Foreign investment in Mexico

Foreign investors appear to be discounting the political strife and the pipeline attacks that disrupted industrial production earlier this year.

The Mexican government reports in Milenio that foreign investment is up more than 30 percent this year. I was surprised to learn that barely 50 percent of this investment is from the U.S. The Netherlands is second with 12 percent; Spain third with about 10 percent, followed by France with nine percent.

Foreign investment is controversial in a lot of places, including the U.S. Remember the furor when a Dubai firm wanted to buy port facilities here?

But in Mexico, there is quite a bit of a tradition of isolationist nationalism that views all foreign investment, especially U.S. investment, as a threat to national sovereignty.

In a related story,
President Felipe Calderon met with a group of Lebanese business people--apparently Mexican citizens/residents-- and brushed aside that tradition, saying that Mexico's economic transformation requires lots of investment, foreign and domestic--not demagoguery. To encourage investment, Calderon said the government needs to provide security, legal certainty and clear regulations.