Madrid - Spain's EU-harmonized consumer prices fell 0.1 per cent in March, after rising 0.7 per cent in February, the National Statistics Institute (INE) said Monday.

Spain thus became the first eurozone country to register negative consumer prices during the global crisis, the economic newspaper Expansion said on its website.

If the figure is confirmed by Spain's general consumer price index IPC later on, prices would be falling for the first time since comparable statistics began to be established nearly 50 years ago, the INE said.

The decline did not yet mean that Spain had gone into a deflation, Economy Minister Pedro Solbes said, attributing it largely to lower oil prices.

The decline was also attributed to shrinking consumption in the country which slipped into a recession in late 2008. (dpa)