This was the best result since 2000. While enjoying the benefits of healthy demand in both foreign and domestic markets, it was also able to take advantage of the increased flexibility of local production attributable to the fact that the labour market had been opened up to nationals of neighbouring countries – without threatening domestic employment. In the course of the past twelve months, almost 60,000 new jobs have been created – a figure unmatched since 2001 – while the number of jobless has dropped by 22,000. Restructuring efforts on the part of the corporates, advances in productivity and the increased flexibility in the employment market have created an environment that allows more vigorous growth. Thus, the difficult path of reform and of opening up has yielded its first successes. It is advisable that we continue following this path in order to ensure a sustained and durable increase in our productive potential. This will help us to place our social security institutions on a sound financial basis again and confront the challenges posed by the aging of our population. Continuing the normalisation of monetary policy Within this context of an improved economic situation, the SNB last year continued the policy of gradually normalising the interest rates that it has been pursuing since June 2004.
Yet the good results can be explained quite logically, since they arise from a combination of particularly favourable factors. First, I would like to mention the remarkable ability of the private sector to adapt to the challenges presented by the globalisation of markets. Thanks to reorganisation efforts in the export sector, results in foreign trade have improved substantially. Over the past ten years, our exports have grown by more than 80%, or five times as fast as the gross domestic product. We now run a surplus in goods trading in addition to our traditional surplus in the area of trade in services. The success of strategies geared to quality and high-tech content are demonstrated by the vigorous growth recorded by exports in high added-value areas such as electronics, watchmaking, chemical and pharmaceutical products. Alongside this we should mention the growth in the exports of services, particularly in the areas of finance and tourism. Overall, our net balance from trading in goods and services has increased from CHF 17 billion to CHF 37 billion in 10 years, in other words, from 4.6% to 8.3% of GDP. Clearly, far from threatening our expansion abroad, globalisation has led to an expansion in our markets from which our companies have been able to derive extensive benefits. The prosperity of our foreign trade depends to a large extent on the good shape of the global economy, whose performance has been very good over the past few years.