France and Germany agree on 'full-time' euro group chief

BERLIN: Germany and France have proposed a full-time president for the euro group as they agreed to cooperate more closely to overcome the debt crisis and to kick-start growth and job creation in the single currency area.


At a meeting in Paris yesterday to work out a common strategy for the next European Union summit in Brussels at the end of June, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to give top priority for tackling youth unemployment, promoting competitiveness and intensifying economic and fiscal policy coordination.

Closer cooperation between the two countries and within the EU could be made easier by structural changes.

Therefore, they agreed that EU summit meetings "should take place more frequently, with a full-time president for the euro group," Hollande said after their meeting.

Hollande and Merkel acknowledged that combating youth unemployment, which reached record levels in some of the southern European nations as a consequence of the three-year-old debt crisis, posed a major challenge for the euro zone.

A full-time president of the euro group should have sufficient funds at his disposal to take decisive steps towards creation of new jobs, enhancing growth and fostering competitiveness of the industry, Hollande told a joint news conference with Merkel.

The two leaders proposed the creation of a 6 billion-euro ($7.8 billion dollars) fund for the euro zone to finance concrete projects in the area of tackling youth unemployment and promoting competitiveness.

They shared the view that this amount could be raised partly from the returns of the proposed financial market transaction tax and from the European Commission's budget for promoting employment.

Chancellor Merkel underlined the importance of increasing the competitiveness of the euro zone economies.