Home to Advanced Civilizations
Pre-Columbian Mexico dates to about 8,000 BC, is identified as one of seven cradles of civilization, and was home to many advanced Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec before first contact with Europeans. With the promulgation of the 1917 Constitution and the emergence of the country’s current political system, it has advanced quickly to become the eighth most visited country in the world, and is poised to become the world’s fifth or seventh largest economy by 2050
By Her Excellency Francisca E. Mendez Escobar, Ambassador of Mexico in United Arab Emirates
Mexico is one of the most open economies in the world through a network of free trade agreements making it one of the most competitive countries for productive investment. Actually, Mexico is an economic power on the global stage, being the 11th largest economy in the world (in terms of GDP measured by the purchasing power parity index).
Holding Many Strengths
During the last five years, we have just passed an important number of structural reforms that have helped to propel and prepare our country for a better growth and development in different areas including, education, energy, telecommunications, financial, tax, labour, judicial, political, anticorruption, transparency among others. We say that Mexico is tradition, culture and innovation, with many strengths; today we are the 11th most populated country with 124 million inhabitants, with a highly skilled young workforce. The 13th country with the largest international reserves; with a growing fiscal capacity and the lowest unemployment rate in the last ten years (3.4 % of the economic active population in 2017). On trade, Mexico is the 13th largest exporter in the world, (with 23% relative to GDP of medium tech and high tech manufacturing exports); and one of the most attractive destinations for foreign direct investment; just last year Mexico received around 29.6 billion dollars in FDI (from 2012 to 2017 Mexico has received more than 170 billion dollars in FDI). The twelve main products exported by Mexico to the world are light motor vehicles, auto parts & accessories, transportation vehicles, computers and computers parts, telephone and telephone parts, petroleum oils and bituminous minerals, tv sets, electricity conductive materials, medical and veterinary equipment, seats, tractors and gold.
Tourism Opportunities
Mexico has something to offer to every visitor; from cultural and natural assets, such as beaches, jungles, lakes, waterfalls, rivers, mountains, deserts, and impressive gastronomy, beautiful and historical monuments, museums, colonial buildings; but mostly a unique, rich, friendly and hospitable culture. It has a good services and a strong hospitality infrastructure (more than 750 thousand hotel rooms), airports (actually, a new airport in Mexico City is under construction to handle a capacity of 120 million passengers (when fully operational) with an investment of 13 billion dollars), ports and highways connecting every corner of our country. During the past years the private and public sectors have combined, coordinated and joined efforts to work on different tasks from hosting world events, festivals, international congresses and expos, to sports and include more SMEs qualified to generate better services and jobs, as well as the development of products such as medical, cultural and business tourism. In 2017, Mexico reached record highs with more than 39 million visitors from around the world, being one of the most visited countries (6th most visited nation according to the United Nations Tourism Organization). The tourism industry in Mexico is a significant contributor of income to our economy; just last year in 2017, Mexico received more than 21 billion dollars from international tourists.
My Efforts towards Cordial Relations
On trade and business, together with our commercial and investment promotion office of ProMexico in Dubai, we have been working on the attraction of foreign direct investment into our country through visiting specific companies, sovereign funds and participating in seminars, expos and congresses all over the United Arab Emirates, with the support of governmental institutions such as the Ministry of Economy, Dubai FDI and of course the Chambers of Commerce and Industry among other relevant actors. Likewise, we have achieved the execution of important agreements between both nations to protect and promote investments such as the APRI (Agreement for the Protection and Promotion of Reciprocal Investments, which just entered into force this year) and the Agreement to avoid Double Taxation. The promotion of reciprocal business missions and opportunities on a daily basis is our goal; likewise, it has been an important challenge since there is a lack of knowledge and awareness of the potential opportunities for the private sector on both sides of the equation. The United Arab Emirates is a new market for Mexico, our commercial office just opened less than three years ago; however, there have been significant advances in the participation in trade exhibitions such as Gulfood, Yummex, Arabian Travel Market, or ADIPEC which have brought important delegations from Mexico achieving satisfactory results in this regard. Likewise, Mexico has received trade missions from the UAE on a yearly basis since then, being single companies or delegations as the one headed by the Minister of Economy of the United Arab Emirates back in November 2016. On the connectivity, we have been working with the local airlines such as Emirates in achieving soon passengers’ flights to Mexico; today we only have cargo flights from Emirates, since we believe connectivity is a key to facilitate approaching and linking businesspersons and companies of both nations easily. Each day, more and more companies and individuals are becoming aware of the business opportunities that each nation offers to each other and that there is a lot of room to grow, but it is a process and takes time; that is the reason that in each official visit or each event that we, as representative of Mexico, have tried to include the business and economic topics on top of the agenda.
