European Commission president Mr Romano Prodi said he sees no changes to the EU's stability pact on member states' public finances.
The pact obliges all member-states in the Eurozone to balance their budgets in the medium term and it forbids budget deficits to exceed 3 per cent of GDP.
In an interview with La Stampanewspaper, Mr Prodi said there is not a deep recession in the economy - rather a settling down after many years of growth and after an excessive rise in financial markets, and now there is a lack of confidence.
"The euro is a great instrument of stability. Without the euro we would have European currencies blowing up one after the other. We would have seen uncertainty like in South America," he said.
"The stability pact has been constructed to help governments to have common rules and to reinforce the conduct that ought to accompany the existence of the euro," he said.
"The stability pact has functioned well . . . the stability pact is an indispensable rule. It does not seem to me for now that European countries are thinking of concrete alternatives," he said.
Last month the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, called for a more flexible interpretation of the Stability and Growth Pact that would allow Eurozone governments to borrow more for capital programmes.
AFP