President Felipe Calderon underscored encouraging job numbers for February during a review of progress at the massive La Yesca dam project on the border of Jalisco and Nayarit this week.
“Today I am happy to announce that we have set an employment record for the month of February,” Calderon told a small crowd of engineers and journalists.
According to figures from the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), 130,416 jobs were added in the shortest month of the year, making it the best month for new jobs in the last five years.
In all of 2011, the country added around 600,000 jobs. Already in the first two months of 2012, it has added about 30 percent of that total—181,000 jobs. Jalisco contributed 9,952 jobs to that February total, with 8,834 of those being permanent positions.
At the ground breaking ceremony for the new Jalisco Center for Innovation, Design and Industrial Development, Jalisco Governor Emilio Gonzalez praised the figures as well, saying, “We have never had a February as important as that of 2012 for job growth.”
The new center exemplifies Jalisco’s place in Mexico’s economy. Located near the Expo Guadalajara, it will be a five-story structure supporting development of design and product innovation for small and medium-size businesses.
On the cooperative development of the new project, Gonzalez commented, “It isn’t done alone. It’s done by working together as a group, it’s the presence of industry, it’s the presence of education and it’s the presence of government, and this guarantees it will be successful.”
A similar jobs trend is taking place in the United States at the moment, with that downtrodden economy adding 227,000 jobs in the same month, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Unemployment in the United States is still around 8.3 percent, while Mexico’s is hovering around five percent– up from 3.45 percent average from 2000 to 2010.
In other positive news, remittances to Jalisco from the United States grew by 9 percent last year compared with 2010, suggesting that the economic fortunes of expatriate Mexicans living and working north of the border are finally improving.