Across the border, economy making life pretty good
By Marla Dickerson
Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY -- A sizzling stock market. A strengthening peso. Good economic growth. Someone forgot to tell Mexico that the U.S. has been flirting with recession.
Mexico's gross domestic product expanded at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the same period a year earlier, according to government figures released Thursday. It's a respectable performance that highlights the nation's surprising resilience in the face of a U.S. slowdown.
"Mexico ... is not immune" to what's happening north of the border, said Gray Newman, chief Latin American economist for Morgan Stanley in New York. But, "it's not suffering the kind of downturn that everyone was expecting with weakness in the U.S."
Mexico is the world's 14th-largest economy, according to the latest statistics available from the World Bank, with a GDP in 2006 of $839.2 billion, which is the value of all goods and services produced in the economy.
Bound to the United States by geography, immigration, trade and investment, Mexico's fortunes have long been linked to those of its northern neighbor.
The U.S. housing industry, for example, which employs one in five Latino immigrants, is in a slump, resulting in a marked slowdown of remittances sent to Mexico. A prolonged U.S. downturn would undoubtedly hit Mexico hard.
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