The Construction Costs Index of the A.C. of the Basque Country registered a 0.1% decrease in July 2005 with regard to the previous month, by which the inter-annual rate for the month came to 5.0%, according to EUSTAT data.

In July 2005, labour costs did not vary at all (0.0%), while raw material costs fell by 0.1%.

The sub-sectors Building and Civil Works registered a quite similar evolutoin, with a 0.1% decrease in relation to the month before for Building, and a 0.3% drop in raw material costs for Civil Works. In the inter-annual evolution for these two sub-sectors we can see that both followed similar trends: raw material costs rose by 5.4% for Building and by 4.6% for Civil Works.

In July the highest growth in prices corresponded to raw materials consumed by Oil By-Products (3.5%), Lime, gypsum and plaster (2.6%), Asphalt products (2.1%) and Glass (1.1%), among others. Prices fell however, for the raw materials used in Metal Piping (-4.6%), Explosives and gases (-1.5%), Mining Arids (-0.7%), and Baked earth (-0.4%), among others.

Among the prices of raw materials consumed by the sector that experienced the highest rates of inflation in the whole of the last twelve months are the following: Asphalt prodcuts (27.1%), Oil by-products (26.6%), Iron and steel (14.1%), Worked stone (11.8%) and Lime, gypsum and plaster (6.7%). By contrast, there were decreases in the inter-annual prices of the raw materials for Office material (-2.5%), Electric energy (-2.1%), Glass (-1.8%), and Metal structures and boilermaking (-1.2%).