Ger­man Chan­cel­lor An­gela Merkel re­sist­ed pres­sure on Fri­day for com­mon eu­ro zone bonds or a more flex­i­ble use of Eu­rope's res­cue funds but agreed with lead­ers of France, Italy and Spain on a 130 bil­lion eu­ros ($156 bil­lion) pack­age to re­vive growth.

Af­ter four-way talks in Rome's Re­nais­sance Vil­la Madama, Ital­ian Prime Min­is­ter Mario Mon­ti said the Eu­ro­pean Union should adopt pro-growth mea­sures worth about one per cent of the re­gion's gross do­mes­tic prod­uct at a cru­cial sum­mit next week.

But the three oth­ers made no per­cep­ti­ble progress in push­ing Merkel, who leads Eu­rope's most pow­er­ful econ­o­my and the main con­trib­u­tor to its res­cue funds, to­wards mu­tu­al­is­ing Eu­rope's debts or us­ing ex­ist­ing bailout re­sources more flex­i­bly. "Growth can on­ly have sol­id roots if there is fis­cal dis­ci­pline, but fis­cal dis­ci­pline can be main­tained on­ly if there is growth and job cre­ation," Mon­ti said.

The mea­sures, al­ready in the works in Brus­sels, in­clude in­creas­ing the Eu­ro­pean In­vest­ment Bank's cap­i­tal, redi­rect­ing un­spent EU re­gion­al aid funds and launch­ing project bonds to co-fi­nance ma­jor pub­lic in­vest­ment pro­grammes. No new steps were an­nounced on Fri­day.

The four lead­ers did agree to move ahead on cre­at­ing a tax on fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions even though not all EU mem­bers will be on board. About a dozen EU states sup­port set­ting up the so-called "To­bin tax", more than the nine re­quired to go ahead as a group with­in the EU, a French pres­i­den­tial source said. Merkel made no men­tion, how­ev­er, of any move to­wards mu­tu­al­is­ing past eu­ro zone debt or new bor­row­ing.

French Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lande voiced im­pa­tience with Berlin's re­luc­tance, say­ing it should not take ten years to cre­ate joint­ly un­der­writ­ten eu­ro bonds. He said greater sol­i­dar­i­ty was need­ed among mem­ber states be­fore they aban­don more sov­er­eign­ty to EU in­sti­tu­tions. "I con­sid­er eu­ro bonds to be an op­tion...but not in ten years," Hol­lande said in a di­rect chal­lenge to Merkel. "There can be no trans­fer of sov­er­eign­ty if there is not an im­prove­ment in sol­i­dar­i­ty."

Reuters