International tourists who visited Spain in 2011 spent 52,796 million euros, representing a 7.9% increase, according to figures from the Tourism Expenditure Survey (Egatur) prepared by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism published on Monday.

The average expenditure per tourist stood at 934 euros in 2011, 0.2% higher than the same period in 2010, while average daily spending rose by 4.6% to 102 euros.

UK and Germany lead the total tourist spending with 10,377 million euros (up 2.1%), and 8,669 million euros (also up 2.1%), respectively. Tourists from Scandinavia and France were those who most increased their spending, with increases of 10.1% and 12.8% respectively.

By region, Catalonia, with 21.4% of the total tourist expenditure and a growth of 7.4%, stood in the first position among the target destinations for 2011.

In December, foreign tourist expenditure increased by 5.2% to 2,811 million euros. Last month the average daily expenditure increased by 17.8% to 104 euros, while the average expenditure per tourist fell 0.4% to 1,033 euros.

El Mundo reported that the markets which contributed most to the growth of spending in December were Japan, United Kingdom, the Nordic countries and Switzerland.

The Canary Islands gathered a major part of the total revenues received with 32.7% of the total, or 918 million euros, and 14.5% more than in December 2010, followed by Catalonia, with 17.6% of the total expenditure, at 494 million euros, representing 1.7% less than the same month last year.

In 2011, families dedicated 29.1% of their gross income, counting deductions, on housing, which is almost two percentage points more than a year earlier, when this figure stood at 27.3%, according to data from the Bank of Spain.

This increase is striking since, according to the Ministry of Development, during the past year the average price of private housing fell by 6.8%, which, in principle, should have reduced the amount for this expenditure in household budgets.

The Bank of Spain statistics indicate that, for its part, the deduction for home purchases, which last year was limited to incomes of up to 24,000 euros per year, served to reduce the wage effort of families to below the 33% recommended by the State Plan for Housing and Rehabilitation 2009-2012.

So, without the benefit of this tax relief, households spent up to 36.1% of their gross income to the end of 2011, up to seven percentage points more. In this case, the increase over the fourth quarter of 2010 was 2.3 percentage points despite the price cuts.

Europa Press reported that the Government has approved in general the reinstatement of the deduction for the purchase of a main residence, although the G-14 group of major real estate agents, as well as the Association of Spanish Promoters and Constructors (APCE), have claimed that this also extends to second homes.

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, sent the Spanish Government a letter yesterday announcing his intention to send EU employment experts to Spain in February in order to help fight youth unemployment.

The initiative will also take in the other seven Member States whose youth unemployment rates exceed 30%: Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The youth unemployment rate in Spain reached 48.7% in December, the highest in the EU, according to data released by Eurostat on Tuesday. The EU executive?s spokeswoman, Pia Ahrenkilde, said of these figures ?We must act now, and in the short term, to do more to combat the urgency of youth unemployment. It is unacceptable to have these very alarming rates of youth unemployment in some Member States?.

The EU experts are ?to visit each of the countries concerned in February, for one or two days, to identify where the EU contribution could be useful to help develop a youth employment plan?, said the spokeswoman. These missions were endorsed by EU leaders at their summit on Monday.

Europa Press reported that the EU officials will form ?action teams? along with the Spanish authorities, employers and unions. These teams must then consider how best to use the 10,700 million euros in European aid which has been assigned to Spain up to 2013, and which has not yet been spent.

?One of the objectives of these ?action teams? should be to agree on how to accelerate and, where necessary, redirect these uncommitted funds?, said Ahrenkilde. They must also ?review the priorities of existing programs in order to have more impact on measures for young people and job creation in SMEs?, she added, stressing that ?there are no new funds? for fighting youth unemployment.

Another of these teams? tasks will be to determine how to promote the use of the EU exchange programs for Erasmus and Leonardo students and trainees.

The ?action teams? will have a period of eleven weeks, until mid-April, to develop an action plan to combat this problem. On Monday the Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, made it clear he was prepared to send his own experts to Brussels in order to accelerate the implementation of these measures.