Figures released by the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social (IMSS) show that 39 percent fewer jobs were created in the first six months of 2019 compared with the same period in 2018.
IMSS registered 289,301 new jobs between January and June. The figure for last year, when President Enrique Peña Nieto was in office, was 517,434.
June was a particularly bad month, closing with 14,244 fewer jobs than the previous month, according to the IMSS.
In the state of Jalisco, the total of 2,326 jobs lost in June is the highest negative monthly figure in 17 years.
For Mauro Garza, president of the Jalisco branch of Coparmex, the national employer’s association, the numbers are not cyclical or an anomaly, but the result of poor federal government policy that has affected confidence and blunted investment.
“We have been warning about this since last October,” Garza said.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rejected the numbers, saying they didn’t take into account young people registered in new government-sponsored programs.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mexico is “slipping toward a recession.” The newspaper stated that industrial output in Mexico fell 2.1 percent between April and May of this year, its sharpest monthly decline in over a decade.
The Mexican economy could grow less than one percent in 2019, according to some estimates.
Lopez Obrador has said that diminished growth would not be the worst thing for Mexico, since the most important part of his mandate is the redistribution of wealth.