Q&A: Economist Gerardo Esquivel says full benefits of NAFTA elude Mexico

World News Report: Next week, the George W. Bush Institute, the public policy arm of the former president’s library in Dallas, will launch a North America Scorecard with an assessment that the North American Free Trade Agreement has been a boon to the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Gerardo Esquivel offers up a slightly different point of view, specifically that Mexico has not done as well as the other nations.

Thousands reject the extractivist logic at the World Bank-IMF meeting in Peru

Waging Nonviolence: The annual governors’ meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank opened on October 5 in Peru’s capital city. In the meeting, an estimated 800 representatives from 188 countries were negotiating the shape of the world’s soon-to-be renovated finance infrastructure.

While the international media focused on the official meetings, no news outlets outside of Latin America have mentioned the Plataforma Alternativa conference — a parallel three-day meeting organized under the theme “Belying the ‘Peruvian Miracle.’”

More than 1,200 people attended Plataforma Alternativa’s conference. Dozens of young volunteers zoomed through the marbled hallways of Lima’s Hotel Bolívar, which hosted the conference. Participants represented dozens of organizations and countries as diverse as the Netherlands, China, the United States, Belgium, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Indonesia, Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Palestine and Argentina.

On Friday, an estimated 5,000 people marched across 70 blocks in Lima, from Plaza San Martín to the first of three police perimeters around the official conference. Groups at the protest included indigenous feminist organizations, the Lima-based Comando Feminista, Bloque Hip Hop, worker unions, the Peruvian Campesino Confederation, and dozens of others. Read more.

Mexican Government Cuts 2016 Budget by $13 Billion amid Slumping Oil Prices

Latin American Herald Tribune: The government is cutting the 2016 budget by 221 billion pesos ($13.12 billion) to maintain economic stability amid a challenging global situation, Mexican Finance and Public Credit Secretary Luis Videgaray said.

“The spending planned in the budget for the year 2016 reflects a reduction of 221 billion pesos ($13.12 billion), that is 1.15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) less than in the planned spending for last year,” Videgaray told Congress.

Migrant Dollars More Valuable than Black Gold

FNS News: For the first time in 15 years, dollars sent home by Mexicans working in the United States have surpassed the value of Mexico’s oil exports. According to the central Bank of Mexico, the flow of migrant remittances from the U.S. reached $14.3 billion from January to July of this year. In contrast, money earned from oil exports came to about $12.2 billion during the same time period, according to the Pemex national oil company.

Alfredo Salgado Torres and Juan Jose Li Ng, analysts for the BBVA-Bancomer bank, attributed a spike in remittances to better conditions in the U.S. economy, exemplified by improved employment in states with large immigrant populations like Texas and California, as well as the ongoing peso devaluation that provides greater incentives for migrants to send money to their loved ones back home.

Slowdown in China Bruises Economy in Latin America

NYTimes: Few people are as intensely worried about the slowing Chinese economy as Latin Americans.

Not only does China buy nearly 40 percent of Chile’s copper, but its once-insatiable demand helped push copper prices from $1 to $4 a pound. Read more.

For Mexico, good economic times are always just out of reach

McClatchyDC

BY Tim Johnson

The central bank chief calls it a “temporary pothole.”

Whatever the term, Mexico’s economy has hit some turbulence - despite the most ambitious overhaul to its business structure in decades.

Tax hikes have dampened consumer confidence, retail sales remain stagnant, and low U.S. demand for Mexican-made cars and televisions slowed the economy earlier this year to its lowest point in four years. Mexico grew at a sluggish 1.8 percent rate in the first quarter of 2014, forcing the government to ratchet down its forecast to 2.7 percent growth for the year.

Bankers and economists still voice hope that Mexico is on the threshold of faster growth because of the opening of the energy, banking and telecommunications sectors. “We know that the reforms don’t have an immediate effect and that it is necessary to have patience and persevere,” a Spanish banker, Francisco Gonzalez Rodriguez, chief executive of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, or BBVA, told a forum this week. Read more

Mexico, where off-the-books work is the rule, not the exception

Global Post 
July 30, 2013

Mexico City - Meet Luis Troncoso, enemy of the dynamic modern economy envisioned by Mexico's leaders.

