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MEXICO CITY, May 1 — Mexico’s economic growth slowed sharply in the first quarter of 2021 as a surge in coronavirus infections put the brakes on Latin America’s second largest economy, official figures showed Friday.
Gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 0.4 per cent in the three months to March from the previous quarter, when it had risen by 3.3 per cent, government statistics agency INEGI reported.
Compared with the same period of last year, GDP was down 2.9 per cent based on a preliminary estimate, it said.
“Mexico’s economy was dragged down by the tightening of lockdown measures around the turn of the year, and power outages which hit the industrial sector in the middle of the quarter,” the Capital Economics consultancy firm said in a note to clients.
But the country’s economic recovery now “appears to be back on track,” helped by a decline in new coronavirus infections which have led to an easing of lockdown measures, it said.
Mexico’s economy shrank 8.5 per cent in 2020 in what analysts said was the worst slump since the Great Depression some nine decades ago.
The finance ministry predicts that GDP will rebound by 5.3 per cent in 2021 thanks to coronavirus vaccinations, increased export demand and stronger growth in key commercial partner the United States.
“By the middle of this year we’re going to be in the economic situation that we were in before the pandemic,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters on Friday.
Mexico’s official Covid-19 death toll of more than 216,000 is the third highest in the world after those of the United States and Brazil, and the actual figure is believed to be significantly worse. — AFP
Source: Malay Mail
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