Ancient Mexico Facts

Mexico always has had a diverse export mix. In the 1940s minerals, such as silver, copper, lead, zinc, and petroleum made up the majority of Mexican exports. Agricultural products, especially cotton (Laguna), coffee (southern highlands), sugar (south-central temperate zone), shrimp (gulf coast), cattle (northern region), cord fiber (Yucatán), and fruits and vegetables have also played an important role. During the 1950s and 1960s, the importance of mineral exports diminished, while that of manufactured goods increased. This change reflected the growth of Mexican industries, led by the steel, glass, cement, and beer factories in Monterrey and the textile factories in Puebla.

In the late 1970s petroleum shot to the top of Mexico’s list of exports, fed by the discovery of huge reserves on the gulf coast. In 1979 petroleum comprised more than half of the value of Mexico’s exports, and by 1982 oil’s share stood at more than three-quarters. The fall in world prices in 1986 reduced the weight of oil in Mexico’s export mix, however, and by 1993 petroleum accounted for only 22 percent of Mexican exports.

Automobiles and automobile parts also began to be an important source of export revenue in the 1970s. (From 1982 to 1988 the number of automobiles produced in Mexico increased tenfold.) Most of these were assembled in “maquila” plants near the U.S. border. The Mexican government encouraged the creation of these off-shore assembly plants for U.S. manufacturers beginning in 1965. Their numbers grew dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s, and by the mid1990s there were several thousand maquiladoras assembling everything from televisions to heavy trucks.

The composition of Mexican imports also has varied over time. In the 1940s, Mexico had to import 350,000 tons of food per year to feed its population. Through improvements in irrigation and technology, Mexico gradually reduced its dependence on imported food through the 1950s and even became a net exporter of agricultural goods in the 1960s. During this period imports of machinery and industrial inputs increased to supply domestic factories. In the 1980s Mexico again began to import greater volumes of foodstuffs, reflecting the failure of government programs designed to achieve food self-sufficiency.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the appreciation of the peso increased the purchasing power of Mexican consumers abroad, and the proportion of Mexican imports represented by consumer goods increased to 14 percent, about double what it had been in the early 1980s. Increased consumer confidence, the availability of consumer credit, and faith in the economic program of President Carlos Salinas contributed to this trend. The peso crash in late 1994, however, brought Mexico’s foreign buying spree in consumer goods to an end.

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