Read the following statements and answer the question that follows.

A. The treaty tests of a budget deficit no bigger than 3% of the GDP and a public debt converging towards a ceiling of 60% of a GDP seemed impossible for Italy to pass by 1999.

B. That Belgium also had a public debt above 100 percent of GDP helped, as did a special euro tax Mr. Prodi introduced. 

C. Into the uncompromising environment came the first of a series of external shocks. One of the earliest was entry into the European single currency, the euro, in 1999. 

D. But when it became clear in 1997 that Spain was determined to join from the start, Romano Prodi, then Italian prime minister, decided that Italy, as a founder member of the bloc, must be there too.

E. Germany had more or less designed the 1992 Maastricht treaty’s convergence criteria to keep out a profligate, chronically indebted Italy.

Which of the following sequences is the MOST logically ordered?

Given the seemingly complex appearance of the jumbled sentence, a good starting point would be to look at the repeated words in sentences A and E: both mention a treaty and the idea of convergence.

We begin with Sentence E, which introduces the Maastricht treaty and its convergence criteria. This sentence highlights the motivations behind the treaty: Germany wanted to design the rules to exclude fiscally unstable countries, specifically pointing to Italy as a target of these restrictions.

Sentence A naturally follows because it elaborates on the specific criteria outlined in the treaty. Where E sets the broader context of the treaty and its purpose, A narrows it down to the actual numerical benchmarks - a 3% budget deficit limit and public debt converging toward 60% of GDP. It then highlights Italy’s struggle to meet these standards, describing them as nearly impossible to achieve by 1999.

Together, E→A presents a clear situation: the treaty (E) was crafted to exclude countries like Italy, and Italy’s financial state (A) made it a clear candidate for exclusion.

Once the situation has been clarified, the natural question becomes: How did Italy respond to these challenges? This is where Sentence D comes into play. The sentence introduces Romano Prodi, then Italian prime minister, and highlights his resolve to ensure Italy joined the group under question (the group from which Germany wanted to prevent Italy from entering). Despite the challenges outlined in A, Prodi decided that Italy, as a founding member of (perhaps the European) bloc, had to join the group. Prodi’s determination wasn’t arbitrary - it was a reaction to the realization that countries like Spain were pushing to join the group, too. Therefore, the link between A→D reflects an action-response relationship, where the constraints in A led to the decisive response in D. At this stage, E-A-D forms a coherent narrative. E introduces the treaty, A highlights the challenge for Italy, and D shows how Italy’s leadership decided to deal with it.

We observe that Sentence B further cements this narrative by informing us how certain factors might have played in Italy’s favour; its attempt to join the group in spite of the restrictions placed by the treaty might have been expedited by the presence of Belgium, which also did not meet the convergence criteria, with a “public debt above 100 percent of GDP.”

We observe from the options that only Option B presents an arrangement correctly representing the narrative E-A-D-B. This suggests that Sentence C likely serves as the context.