Weekly Report - 22 January 2009 (ISSN 1741-7422)

MEXICO | US recession bites. The economy is reeling from the effects of the US recession. On 21 January the official statistics agency, Inegi, reported that unemployment in December was 4.32%. This is the highest since 2000, when the Inegi switched to a new system of measuring unemployment. Data from the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo Urbano (ENEU) suggests that urban unemployment in December 2008 was as high as it was in 1995 when the economy contracted by 7% in a year, after a devaluation at the end of 1994.
On 19 January Inegi reported that industrial output in Mexico fell by 5.4%, year-on-year, in November 2008. Manufacturing contracted by 6.2% year-on-year while construction was down by 5.1%; mining, which also includes oil production, was down by 4.2%. The state oil monopoly reported that in 2008 crude oil production was down by 9.2% at an average of 2.799m bpd.

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