DUBAI: Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti insisted Tuesday that the eurozone was overcoming its debt crisis and that member states were determined to preserve the common currency. "The euro area is overcoming its crisis," Monti told a UAE-Italy business forum in Dubai, where he stopped as part of a tour of the Gulf region. "More than a currency, the euro is a symbol of European integration that European governments are determined to preserve and strengthen," said Monti, few days after Eurostat data showed that the 17-nation eurozone tipped into recession in the third quarter of 2012. "In the last six months we have stabilised financial markets by implementing a powerful and permanent rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism," said Monti. "The European Central Bank, for its part, has put in place a bond buying programme to ensure governments' financing costs reflect their economic fundamentals and reform efforts." "Next month we will adopt a concrete roadmap to reinforce the architecture of our economic and monetary Union starting with a single supervision mechanism for banks to make sure we spot and deal with problems earlier in the future," he added. The European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi said earlier this month that the eurozone economy is weak and will remain so for the time being, citing "deplorably high" unemployment, and an overall "weak" economic activity. The eurozone economy shrank 0.1 percent in the third quarter after contracting 0.2 percent in the preceding quarter, statistics released in Brussels revealed.

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