Brussels - European Union leaders Friday pledged to provide some 100 billion dollars in extra loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a system for bailing out non-eurozone EU members in a bid to keep more countries from falling into the financial abyss.

"The decisions that we have made today, and the extra money that is being released, will help ensure that we do everything in our power to return the global economy to growth at the quickest possible opportunity," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

On the closing morning of their regular two-day spring summit, EU leaders agreed to offer 75 billion euros (101.5 billion dollars) in lending facilities to the IMF, if it should ask for help, as part of a call to the international community to double the fund's resources.

That loan will "enable (the IMF) to react better in the context of the crisis," Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who chaired the meeting as the current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, told journalists.

   Ahead of the talks, EU diplomats had proposed that the bloc offer the IMF from 75 billion to 100 billion dollars.

Also on Friday, the EU's top politicians agreed to double to 50 billion euros the credit limit on a fund designed to bail out EU members which do not use the euro, if they appear on the brink of defaulting on their public debt.

It is the second time in three months that they have decided to double the facility, which involves the EU executive in Brussels, the European Commission, raising money on the international money markets.

But politicians said the move should not be interpreted as a sign that they expects more members to follow Hungary, Latvia and Romania, who have already requested some 16 billion euros in aid from the fund to keep their currencies from meltdown.

Latvia's new prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that his country may not be able to keep to the deficit limits imposed on it as part of an IMF bailout because of a worse-than-expected downturn, but that he hoped to renegotiate the terms of IMF and EU loans without demanding more funds.

The move is "to show our partners in Central and Eastern Europe that the EU as a whole is ready for solidarity whenever solidarity would be needed. I don't think that this credit line will be consumed," Luxembourg premier Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the informal group of countries which use the euro, said.

Juncker also fiercely denied reports that the European Central Bank was setting up a similar fund to keep crisis-stricken euro users such as Ireland, Malta and Greece from default.

"The question of whether a euro member could default is purely hypothetical. I have no reason to think this might happen," he said.

Leaders also finally agreed after months of haggling to a scheme to spend 5 billion euros from the EU's budget on projects to improve energy and high-speed internet connections - a plan the EU's executive, the European Commission, first proposed in November.

Top of the list of projects was the "Nabucco" gas pipeline from Azerbaijan to Austria, in what Czech Deputy Minister Alexander Vondra, who brokered the compromise, called a "clear reaction" to the crisis caused by January's gas row between Russia and Ukraine.

In a further reaction to that row and to Russia's August invasion of Georgia, the leaders approved the launch in May of a new partnership with the EU's former-Soviet neighbours, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

But they put off deciding whether to invite Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is widely termed "Europe's last dictator."

That decision "will depend on the behaviour of Mr Lukashenko and the Belarusian government in the coming weeks," Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said.

Leaders also forged a common stance ahead of a summit of Group of 20 (G20) leading economies in London on April 2, and agreed to focus a summit with US President Barack Obama set for April 5 on energy security, climate change and relations with the Middle East, the South Caucasus and Iran.

But they reacted a US call to pump still more public money into their economies, saying that the EU was already doing enough to kick-start a recovery.