All such policies are desirable in their own right, irrespective of membership of the euro area. However, the use of structural reforms to address excessive aggregate demand growth in the short term suffers from the substantial amount of time needed to prepare and implement such reforms.
While we never had a formal fixed exchange rate regime, South Africa experienced some version of these problems in the early years of our new democratic dispensation. As South Africa reintegrated into the world economy, with import tariffs and capital controls significantly reduced, the prices of our major commodity exports declined, resulting in intense downward pressure on the real exchange rate of the rand.