The unemployment rate also began to fall as the pace of new hires to man the new facilities exceeded the pace of layoffs from the old. Parenthetically, the perception of increased churning of our workforce in the 1990s has understandably increased the sense of accelerated job-skill obsolescence among a significant segment of our workforce, especially among those most closely wedded to older technologies.
The ECB will continue to pay particular attention to the situation of euro area SMEs when implementing its non-standard measures.