MEXICO CITY – President Felipe Calderon said Thursday that the Mexican economy grew 2.7 percent in the third quarter and has therefore climbed out of its worst recession in decades.

“This result is very good news because it indicates the end of the recession, of the economic contraction in the country and we’re working hard so this recovery continues and broadens in the coming years,” the head of state said in inaugurating the Bloomberg Mexico Economic Forum in this capital.

In addition to the return to economic growth, the inflation rate came in at “4.6 percent in the first two weeks of October, the lowest level since May 2008,” Calderon said.

The official gross domestic product figure will be provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography on Nov. 20, although most analysts and the Mexican central bank had already estimated that the economy grew at a clip of around 3 percent.

The Mexican economy began shrinking at the end of 2008, with a 1.6 percent drop in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter.

The GDP decline continued in the first two quarters of this year, falling 8.2 percent and 10.2 percent, respectively. The government is forecasting the economy will contract by 6.8 percent for all of 2009, while private economists say the figure will be closer to 7.2 percent.

The Mexican economy in the first half of the year shrank by almost 10 percent year-on-year, “a truly brutal contraction,” the president said Thursday, noting that there was a sharp slowdown not only in consumer demand but also in investment and bank lending to the private sector.

He predicted Mexico’s economy would rebound to grow 3 percent next year and achieve growth rates of 5 percent in 2012, when Calderon’s six-year term ends.

“We’re determined to make our economic forecasts a reality. And beyond that, we want the country to be able to achieve sustained growth rates in the future,” Calderon said.

With that goal in mind, he pledged continued prudence in the “handling of macroeconomic variables” as the country works to shore up troubled public finances that have been depleted by a fall in tax collection and a steady decline in oil output, Mexico’s No. 1 source of revenue.

The president also pointed to a rosier employment picture, saying that “80,000 new net (formal) jobs” were created in the country in October, marking the fifth consecutive month that employment has risen.

But Calderon also said that “structural solutions” were needed to tackle the country’s “structural problems” and, in that regard, congratulated Congress for passing the revenue portion of his administration’s 2010 budget bill over the weekend.

Lawmakers agreed to raise taxes on most consumer goods, though not food and medicine, and to hike income taxes for the highest earners, among other changes.

Many analysts, however said that measures were not enough to shore up Mexico’s public finances and broaden the country’s tax base.

Mexico, which has been hammered by a drop in exports to the United States and lower remittances amid the global financial crisis and a worrying decline in oil production and oil-export revenues due to insufficient investment in that sector, is trying to retain the investment-grade credit rating it has enjoyed throughout this decade.