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

The commission was asked to come forward with proposals for possible new sanctions later on.

The EU would also act on the debt level of member states. Van Rompuy said the current budgetary rules are largely focused on deficits, but pay little attention to the debt problem, which should be corrected.

In the future, the EU will launch excessive deficit procedure against those member states that do not cut too high debt.

As a lesson drawn from the Greek debt crisis, the EU will ensure national statistics offices are truly independent from political influences, so national governments can no longer manipulate the figures to conceal their budgetary problems.

On the macro-economic surveillance, Van Rompuy said the commission was asked to develop indicators to monitor the competitiveness gap between EU member states, which should function as an early warning to those which may be in trouble.

"Macro-economic surveillance should function next to budgetary surveillance," he said.

Van Rompuy said the first priority is for the countries with competitiveness problems to act, but those with surplus, notably Germany, should also look into their internal demand.