2011: No Fun

Analysts at a meeting of Latin American economic analysts said that Mexico's economic performance next year will be worse than the rest of the region's, which is a sobering prediction, though somewhat less so because the projection isn't, objectively speaking, that bad (3.9 percent), and also that the projections for 2010 shorted the actual growth. In general, though, Mexico has a couple of big long-term barriers to development that could prove trickier than those faced by many other nations in Latin America: they are overly dependent on the US, which is looking at years of reduced consumption, and they have (for now) a competitive rather than a complementary relationship with China, which stands in stark contrast to what is fueling a lot of South America's growth.