Brussels - The head of the European Union's executive has an ambitious Christmas wish this year: he wants to save the European economy by asking governments to spend more of their own money.

The European Commission "has limited responsibility here ... It can't command governments to spend, all it can do is get them to agree to the appropriate level," Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank in London, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

On Wednesday, after days of what officials described as round-the- clock work, commission president Jose Manuel Barroso unveiled the "EU economic recovery plan", a package of measures aimed at beating the current recession by stimulating consumption and investment.

Central to the plan is a call for a 200-billion-euro (260-billion- dollar) shot in the arm of the European economy - a sum close to 1.5 per cent of the 27-member bloc's total gross domestic product (GDP).

"Our plan will boost demand and, we hope, create millions of jobs in the future ... (It is) the best way to restore confidence to those citizens who fear a long recession," Barroso said.

Analysts say the figure - which is well above the sum of 130 billion euros which diplomats had hinted at earlier in the week - is a "significant" amount and a step in the right direction.

But so far, that number remains little more than a Christmas wish, with the commission itself pledging less than a tenth of the sum.

Of the 200 billion euros which the commission sees as the right amount to jump-start Europe's stalled economies, 85 per cent - 170 billion euros - is set to come from EU member states' own budgets, an area over which the commission has no control.

"The main legal and budgetary instruments for stimulating demand and employment are in the hands of the member states. The commission cannot replace their actions or attribute further funds to itself!" a commission press release pointed out.

Slightly more than half the remaining sum - 15.6 billion euros - is set to come from the Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank, an EU body which specializes in raising money on international capital markets and lending it to support projects which support EU aims.

That leaves the commission pledging 14.4 billion euros out of its own coffers - a substantial 10 per cent of its existing annual budget - to help Europe turn the financial corner.

Such a sum, while immense in terms of the EU's own budget, is hardly likely to solve Europe's economic woes alone.

The commission "can't do much beyond using its own funds, and those are pretty small change in this situation," Tilford said.

That leaves the commission's economic rescue plan dependent on the goodwill of EU member states - and their desire to modernize their own economies.

"Most (of the money) will be distributed at the national level, and the question is how much will qualify as genuine stimulus and how much will be devoted to shoring up competitivity in key sectors," Tilford pointed out.

And while the commission has agreed to relax the strict rules that govern the budget deficits of member states, there are only a few EU countries which have been wise enough to save during the good times and now enjoy a comfortable margin for manoeuvre, Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia conceded.

Heavyweights Britain and France, plus Ireland, for instance, are all expected to breach the 3 per cent of GDP limit in 2009, while Latvia and Hungary have had to resort to outside help in order to protect their financial sectors from the global credit crunch.

The plan has the merit of attempting to coordinate the responses of individual member states, so as to avoid what officials in Brussels call "negative spillover effects" in other countries, while refraining from imposing "one-size-fits-all" solutions.

But with EU member states already at loggerheads over the cost of fighting global warming, and desperately grappling to save their own industrial bases from meltdown, Barroso will have to hope that national leaders get a sudden rush of Christmas spirit at their next summit on December 11-12, when they come to debate his proposals.