In particular, there have been substantial declines in industrial goods prices over the past year, while services prices, traditionally prone to very high rates of increase, have eased substantially and have even been growing at a lower rate than in the euro area in recent months. Admittedly, this negative inflation differential is very closely linked to the weakness of demand in Spain. But it is a promising sign of the competitiveness on which the pick-up in activity should be based, so it is important that this price moderation should be preserved in the near future. As I said earlier, there are two adverse consequences of the way in which these imbalances are being corrected: the excessive toll imposed on employment by the crisis, owing to the poor functioning endemic in our labour market, and the deterioration of public finances. Job destruction began with great virulence in construction and subsequently spread to manufacturing industry and market services. It was centred above all on temporary contracts, given the prevailing duality in the labour market. In recent months employment has continued to fall, although the State Fund for Local Investment has slackened the effect. The unemployment rate skyrocketed from 8% in 2007 to almost 18% in the third quarter this year, when it stabilised due partly to the strong slowdown in the growth rate of the labour force. This slower labour force growth was the consequence of part of the population being discouraged by poor employment prospects and of the return of some immigrants to their countries of origin.
Yet the considerable slack in productive capacity and the sluggish recovery in demand and activity across Europe suggest that inflation rates, while positive, will hold at moderate levels in the near future, with no risk of deflation discernible for the moment. Given the incipient pick-up in activity and the continuation of very modest levels of both actual and expected inflation, the official interest rate for the euro area, at 1% since last May, is at the appropriate level. Switching our focus to the Spanish economy, the decline in output in 2009 is not going to be sharper than in other countries, but the contrast with the growth rates of the ten previous years is more patent. The fact is, as I have explained on other occasions, the Spanish recession shares features with other countries, but has its own hallmarks, such as the real estate adjustment and the behaviour of the labour market. The powerful external contractionary forces generated by the international crisis compounded the internal adjustment on which the Spanish economy had embarked, exacerbating the decline in domestic spending and employment. The latest figures indicate that, as in the euro area and the rest of the world, the sharpest phase of contraction in the Spanish economy is now behind us. According to the data released some days back by the INE, activity slipped once more in the third quarter, unlike in other developed countries, although it did so at a quarter-on-quarter rate of 0.3%.