Yet nearly half of EU members breach at least one, or as in the case of France and Italy, both these limits.
The key difficulty of the stability and growth pact rules is in failing to acknowledge that the needs and future challenges of member states vary considerably.
The fact that they were plainly unrealistic for some single currency members, moreover, and were in practice repeatedly flouted even by the main enforcers, undermined their credibility.
The new ones recognise these failings, but with different targets for different countries are too complicated and too easily gamed to provide credible guardrails. As such, they threaten to breed resentment between member states over who is pulling their weight on fiscal retrenchment and who isn’t.
This is especially the case given growing pressure on governments for spending on ageing populations and for the provision of industrial subsidies.
In addressing the problem of lack of flexibility, the policymakers are sowing the seeds for a second eurozone crisis driven by national rivalry for investment, jobs and growth.
In other words, the nationalist forces that threaten to pull the euro apart are potentially made worse, not weaker, by the new rules.
The thresholds used in the old stability and growth pact rules were admittedly fairly arbitrary and not particularly scientific.
The debt ceiling of 60pc was merely an average of member states at the time, while the 3pc budget deficit rule came about because it was assumed that with inflation at 2pc and growth at 3pc, it would stabilise debt at the prescribed average.
All of these assumptions have proved completely wrong, particularly the growth rate, which Europe hasn’t seen for many a long year nor has any chance of achieving in the foreseeable future.
Not that the UK can claim to be much better. Over the past 14 years, we’ve changed our own fiscal rules more often than any other OECD nation. On virtually every occasion, it has been to loosen them so as to accommodate rising debt-to-GDP ratios.
