Indeed, for the first four months of 2009, industrial production was 10.7% down on the same period of 2008. The big problem for Mexico is that May is likely to be even worse. In the US industrial output fell even more heavily in May (down 1.1%) than it did in April (down 0.7%).
The Mexican industrial production figures in April were a horror show right across the board: manufacturing output fell by 18% (thanks largely to the problems of the US motor industry which Mexican plants supply) while construction, worryingly, was down by 11.3%. This may be just a reflection of the effect of the outbreak of swine flu (AH1N1) but Inegi itself said that there was simply less building going on.
Javier Lozano Alarcón, the labour and social security minister, warned that unless the economy started to recover soon the country would see more people slip back into poverty. He suggested that more children would be forced to work, rather than stay at school, and that this would lead to poverty levels reverting to what they had been 10 years ago.
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