In mid-April, Portugal's parliament ratified the new European pact on budgetary discipline, the second EU country to do so after Greece. The pact provides for an automatic procedure to punitively sanction a country that swerves away from the rules: a structural deficit of 0.5 percent, a maximum public deficit of 3 percent and a national debt ceiling of 60 percent of GDP.
...
http://www.euronews.net/
