Decrease of Domestic Product in MexicoMexico's per capita Gross Domestic Product totalled 155,949 pesos ($7,083) in the second quarter, a drop of 19.5 per cent, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reported, on August 27. The per capita GDP marks the value in pesos of the income per inhabitant, which in those three months is the lowest in annualized terms since the same period in 1996 when it stood at 150,394 pesos ($6,836). Reaction is yet to come from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is a critic of the mechanism for measuring GDP because of the inadequacies of the method for weighing economic development, such as not considering factors linked to social welfare and non-economic services. Mexico is devising its own system for measuring economic development that includes people's well-being and happiness, as well as the levels of corruption that it aims to turn into an economic category. The historical collapse of per capita GDP in 2020, according to INEGI, was due to the fact that the economy recorded an annual fall of 18.7 per cent in April-June this year, coupled with the increase in the country's population over the past year (0.8 per cent). What INEGI -- whose data and conclusions almost never coincide with those of the government -- finds serious is that the fall in 2020 is 9.0 percentage points higher than that of 1995, when the indicator plummeted 10.5 per cent in the second quarter of that year, and was also 9.2 percentage points higher than the fall in the second quarter of 2009, and 11.6 points higher than that recorded in the 1983 crisis, in a similar period in April-June. INEGI's analysts anticipate that the main impact of the collapse of the Mexican economy will be a deterioration in the country's poverty indicators. The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy indicated that the number of people living in extreme poverty will increase to more than 10 million due to the economic and health crisis. Meanwhile organizations such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean expect Mexico to be the country with the greatest increase in poverty in the region. (Prensa Latina, August 27.)
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