This means that for every US$2 earned by Mexico's oil industry, its expatriate workers send home US$1.50. The remittances total for the first half of the year also overtook, for the first time, the inflow of foreign direct investment, which totalled US$5.22bn (20.8% less than in the comparable period of 2002).
EMPLOYMENT | Steepening jobs decline in manufacturing. The national statistical institute, Inegi, reports that jobs in manufacturing in the first half of this year were 3.4% fewer than in the same period of last year, with a tendency to further shrinkage: the year-on-year decline in June was 4.1%.
Blue-collar jobs have disappeared twice as fast as white-collar ones. Official figures also estimate the number of people working in the informal sector at 26.9% of the workforce.
The private-sector think-tank Ceesp has used the latest figures to take an oblique swipe at the government. It says that both the remittances from abroad and the growth of the informal sector bring home the need for `structural changes to promote formal employment'. The weakness of the economy that forces companies to reduce their personnel, says Ceesp, drives many workers to seek a source of income in the informal sector and abroad.
The latter, it says, has had a good effect, as a `safety valve' and a source of hard currency, while the former `generates more spending than income'. It is not hard to discern an allusion to President Vicente Fox's recent positive depiction of the informal sector (WR-03-32).
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