Mexico Among the World’s Top 50 Destinations for “Doing Business” According to The World Bank

Mexico is ranked among the world’s top fifty economies for ease of doing business, and shows improvement for the fourth consecutive year, according to a report just released by The World Bank’s “Doing Business 2013: Smarter Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises” report. 

The World Bank’s “Doing Business” report joins other internationally well-recognized sources, such as the World Economic Forum and the IMD, that demonstrate how Mexico is advancing in global competitiveness. As MexicoToday reported in recent months:

• Mexico has improved 13 positions in the past two years, as reported by The World Economic Forum (watch video here)
• Mexico has improved 10 positions in the past two years, as reported by the IMD  
• Mexico has improved six positions in the past two years, as reported by The World Bank’s Doing Business report 

The “Doing Business” report assesses regulations affecting domestic firms in 185 economies, including Mexico, and ranks the economies measured by ten areas of business regulation, including: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and resolving insolvency.

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The Keys to Mexico’s Economic Ascent

“Mexico ¿cómo vamos?” is a new website meant to track Mexico’s economic rise. Feel free to take a gander at http://www.mexicocomovamos.mx. 

The site is a creation of two of Mexico’s leading think tanks, and it draws on insights from 60 leading economists and policymakers, including the likes of Dr. Guillermo Ortiz, Dr. Luis de la Calle, and Dr. Jonathan Heath. A medley of interactive graphs and polls attend op-ed articles, making the site a wonk’s delight. (The question of the day: Can Mexico create one million formal sector jobs this year? ‘Unsure’ is just nudging out ‘agree’ as the most frequent choice among respondents.) The major drawback: so far it’s in Spanish only. 

This is just one more vignette in what has become a perceptible, though hardly dominant, trend in the world of global economic analysis in 2012: Mexico has an awfully bright future. Perhaps the most bullish prediction came from Nomura Securities earlier this year, when it forecast that Mexico’s economy would be larger than Brazil’s by 2022. A more conservative IMF forecast has Mexico’s economy eclipsing Brazil’s in 2028 or 2029. 

President Felipe Calderon, who will leave office on December 1, recently spoke to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., about Mexico’s underlying economic strengths. He went on to tick off infrastructure gains, including new roads and universities, and Mexico’s doubling down on free trade, as evidenced by its recent entrance into negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Among the many factoids and macroeconomic indicators, this fact stood out to me: Mexico exports more manufactured goods than the rest of Latin America, including Brazil, combined. 

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