text: Regulation 1175/2011 amended the preventive arm (Regulation 1466/97), and introduced the European Semester. This is a procedure meant to provide a forum for ex ante coordination of economic and budgetary policies of Member States on an annual basis. In particular, every year in April all eurozone member states submit their "stability programmes", while all non-eurozone member states submit "convergence programmes" that except of a different title provides identical content. These documents outline the main elements of the member states' budgetary plans and are assessed by the Commission for compliance with the SGP criteria both within the preventive arm (MTO achievement) and corrective arm (EDP correction). An important part of the assessment addresses compliance with the minimum annual benchmark figures set for each individual country's structural budget balance, striving towards either a minimum improvement for the structural budget balance to be on the set path to correct an ongoing Exessive Deficit Procedure within the corrective arm, or striving towards achievement of the country-specific Medium-Term budgetary Objective (MTO) - or being assessed to be on an appropriate adjustment path towards this MTO within the preventive arm. Based on its assessment of the stability and convergence programmes, the Commission also draws up Country-Specific Recommendations for all EU member states, on which the Council adopts opinions in July. These include recommendations for appropriate economic and fiscal policy actions. All CSRs adopted in the context of the European Semester since 2011 are registered in the CSR database, which is the main tool for recording and monitoring each member state's annual progress with the implementation of CSRs. Furthermore, the Council adopts recommendations on economic policies that apply to the euro area as a whole.
  Directive 2011/85/EU outlined requirements for annually submitted budgetary frameworks of all member states, and shall be implemented by each member state no later than 31 December 2013.
  New debt reduction rule (Regulation 1177/2011)
  The corrective arm of the SGP (Regulation 1467/97) was amended by Regulation 1177/2011. By an entirely rewritten "article 2", this amendment introduced and operationalised a new "debt reduction rule", commonly referred to as the "debt brake rule", and legislatively referred to as the "1/20 numerical benchmark for debt reduction". The new debt reduction rule entered into force at the EU level on 13 December 2011.