Luxembourg, 17/05/2005 (Agence Europe) - Answering press questions on Saturday on how appropriate the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy is given the different rates of growth and productivity observed within the euro zone, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said that such differences were ”not abnormal for such vast continental economies”. After the informal Ecofin meeting, Mr Trichet explained that the ECB survey should cover the whole of the zone, “as does the Federal Reserve”, in the United States, without asking whether all the economies are in phase. “In a continental economy of 306 million inhabitants, it is normal for there to be quite substantial differences between the rates of inflation observed in the various parts of the economy or between growth rates”, Mr Trichet explained. Taking the example of the United States, where there can be a boom in Florida and a difficult situation in Massachusetts, Mr Trichet stressed that the typical differences between inflation rates in the twelve states of the euro zone and the main States in the United States were of an identical size. Nothing is therefore abnormal, even if this must “of course be looked into carefully” like the development of unitary production costs and medium and long term trends - which must be “looked at even more closely”, he stressed. “We believe our monetary policy is appropriate” from the point of view of growth and job creation, Mr Trichet stressed, saying that the level of interest rates, the lowest since the end of the Second World War, reflects the credibility of this policy.