Employment

Inegi reports that 12.6 million Mexicans now work in the informal sector, which continues the up, up, up trend that financial crisis initiated. The article linked above also mentions unemployment figures around the nation. The industrial North has a some of the idlest states: Chihuahua has 8.5 percent unemployment, the highest in the nation. The figure for Durango is 7.2, in Coahuila it's 7.4, and in Nuevo León it's 6.7 percent. Meanwhile, in the South, which is less reliant on exports to the US, the picture couldn't be more different: 2 percent of Guerrero's active labor market is unemployed, 2.1 percent in Oaxaca, 2.7 percent in Chiapas, and 3.2 percent in Yucatán and Veracruz.

I mentioned last week how the South of Mexico in a relatively short time has gone from a major locus of violence to a big reason why, record drug violence notwithstanding, the nation is safer now than ten years ago. Unemployment in that region is traditionally low, so it can't explain the whole of that transition, but achieving full employment certainly doesn't make public security more complicated.