MexiData

MexiData is a website maintained and written by a group of businessmen and politicians with insight into the workings of the government and business of Mexico. The columnists are Enrique Andrade Gonzalez, an attorney and business consultant and former Director of Audiences and Hearings for Vicente Fox until two years ago, Kenneth Emmond, a Canadian journalist and consultant who lives in Mexico, Carlos Luken, a consultant and real estate develpor and Barnard Thompson, a long-time consultant in risk analysis who is also the editor and who lives in San Diego. Mr. Thompson runs MIRA, Mexico Information and Research Associates which helps US companies do business in Latin America.

Without spending all day reading the website, I cannot say where these guys fall in the political spectrum between liberal and conservative. One of the categories of information on this website are columns written about their opinions on current affairs affecting or originating in Mexico. The columns are well thought out, informative but not very in-depth.

The second category of data on this website is Media Watch. These are columns written in Spanish for Mexican and other spanish-language newspapers, translated into English. For those of us with not enough fluency in Spanish or time to puzzle out a whole article, this section is a great resource.

But the best resource of all on this website is the Reports section. Here the group has uploaded various .pdf files with reports from all over. There is a lot of good information here. One of the first to catch my eye was the InterAmerican Development Banks' report on Migrant Remittances from the USA to Latin America. Did you know that the cost of transferring remittances has fallen 50% over the last six years? And that remittances from migrants constitutes one of the broadest and most effective poverty allevation programs in the world? I knew it was doing a lot of people a lot of good. Did you know that immigrants constitute 23% of working people in the production sector and 20% of service workers in the US?
Did you know that the majority of immigrants in the US did not have jobs in their home country before they came to the US? And that if they did have work before, within a month they were making an average of six times their former salary? And that almost 40% of immigrants found a job within two weeks of crossing the border?

In this section you can also read reports from Amnesty International about violence against women in Mexico. You can read the Global Competitiveness Report from the Executive Summary of the World Economic Forum, for instance. There is even a Maquiladora Employment report just recently released by the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas.

In other words, there is a wealth of information for anyone doing research or someone just plain curious, like me. Enjoy!