The Americas Economy

Recent years have seen the number of asylum seekers along the US-Mexico border increasing. A vast majority of people seeking asylum are doing so to escape violence in their home countries, particularly from the Northern Triangle made up of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but also including small numbers of nationals of African countries, such as Cameroon and Burkina Faso...

As the world’s nations and businesses become increasingly interconnected, so too does the flow of global migration. According to the OECD’s “International Migration Outlook 2018”, in 2017 some 258m people resided in a country other than the one they were born in, and over 5m foreign-born persons were permanently settled in OECD countries. This flow of people not only brings...

Following a series of economic crises in the 1980s, Mexico progressively abandoned its relatively closed, inward-looking economic development strategy. Periodic waves of liberalising structural reforms have underpinned its transformation from an economy once heavily dependent on crude oil exports, to one of the world’s most open, trade-orientated emerging economies. One of the...

In accordance with the constitution, every six years the newly elected president of Mexico is required to prepare a National Development Plan (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, PND) covering the length of his or her mandate. The plan must be submitted to Congress for approval in the early months of the presidency, allowing the incoming administration to set out its vision for the...

Global trade faces protectionist headwinds that are dampening the outlook for growth in the coming years. According to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), trade volumes expanded by 3% in 2018 and are expected to decline slightly to 2.6% in 2019 before rebounding to 3% in 2020. This may be the first time since the 2007-08 global financial crisis that growth will fall below a 3...