premised on a gross domestic product contraction of “only” about 3.5 percent in 2013.

With such bleak prospects ahead, one might ask whether Cyprus would not have been better advised to exit the euro as a means to limit the decline in its economy. For by exiting the euro, Cyprus would have been able to use a cheaper currency to promote its tourist sector as an offset to its fiscal adjustment as well as to effect the necessary adjustment of its economy away from an excessive reliance on its financial sector.

What might have been a good deal to get Angela Merkel through her September 2013 election would not appear to have been a good deal for Cyprus. It is also not clear that it will have served to keep a collapsing Cyprus in the euro over the longer haul. This would particularly appear to be the case since 67 percent of the Cypriot electorate already has doubts about the advantages of staying in the euro.

Desmond Lachman, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, US