Austrian Vice Chancellor Josef Proell is set to travel to Central and Eastern Europe from Wednesday to promote his country's initiative to stabilize the region's economic and financial systems, according to dpa . With Austrian banks strongly exposed in the region, Vienna has called on CEE countries, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to come up with joint measures to prevent a credit crunch and deal with the effects of depreciating currencies. Proell, who is also finance minister, is scheduled to meet his counterparts in Croatia and Ukraine on Wednesday and in Romania and Bulgaria on the following day, his spokesman said Tuesday.
