La Jornada – Trade facilitation, key to easing inflation: SE

Mexico City. The Department of Economy (SE) said trade facilitation is key to mitigating the levels of inflation observed in the country and around the world as a result of the disruption to supply chains due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the context of the opening of the 26th Congress of Mexican Foreign Trade, the head of the Federal Agency, Tatiana Clouther Carrillo, commented that the global exchange of goods is a central driver of the growth of the Mexican economy.

He said that in the period from January to September, the country’s trade with abroad amounted to more than 727 billion dollars, which means a growth of 27 percent compared to the same period last year, and an increase of 6.1 percent, compared to the same period in 2019.

“This is good news and shows how important it is to boost our foreign trade and a plan to revitalize the economy is yielding results,” he said.

Destacó que el gobierno federal se está enfocando en la facilitación comercial, aduanera y logística, como el trabajo que se realiza con Estados Unidos para relocalizaredurías y fortalecer las cadenas norteamericanas de producción des lue continu everybody.

Luz María de la Mora, Under-Secretary for Foreign Trade, noted that with the ratification of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement, it is estimated to reduce an average of 14 percent in trade costs worldwide.

He stressed that by facilitating trade not only are costs reduced and competitiveness increased, but “it can help mitigate the inflationary pressures we are all seeing in the world”.

“It is an issue that affects not only efficiency in international trade but also the competitiveness of countries that participate in foreign trade and affects the competitiveness of companies,” he said.

Valentin Diez Morodo, President of the Mexican Business Council for Foreign Trade, Investment and Technology (Comce), emphasized that without exception, all countries sought and generated elements to create mechanisms that would allow “to continue to carry out exchanges in the best possible way, since the first measures taken to stop the damage were to stop activities in some sectors of the economy.

For his part, Ricardo Trevigno, Deputy Secretary-General of the World Customs Organization, stressed that there are still some signs of concern about the uncertainty caused by inflation at the global level, which was partly caused by the container crisis that is taking place. …it ended up unleashing the health emergency.

“With the economic recovery in the last months of 2020, times are starting to stabilize, but we see again how it reached a peak derived from the container crisis, and their prices are high in terms of logistics costs and also indicate a part of the inflation that is living in the world.”

“E-commerce is an important driver of cross-border trade and, of course, economic recovery,” he commented.

In this sense, he said, Customs is facing a very important challenge in terms of risk management for this type of operation because the number of operations has doubled.