国际英语新闻：EU moves on budgetary, economic surveillance

LUXEMBOURG, June 7 (Xinhua) -- European Union (EU) countries moved ahead on Monday to strengthen budgetary and economic surveillance in the 27-nation bloc so as to prevent recurrence of the current debt crisis.

"Today we worked on the first two points, strengthening the stability pact and erasing competitiveness divergence, in other words, budgetary surveillance and macro-economic surveillance. In these two areas, rapid progress can be made," EU President Herman Van Rompuy told reporters after chairing a meeting of EU finance ministers and experts on economic reforms.

On the budgetary side, EU countries agreed to pre-screen each other's budgetary plan before it is approved by national parliaments.

"In each spring, national budgetary plans would be presented to the (European) Commission and European Union member states," Van Rompuy said, adding both the commission and the member states would not check the plans in detail, but main assumptions underline the budgetary plans like the level of growth or inflation would be examined.

In a bid to sharpen the teeth of EU rules against countries which repeatedly break budgetary discipline, EU countries agreed to create more sanctions, such as an early sanction against those countries which are approaching the EU deficit limit and ignore warning from the EU to bring their house in order.