By EFE,
Madrid : Spain’s gross domestic product fell 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, the largest such decline since 1970, the National Statistics Institute (INE) said Thursday.
The drop in GDP between the first and second quarters of 2009 was smaller, 1.1 percent.
Employment shrank 7.1 percent in the April-June period, representing the loss of nearly 1.37 million full-time jobs since June 2008, according to the INE.
All of the principal economic indicators experienced their biggest 12-month declines since the government began keeping statistics in 1970, the INE said.
The institute largely attributed the plunge in GDP to a 7.3 percent slide in domestic demand and investment.
Purchases by households fell for the fourth consecutive quarter, sliding 5.9 percent compared with the same period last year, while business investment was down a whopping 17 percent from the second quarter of 2008.
INE figures show that employment continued to fall in all sectors except non-tradable services, with jobs in the devastated construction industry off by more than 25 percent from year-ago levels.
The secretary of state for the economy, Jose Manuel Campa, said Thursday that Spain has survived the worst of the recession, though he cautioned that annualized GDP will not turn positive until the second quarter of 2010.
Spain has the highest unemployment in the European Union, according to the latest figures from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency.
Eurostat said in a report that the Spanish jobless rate was 18.1 percent in June.
Spain’s economy is currently in its first recession since 1993, with the construction and service sectors having been especially battered by the global financial crisis.
In June, the central bank said in its annual report that it feared unemployment in the Iberian nation would remain high for an extended period and jeopardize economic recovery.