By Anthony Esposito and Miguel Gutierrez
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s economy contracted for a second straight quarter in the last three-month period of 2021, according to official data published on Monday, putting Latin America’s second-largest economy in a technical recession.
Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank in the fourth quarter by 0.1% from the previous three-month period in seasonally adjusted terms, preliminary data published by the INEGI national statistics agency showed.
That beat out expectations for GDP to contract in the fourth quarter by 0.3%, after the economy declined by 0.4% in the third quarter, according to a Reuters poll of analysts.
Mexico’s Deputy Finance Minister Gabriel Yorio said on Friday that talk of a “technical recession,” defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction, does not take into account coronavirus-related economic volatility and global supply chain issues.
Yorio said that global supply bottlenecks, increased prices for raw materials, and higher costs for ground transportation and sea shipping are weighing on the economy.
INEGI’s figures showed that tertiary activities, which comprise the service economy, contracted by 0.7% in the fourth quarter from the previous three-month period in seasonally adjusted terms.
The decline of “the labor intensive tertiary sector; a reflection of the impact of the recently approved outsourcing law which led to a large decline in services rendered to corporates, businesses,” Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos said in a research note.
Primary activities, which encompass farming, fishing and mining, rose by 0.3%, while secondary activities, which include manufacturing, increased by 0.4%.
Mexico’s economy expanded by 5.0% for full-year 2021, the data showed, after shrinking by 8.5% in 2020 in what was Mexico’s worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
GDP grew by 1.0% in the fourth quarter versus the same period a year earlier, data showed.
(Reporting by Anthony Esposito, Miguel Angel Gutierrez and the Santiago newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson and Chizu Nomiyama)
