On January 1, 2014 Latvia became the 18th country to adopt the euro as its legal tender, retiring the Latvian lat (ISO code LVL). As announced by the European Central Bank (citation):

Latvia joined the euro area on 1 January 2014. On that date the euro replaced the lats at the fixed exchange rate of €1 = LVL 0.702804. There will be a two-week period when both currencies are in circulation, with change normally provided in euro. The lats will cease to be legal tender on 15 January 2014.

The 18 countries are: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia and Spain.

We expect the following in the near future:

• The statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat) to report using the expanded euro zone definition.
• Statistics Latvia will migrate currency-valued data from LVL to EUR; expect "data change" articles.
• Historical datasets that use "euro zone" aggregates will be replaced or revised.
  • OECD CLI (see related article)

As a result of the above mentioned change, the following adjustments have already been made to the Data Buffet:

• Geo code IEZ18 = euro zone, fixed 18-country composition
• Geo code IEUZN = euro zone, mutable composition (see related article). Please note that data using the IEUZN geographic code might not yet incorporate the recent addition of Latvia.  We expect the transition to occur over the next several months as new data are released.
• Geo list GB_EUZN_CTY.LST = Please note that geo lists are ordered by country name; we inserted Latvia between Italy and Luxembourg.  Baskets using the geo list will show changes to their contents when next run.