From the editor's desk

The Business Year: Mexico 2020 is a comprehensive examination of Latin America’s second largest economy during an unprecedented period of uncertainty and change. To understand how this economy performed during this period and how it might recover, we conducted a year-long investigation that includes interviews with the top executives and officials from the public and private sectors.

This has also presented us with a unique challenge that sets The Business Year: Mexico 2020 apart from our previous editions on the country. While there is always a risk for an annual publication to have certain parts become outdated due to a major internal event or external shock, the global COVID-19 pandemic has taken this risk to an extreme reality.

As The Business Year: Mexico 2020 includes both interviews conducted before and during the crisis, where expectations and circumstances can vary wildly, we have had to take some deliberate editorial decisions that you the reader should be aware of. As such, the scope of many interviews is focused on the long term: what are the inherent opportunities and structural challenges within this sector, particularly those that predated and will outlast the pandemic? What role can or should this specific industry have in moving the country forward, and who are the people behind its development? Of course the pandemic is not being ignored, as the response and impact of COVID-19 is of obvious importance to understanding the current situation, but this is all to say that each interview is not devoted solely to how a company or institution is responding to the Coronavirus in the short term. For more coverage of the immediate impact on the Mexican economy and its premier companies, I would suggest to visit our website, thebusinessyear.com, where a host of written and video interviews covering these more short-term topics can be found.

The pandemic has both further exposed the gaps in Mexico’s economy, and accelerated the trends meant to close them. Issues such as digitalization and financial inclusion, long discussed but until now unevenly implemented, have taken center stage. Tourism, a sector of obvious importance for the 7th most visited country in 2019, has a long road to safe recovery after suffering from unprecedented coronavirus-related hits in the second quarter of 2020.

It has also accelerated Mexico’s shifting role in global geopolitics and trade. The country’s involvement in supply chains and trade, already trending toward a more regional direction due to the changing dynamics of the US-China trade relationship, could potentially look significantly different in the coming years.

Against all of this is a backdrop of the already embattled AMLO administration. It continues to push its vision for economic change—often times, with a mixed reception from the private sector—while also attempting to handle the pandemic.

This is all to say that 2020 is a year of daunting challenges, unprecedented uncertainty, and urgent opportunities for the vibrant country.