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EU proposes $260 bln economic recovery plan
Jose Manuel Barroso described the package, worth 1.5 percent of the EU's gross domestic product, as a response to "exceptional" times.
"The jobs and well-being of our citizens are at stake. Europe needs to extend to the real economy its unprecedented coordination over financial markets," he said in a statement. "This Recovery Plan is big and bold, yet strategic and sustainable."
"Measures that member states are introducing should not be identical, but they need to be coordinated," he also said.
He said under the plan 170 billion euros ($220 billion) would be channeled from national governments' budgets, and the other 30 billion euros ($39 billion) would come from the EU budget.
The plan, designed to mobilize fiscal, structural and regulating instruments both on a pan-European and a national level, will be considered at an EU summit in Brussels on December 11-12.
"I expect this package to receive strong support from European governments," Barroso told reporters.
Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain have recently started drafting national economic revival projects.

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