Troncoso, 70, and many of the 150 other street vendors who work with him rise before dawn five days a week, heading first to buy provisions at Mexico City's huge produce distribution center and then to one of the neighborhood streets where they hawk their goods.

"This is the opportunity that we have,” said Troncoso, whose own stall selling an array of candy is flanked by others displaying used clothes, fresh meats, fruits and flowers. “There aren't any other jobs. This work is passed down from generation to generation.”  Read more. 

Mexico aims to bring shadow economy into the light

Reuters
By Krista Hughes
Jun 26, 2013

Seeking to dismantle a black economy dragging on economic growth, Mexico wants to lure informal workers into the social security net - and the reach of the tax man.

Six in 10 Mexican workers, or 30 million people, live in the informal economy, eroding Mexico's already-low tax base and hindering plans to set up a universal social security system.

"The country loses 3 or 4 percentage points of GDP every year because 60 percent of its workers don't generate any taxes and also don't have social security benefits," Labor Minister Alfonso Navarrete said on Tuesday.  Read more. 

Analysis: Mexico's reforms hook U.S. investors

Reuters
By Daniel Bases
New York, Mar 18, 2013

(Reuters) - Don't be fooled by the Mexican stock market's slow start to the year. The country's push for economic reforms and the revival of the economy of its largest trading partner, the United States, are stirring investor interest in Latin America's No. 2 market.

International fund managers say recent announcements of reforms to Mexico's education system and telecommunications sector provide a positive backdrop for U.S. investors to keep putting roughly 30 percent of their allocations for Latin America into Mexican stocks and bonds.

"You saw a lot of optimism around elections and the potential reforms," said Darren Capeloto, portfolio strategist focused on Latin America at Payden & Rygel in Los Angeles.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, in office since December, has managed to reach agreement with opposition lawmakers to push through reforms, the most important of which will be in the state-dominated energy sector this summer.  Read more. 

Mexico's leftist opposition rallies against energy reforms

Reuters
By David Alire Garcia
Mexico City, Mar 18, 2013

(Reuters) - Waving party flags and shouting their support, tens of thousands of leftist party members rallied on Sunday against government plans to overhaul Mexico's energy sector, a preview of the tough road ahead for President Enrique Pena Nieto's reform push.

Organized by the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, the rally took place on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the nationalization of the country's oil industry, the historical pivot that gave birth to state oil monopoly Pemex.


Speakers denounced any move to privatize the government-run oil giant, even though Pena Nieto and other members of his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, have consistently denied any plans to sell or privatize Pemex.

"We are being loyal to this historical legacy that has given our oil riches to the nation and we are going to defend it with everything we've got," said Jesus Zambrano, the PRD's national president, to rousing applause.  Read more. 

Mexico Reverses Foreign Investment Flows

The New York Times 
February 25, 2013

MEXICO CITY (AP) — After decades of depending on inflows of foreign capital to develop its economy, Mexico turned a corner and become a net exporter of direct investment capital in 2012, according to a report released Monday.

Mexico's central bank said that Mexican corporations invested about $25.6 billion last year in buying up foreign plants and companies, more than twice the $12.6 foreigners invested directly in Mexican firms. An official confirmed that was the first time in recent memory that outflows exceeded inflows.

For a country that still has one foot planted firmly in the developing world, that news worried some analysts and delighted others.  Read more.

United States and Mexico Reach Deal on Tomato Imports

The New York Times
Stephanie Storm
February 3, 2013

The United States and Mexico have reached a tentative agreement on cross-border trade in tomatoes, narrowly averting a trade war that threatened to engulf a broad swath of American businesses.

The agreement, reached late Saturday, raises the minimum price at which Mexican tomatoes can be sold in the United States, aims to strengthen compliance and enforcement and increases the types of tomatoes governed by the bilateral pact to four from one.

“The draft agreement raises reference prices substantially, in some cases more than double the current reference price for certain products, and accounts for changes that have occurred in the tomato market since the signing of the original agreement,” Francisco Sánchez, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, said in a statement.

The agreement will be open for public comment until Feb. 11. The Commerce Department estimated it would go into effect March 4.  Read more.