EMPLOYMENT | Job losses mount in maquiladora sector. At the end of June, 1.08m people were employed in Mexico's 3,229 maquila plants. As the newspaper Reforma points out, this is more than a quarter of a million fewer than in November 2000, the month before the Fox administration took office. Most of the job losses were in the northern border states: Baja California (-74,485), Chihuahua (-70,811), Sonora (-38,623), Tamaulipas (-22,218) and Nuevo León (-18,105).
The Consejo Nacional de la Industria Maquiladora de Exportación says this is mainly due to the relocation of assembly industries abroad; many to China, but also to other Latin American countries like Brazil, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
BLACK ECONOMY | Informal sector produces more than farming. In 2001, Mexico's informal economy produced goods and services worth M$663bn (US$60.8bn), or just over three times as much as agriculture. The figure comes from a guesstimate made by the national statistical institute, Inegi, which also reckons that the profits of the informal sector are equivalent to 17.4% of those of the formal economy. The black economy's labour costs, says Inegi, amount to only 8.5% of total income, as against 20.6% in the formal economy.
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