Daniel Chavez Moran on Mexico’s Global Economy

Daniel Chavez Moran, a retired developer now focused on philanthropy through the non-profit Vidanta Foundation, recognizes that today’s global economy directly connects life in Mexico with decisions made far away in Manhattan in the United States. He read with interest this recent article on the subject in the Economist magazine, excerpted below:

Making the desert bloom ...The financial crisis of 2008 began on the trading floors of Manhattan, but the biggest tremors were felt in the desert south of the Rio Grande. Mexico suffered the steepest recession of any country in the Americas... Its economy shrank by 6.1 percent in 2009... Between the third quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, 700,000 jobs were lost, 260,000 of them in manufacturing. The slump was deepest in the prosperous north: worst hit was the border state of Coahuila. Saltillo, its capital, had grown rich exporting to America. The state’s output fell by 12.3 percent in 2009 as orders dried up. The recession turned a reasonable decade for Mexico’s economy into a dreary one. In the ten years to 2010, income per person grew by 0.6 percent a year, one of the lowest rates in the world. In the early 2000s Mexico boasted Latin America’s biggest economy, measured at market exchange rates, but it was soon overtaken by Brazil, whose GDP is now twice as big and still pulling away, boosted by the soaring real...
 Yet Mexico’s economy is packed with potential. Thanks to the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a string of bilateral deals, it trades more than Argentina and Brazil combined, and more per person than China. Last year it did $400 billion of business with the United States, more than any country bar Canada and China... Though expatriates whinge about bureaucracy, the World Bank ranks Mexico the easiest place in Latin America to do business and the 35th-easiest in the world, ahead of Italy and Spain...
 These strengths have helped Mexico to rebound smartly from its calamitous slump...

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