The Mexican Ministry of Economy confirmed that in the first two months of 2022, Mexico positioned itself as the main trading partner of the United States and detailed that total trade between the two nations totaled $113,187 million, representing an annual growth of 16.7%.
In this way, our country surpassed China as the largest trading partner of the US, a situation that represents the strengthening of productive integration in the North American region, said Tatiana Clouthier, Secretary of Economy.
The figures released by the United States Department of Commerce Census Bureau indicate that Mexico concentrated 14.5% of that country's foreign trade, slightly surpassing China and Canada
During the first two months of the year, Mexican exports stood at $32,536 million, an increase of 18.6 per cent over the previous year. As for imports from the neighbor to the north, these amounted to 23,715 million, an increase of 12.7%.
During the period of the coronavirus pandemic, Mexico accumulated nine months without occupying the position of the largest trading partner in the US, a position that it recovered marginally during the first two months of 2022.
This trade balance for our country occurs after the US economy experienced a strong expansion in the last quarter of 2021.
According to Bloomberg, the states of Baja California, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas accounted for nearly 50% of exports to the neighboring country at the end of last year.
These trade balance sheet data are presented at a time when the governments of Mexico and the United States have shown their differences with respect to the Energy Reform promoted by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and some US sectors.
Last Thursday, a delegation consisting of John Kerry, climate envoy of Joe Biden's government, Ken Salazar, US ambassador to Mexico, and a group of representatives of the country's major companies met at the National Palace with the Mexican president and part of his cabinet to discuss the possible effects on the relationship bilateral with possible changes to the legal framework in the Mexican electricity industry.
In this regard, AMLO said that in the meeting with the US delegation, he clarified that the electricity reform is not a statist or expropriatory initiative and added that he does not consider it to be in any violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“We agreed to hand over the initiative so that they know it thoroughly and there was also something that caught my attention, because it was said and then I saw it published, that they saw us pull our ears and that they forced us to accept the participation of a group from the US government to review everything related to our initiative... well that is logical, we could not accept it, neither from the United States, nor from Canada, nor from China, nor from Russia. And there was an approach that communication should be maintained on the subject and that a group should participate, but they raised that and I was silent... it was not accepted,” said the president last Friday.
On the same day, Ambassador Ken Salazar reported that the meeting at the Mexican government headquarters spoke “about the principles that should govern the energy sector in the region in order to accelerate the use of renewable energy and North American integration, and compliance with the T-MEC.”
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